Osteography

From: Issue 5

Our messenger speeds out of town with the first grey of dawn, and in the evening, Shardon sends us his bones.

His sister empties them onto my table in dry-eyed silence. They’re clean and golden-brown as though stained by years underground, a burnished shine beneath the alien head of the operating light.

“You’re sure it’s him?” I ask.

She fingers an old callus, a slight overlap of fractured ends. “What bone is this?”

“The radius,” I say. Her face stays blank. “In the forearm. This would have been just above the wrist.”

“He broke it when we were children. Fell out of a tree.”

They were half-grown already when I arrived here. Some other medic splinted this, inexpertly; dried tears; checked for swelling heat beneath the skin. He was hale and healthy, so I saw little of him. It’s the frail and the children I know best, the mothers who come clutching small hands with worry-waxen faces.

Her touch lingers, and in it is all the reverence and longing of a priest handling saint’s relics. None of the distance, though. Her eyes shine black as sparrows’, opaque with grief. “He was twenty-three,” she says. “So young.”

She must have been the eldest, cradling the dead man’s skull tenderly as a baby’s still soft at the fontanelles.

But the zigzags of the cranial sutures are almost vanished, buried like tyre tracks beneath snow. I reach out slowly, seeking permission, and at her nod trace with my fingers the coronal suture, sitting at a tiara-angle before the ears.

“Not young anymore,” I tell her.

— # —

Cranial suture fusing advanced to totally fused. Mean age estimate 51, likely range 35-65.

Pubic symphysis concave. Porous appearance with moderate lipping and bony spicules at margin. Some rim erosion. Mean age estimate 63, likely range 51-86.

— # —

It will frost tonight, the arthritic bones in his hands throbbing with an ache that reaches his fingertips, a deeper pain worrying at the old breaks in forefinger and wrist. He shuffles toward the cabin, lantern lurching in his grip.

Dove fusses up to him, prising the plastic handle from his gnarled fingers. “Give me that. There’s no-one around to see us.”

You are too disposable to need help. A hard old lesson; new arrivals learn it fast or die. Shardon’s no use for those who don’t pull their weight and then some. But he fears, or maybe hopes, it’s irrelevant now. The cold lodges splinters in his throat and his lungs, and he imagines his ribs have sprouted spines to needle at the viscera, impatient with long years holding them up for not so much as a thank-you. For weeks he’s been coughing blood, red as the meaty inside of a plum, and scrunching up the rags inside his sleeves.

“Come on,” says Dove. “You’ll catch your death out here.”

The sky’s clear, thick with indifferent stars. Out beyond the fields, the sodium-orange burn of the gateway arches over an encampment of swaying trees, the air around it muddied with endless eddies. He allows himself a long last look; entertains a short fantasy of a shining, baseball-bat-wielding cavalry pouring down upon Shardon like the Angels of Mons.

Dove settles him in bed, eyes in the back of her head for a foreman. Shardon knows exactly how to separate its workers, setting one above the other so as to trigger a frenzy of scrambling that stops well before the top. Foremen over workers; lifers over newbies; and each so desperate to cling to his position that he puts down a taproot and sticks in the dirt. But a truce has descended tonight, and nobody stirs to turn Dove in though she oughtn’t to be in the men’s dormitory at all. Her young face bobs over him as she smooths down blankets, bright and unlined as a lantern of stretched paper.

He smiles at the naked ceiling joists and the cobweb-caught husks of last summer’s bugs, loosely crosseyed in the manner of one who’s stared too long at a book instead of sleeping.

It’s been a long time since he had a book, of course.

Dove whisper-sings, voice cranefly insubstantial, a half-lullaby that might hold solemn beauty in the hands of a better singer. He doesn’t know the song, though they were the same age once, Dove and he. She came from another settlement, else he would have recognised her when she arrived. No shared memories of before-Shardon here, no gentle nostalgia in which to bury himself.

He closes his eyes anyway.

His sister used to sing when they were small, the only one who could make him settle. Later, the woman he loved murmured fragments of song during snatched moments behind cabins, hurried fumbles in the trenches of the night, wary dozes before the morning sun ambushed them. Dove sounds nothing like either of them, but still the memories cat’s cradle together, thready voice around thready voice, Diamonds, Cat’s Eye, Soldier’s Bed.

Each stertorous breath seems to spread itself over hours. The spines have pierced his lungs, letting in an expansive pain flush with night air, but he lacks the energy to protest. The aches in his bones are faint, muffled beneath a greater heaviness.

The clock ticks toward midnight. No cavalry, no angels.

His aged hand tightens on Dove’s smooth one. It could be a bid for attention or a dying convulsion; she takes a moment to figure out it’s the former and focuses on his face.

An exhale like a colony of moths raising wings in trembling anticipation of flight. “I lied, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not that way.” He jerks his head. “Away from the gateway. Run. And keep running.”

— # —

“It’s true, then,” she says. “They really have found a way to compress time.”

The rumours about Shardon’s relative wealth have been circulating for months. None of their citizens ever goes hungry and they sell bucketfuls more surplus than they ought to be able to produce in a year. The gateway they guard so jealously, it is muttered, leads not to a parallel universe or the other side of the world, but to a place where years pass for every hour on this side of the breach.

And the people vanished from settlements roundabout—there are mutterings about them, too. The disappearances have been getting closer for weeks.

I peel off my gloves, the moist unsticking sound revealing a nervous clamminess I hadn’t been aware of. “We need to tell the Mayor.”

“Of course.” But she lingers over the bones, tracing a supraorbital ridge with the bare pad of her thumb and a dreadful tenderness that keeps me from reprimanding her. “But later—will you see if there’s anything else you can tell me?”

“Like what?”

“Was he happy? Did he have friends, a family?” She gives the soft part of her nose a long pinch. “That’s stupid. I’m sorry. Did—did he have enough to eat?”

The Mayor’s quiet horror when we tell her radiates outward, a bubble of dampened affect that encompasses everyone in hearing distance. She folds her hands atop her desk, thanks us stiffly. As we leave, we hear a flurry of footsteps head for her office, a frantic clatter of activity that all feels very pointless. What to do against an enemy who’s mastered time?

We walk into town still swaddled in silence. The sister—I realise I have forgotten to ask her name—touches my shoulder before we part.

“Thank you for all you did today.” She speaks with an exhausted flatness. “I shouldn’t have asked you for more. I know you have living people to worry about.”

Yet I find myself late at the lab that night, excavating dusty tangles of equipment I took from the university when my department closed. Back when I was a researcher and not a poor excuse for a medic. Perhaps I’m more useful now. The world certainly thinks so.

Poking at old bones warranted no corporate sponsorship, which meant survival, in the old world. Department after department folded: from the cutting edge to the scrapheap.

If I’d gone into a more lucrative field, temporal manipulation or genetics, would I be at Shardon now?

The thought comes tinged with guilt and want, the shadowed hollows of the messenger’s skull accusing.

— # —

Scans show poor bone opacity. T-score is 2.3, suggesting osteopenia. Potentially age-related, though this is less common in men. More likely a result of illness or poor diet.

— # —

The boy watches him with eyes unnaturally wide, honey-gold and hungry, fastened with toothy tenacity on the small portion of meat at the side of his plate. The rest is mush, mostly potatoes. The last harvest was poor. Shardon took the best part and provided nothing to make up for it. Nobody has come through the gateway to check on them in weeks. Sometimes they manage to snare rabbits for much-needed scraps of protein, but for the most part it’s the leftovers deemed too poor to sell even this thin year.

The boy, clutching his empty plate, is terribly small. The bony knob of his wrist is vicious-sharp under the skin, the finger-bones Halloweenishly prominent.

He considers selfishness, briefly. Then he sighs, heaves himself upright, and spears his portion of meat with his fork. It lands on the boy’s plate with a greasy plop.

The boy falls on it without pausing to look up. The woman at his side—too young to be his mother; a sister, perhaps?—murmurs, “Thank you.”

She has the look of something faded by too much hard sunlight, all ragged fingernails and wilting black hair. He musters a smile and levers himself to the dirt floor, joints cracking. “He’ll use the energy faster than I will,” he says, and proffers a weathered hand. “I’m Walter.”

“Dove,” she says, her hand in the boy’s hair. “And this is Tyler.”

Walter watches the child pick the last shreds of meat from the bone, fingers slippery with residue. “I had a big sister, once.”

“Oh?” Dove’s eyes are big, guileless. “What happened to her?”

He darts a glance out at the burning orange of the gateway, and her cheeks pinken. They’re new, not yet accustomed to thinking of themselves frozen out of time’s flow, of loved ones trapped in the treacle-slow hours of the past.

“I’m sorry,” says Dove, and he pats her hand.

“Don’t be. Eat up. You don’t know when we’ll get more.”

She bends over her dish. He lets his head fall against the cabin wall with a dull thud of skull on wood, and tries to ignore the hollow in his stomach. He’s half-asleep when she speaks again: “Do you think we’ll ever get out of here?”

“Not that way,” he says, with a nod toward the window, the orange halo.

Her eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”

He considers, briefly, then lets his eyelids drift shut with tired ease. “Forget it. There’s no way out.”

— # —

The sister comes by the following morning. I hope she won’t repeat her question about food, but hoping’s never done me much good. She stands beside the examination table, fingers lingering over the head of an arthritis-clubbed joint.

“Do you remember what I asked yesterday? I know I shouldn’t; but I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“I remember.”

I don’t have to elaborate. The reluctance on my face does it for me, and her mouth tugs down at the corners.

“I’m sorry,” I offer.

She shakes her head. “Tell me something else. Something better.” In her voice I picture the stubborn jut of a child’s lower lip. She shoves hands deep into pockets, shifts from foot to foot. “Please?”

— # —

Fibrous enthesis on humerus shows increased robusticity, while bicep attachment site on radius shows fine porosity. Possibly age-related, possibly indicative of musculoskeletal stress on upper body. Chest and arm muscles appear to have been more pronounced on left-hand side. Marginal osteophytes and Schmörl’s nodes on vertebrae suggest degenerative disc disease. Age again, or could be poor posture, stooping.

— # —

He walks tall away from the fields, feeling his whole being has expanded. The air crackles with freshness, an almost painful repletion on the inhale, and he puts out his tongue, tasting it. Up ahead, Kaia whistles. He imagines licking the notes like snowflakes out of the air.

They oughtn’t to be out here; certainly not together. Should a foreman choose to come snooping and find they’re not sick in their beds after all, the consequences are… well, hazy, but dire. But it’ll be weeks before anyone comes through from Shardon, and it feels so good to stand upright, twisting out the kinks in his spine, after months bent over the ground.

Kaia holds up a hand, and he stills while she bullseyes a rabbit in the undergrowth. He gathers up the furry slip of a thing, still warm. They’re almost at the treeline; it will be time to turn back soon.

Kaia pauses, though, leaning up against a moss-green trunk, laughing in the bright air.

“What?” he asks, and kisses her mouth, her temple.

She shivers, grinning, at the touch of his lips. “We’ve got some time. Maybe we should just keep walking.”

A plane spreads out before them, bounded to the north by hills. It’s more space than he’s seen in years. Shardon’s fields are hemmed in on all sides by cabins and storage sheds and the always-clanking processing plant. The shadows of clouds barrel toward them over the rippling grass, and he flinches, half-expecting a body-blow. Kaia chuckles.

Nobody ever goes further than this. Not even Shardon people.

A thrill of possibility rills down his spine. “Come on then. Let’s go.”

Almost dark by the time they spot something, up ahead. Walter takes it, at first, for a glow of sunset, but they’re facing the wrong direction for that. An evil, muddy red, burning low in the saddleback between two purple hills. It throbs like a bruise and he feels an answering pulse in the aches of his spine, his fingers, his wrist.

Kaia strides toward it, chin high.

A sound behind them, one that doesn’t belong amid the birdcalls and the shushing of the grass. A human voice.

He knows it: the foreman.

Kaia stills, head at a listening angle, while Walter presses himself into the shadow of the hills. The foreman isn’t alone. Others move over the plain, calling out to them. If they return now, it is promised, they’ll be in no trouble. All will be forgiven. And besides, it’s dangerous beyond the hills. There’s a good reason nobody comes out here. Really, it will be better for everyone if they turn back.

Kaia tilts her head toward him, an invitation in her eyes. Holds his gaze, the sensation of a wire stretched taut between them and fit to snap. Then she runs for the gap between the hills, great ground-eating strides that make the grass fan out wildly where she plants her feet.

He thinks he means to follow, but finds himself rooted to the ground. Shots sound. She swerves and keeps sprinting. Finally, he locates his volition, breaks into a clumsy run.

It’s too late. They’re on him, tackling him to the ground, his face in the razor-rough grass. He spits out blades of it, edges slicing his lips. A voice somewhere above him says, “Leave it. She’s out of range. Good as dead where she’s going anyway.”

Another, wonderingly, “We know that?”

“That gateway was an accident,” says the first. “You wanna go through and test it out, be my guest.”

A snort. “No thanks.”

The rabbit has fallen to the ground a few feet away. It regards Walter with a flat pity in its dead eyes.

They lock him up for weeks. Slop less palatable than usual and a bucket to piss in. By the time they send him back to the fields, the whole complex has been fenced round with barbed wire.

He counts up workers. All of them together could bring it down. Briefly, he considers trying to persuade the others.

But another gateway, one through which Kaia vanished sudden as a lightbulb pop? A gateway Shardon fears? They’ll never believe him.

— # —

“What’s this?” she asks, small bones held loosely in her palm as though she means to tell a fortune. I pick them from her hand, count out phalanges. One bulges slightly; another has a tipsy sort of lean.

“Finger bones,” I tell her. “When did he break these?”

She stiffens minutely. “Not here. This must have been—after.”

— # —

Properly splinted, signs of a fracture disappear after approximately seven years. Fracture sites still visible on phalanges though healing appears well advanced. Suggests poor access to medical care.

Though perhaps not much poorer than he’d have had here. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from his bones, it’s that I’m still most comfortable with the dead.

— # —

He struggles when they drag him into Shardon, but the sight of the gateway knocks all fight from his body. The shrill of its power sets his hair on end, high and thin, a kind of distant keening. The air around it shimmers, restless, and it is the colour of light pollution against blue twilight, a thrown ribbon of dirty orange light arcing high over the roofs of Shardon.

“What is that?” he gasps, though they’ve ignored his every word since he tried to deliver the message.

The only response is a snort, “You’ll find out soon enough,” and they haul him toward it, feet dragging in the dirt.

He remembers to fight again.

He wrenches one arm free, swings high and wild at the man on his left. The impact when his fist connects startles him as the man reels, two-step staggers, clutching his nose. He’s never been much of a fighter, never imagined he could hit so hard.

Others swarm in. He gets in a couple more punches, but there are too many of them. Soon he’s on his face in the dirt, gravel embedding itself in his cheek, hands outstretched to steady himself.

The man he hit pins one of them, laughing viciously, holds it in place and brings his other boot down.

The pain comes in an actinic flash. The world turns slow and colour-drained, like something under a strobe light. And when he comes back to himself, he’s on the far side of the gateway, on his arse on the ground, clutching his wounded hand against his breastbone.

A stranger tramps up to him and prods him with an unimpressed toe. “Can you get up?”

He nods.

“Then do it. Won’t last long here if you don’t.”

He follows the man toward the row of low cabins, pausing to look back at the gateway until the man turns around to growl at him.

Inside, a brown-haired woman with cheekbones sharp as obsidian blades elbows her way toward him. “What’s wrong with you, Tom? This guy’s hurt.”

He recognises her, but vaguely. Maybe she’s from another settlement nearby?

“I’m Kaia.” She unfolds the arm from his chest with no particular gentleness. “Let me see to that for you.”

He finds his voice. “Thanks. It’ll help until I get home, I guess.”

She puts her head on one side. “Oh, no. Don’t think about that.” There is a terrible softness in her voice.

But they’ll notice, at home, when he’s been gone a while, and they’ll come for him.

They’ll be here soon.

She sings meanderingly as she wraps his fingers. A gentling, lullaby sort of a tune, but he doesn’t recognise it. It’s not from home.

Not to worry. They’ll be here soon.

— # —

After hours sequestered with the heads of other settlements, the Mayor calls a meeting. The decision has been made. We’re going to Shardon.

I have no choice in the matter: we need a medic onsite, even if I’m not much of one. But the sister is there, too, clutching her weapon at her side like a child with a plush toy. “They took my brother,” is all she says, the defensive narrowing of her eyes daring me to argue.

They’re going to kill her, I think.

But when we arrive, Shardon is deserted.

Our wary steps ring off the walls of the empty courtyard. This could be a trap. But there are doors left hanging open, tools discarded on the ground.

And, flaring to life above the buildings, a bow of orange light.

“Holy shit,” breathes the Mayor, and for once, she speaks for all of us.

On the other side, the same thing. Fields, abandoned. A barbed-wire fence trampled into mud. Tracks lead into the woods.

I follow them, feeling in my hands the phantom weight of the messenger’s bones. His sister catches me on the woodland path and our steps fall into wordless rhythm, slopping through the wet leaves and at last out onto a swaying plain of long grass. On its far side, an arch of red fire.

A woman greets us, just this side of the gateway. She’s stooped, dark hair silvering, face creased like an old apple. “My name is Dove,” she tells us. “We’ve been expecting you.”

“What is this?” I ask her. “What happened here?”

The smile seeps slow through her wrinkles. “They stole our people from their homes,” she says. “Shardon. So we stole ourselves from them. That’s what my grandmother told me—I was named for her, you know. She was a young woman then. One of the old men told her to run this way. Said he’d known someone who got away, years before.” She looks down. “He didn’t live long enough to see it, though. They sent his bones home before they left.”

Behind me, faltering, the sister speaks: “What was his name?”

I leave her on her knees in the long grass, Dove clasping her hands, and slip through the gateway. There’s an ionized prickle to the air as I pass beneath the arch, and then I’m standing before a low stone wall, a row of ramshackle cabins off in the distance.

Before I reach them, I come to a makeshift shelter, fenced-off like the bedroom of a stately home. A breathing, shrinelike quiet hangs over it.

Inside: a slingshot, a pieced-together garment with the dull dead shine of rabbit fur, and a pile of bones.

The skull, picked clean, sits on top. Its empty orbits brim with quiet triumph.

© 2021 JL George

From: Issue 5

About the Author

JL George lives in Cardiff, Wales and writes weird and speculative fiction. Her work has appeared in Fireside, Constellary Tales, Curiosities, and various other places. In her other lives, she’s a library-monkey and an academic interested in literature and science and the Gothic. You can find her on Twitter at @jlgeorgewrites.