Bones of My Bones
Below is a very small piece out of a decently long series that is not yet published, but still lurking about on my computer. The story is from ages ago, an angsty sci-fi piece I started writing when I was 14. Things change and flesh themselves out when they see the light of day – or the eyes of others. So periodically I like to post excerpts of things still in progress.
If you like this and you haven’t yet purchased my book, The Bookshop Hotel, please do. Again – This is not from that book, but it is a sample of my writing.
She often wondered what her bones would look like after death. Bones tell tales. Bones are the memory book of all our scars, all our aches and pains, all our wounds. An autopsy would show her broken ribs, her smashed fingers, conditioned arms and legs… but would it also show the bruising on the inside? All the times her heart nearly burst and beat her sternum in anger and sadness from the inside?
They say that if old lovers can be friends they either were never in love or they still are. She wondered if that could be true, and if it was true then which was the case now? What would be worse? Thinking none of it was real before, or thinking there was still something there that neither one could acknowledge? Worse yet: if old feelings could bubble to the surface at any moment and disrupt the fabric of her current reality.
Then again, what defines lover? The problem with the world is that they apply emotional concepts to physical acts. By doing so, does that make the emotions with non-physical acts irrelevant? You can love someone and be loved by someone, you can be in love with someone, and never cross the line into the realm of ‘lovers.’ Lover implies physical contact, lover implies intercourse, lover implies bones of my bones and flesh of my flesh sort of contact.
It either takes serious emotional bonding or a vivid imagination to feel like you’re one flesh with someone you’ve never touched. To feel their absence like a stab in the gut. To feel their loss like a loss of your own limb. What if she just had the most vivid of imaginations? What if none of it had ever been real?
After death, would they see that too? Would her delusions be written on her bones? In her muscle mass… in her muscle memory. The heart having expanded too much, too quickly. Would they see that?
Copyright A.K. Klemm
Anakalian Whims 
Meb Bryant said,
April 9, 2014 at 8:47 pm
very nice piece of work