The Skeleton in the Closet

“So much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have some bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts.”

- The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

DEAR LOVER,

(the letter i never sent)

s I await your return, I long for your hands around mine. It has been so very long since I’ve felt your touch, yet it seems even longer still until I will feel it again. Your laugh and your kiss are only vague imprints in my memory as I lay alone, forsaken amongst unwrinkled sheets.

And with every day we are apart, it seems as though the good times we spent together weren’t so good after all, that maybe I was only a wander-
lust child entranced with the journey your love presented. Perhaps, through another lense, my younger innocence would become attuned to all the silences and bitter looks we shared. Perhaps I would be then thankful for the time we’ve spent apart because it has stilled the ripples within my liquid memories.

However, I am not so alone. Accompanying me in your stead is the realization that I long only for your touch because the scalding heat of your hands

DEAR LOVER, 2

around mine is infinitely better than this icy division.

Your distant nature has inflicted on me a silent suffering from which I become unraveled—disordered odds and ends pawned away by my next of kin. And yet you remain as you always have, no more than a simple shadow, opaque yet only an illusion cast by the sun’s cruel rays.

PUPPET MASTER

here is a small wooden box in which the puppet master hides, behind a miniature stage where three chipped marionettes enact their charade. All that is left to be seen of him are ten spindly fingers which dance above their strings; the rest is tucked away.

On goes their silent production—the one with seemingly no beginning nor end. When the marionettes sway, they do so with jarring movements, squealing loudly from their rusted joints. These children’s nightmares are incomparable to their shining days, which long since gave way to dark skies and thunderstorms.

The only one ignorant to this fact is the puppet master himself, his vision obscured by the stage. Driven solely by applause—one he believed was meant for him—he has performed without repose. Yet there isn’t a single soul who thought to stop and break him the news: that his crowd has long since deserted him.

KEEP ON WALKING, GIRL

he old bulb flickers in the dark hallway, revealing then hiding shadows along the walls, floors, and window sills. Her head sways from side to side in time to an unheard melody.

With her movements, she commands the symphony of crickets, whose lullaby fills the dank air of the musty house. Her hands twist and untwist low in front of her, obeying the rhythm of the night. Her eyes are wide though her pupils are small, staring at nothing and everything—becoming smaller still when the light flickers silver.

Comparatively, the golden moon shines in through shattered glass, illuminating a small ring within the room down the hall. The door is hanging open, screeching ever so softly in the cool breeze of the summer night.

From within the chamber, cast in the spotlight of moonshine is a woman whose hair is only a variant form of frayed rope. Darkness rims her

KEEP ON WALKING, GIRL

gaunt features and exhaustion tugs at her eyelids. With a hand only bending at the wrist, she quietly beckons her daughter. Her voice, nothing more than an unpleasant rasp.

The girl, whose head has not quit swaying and whose hands have yet to quit twisting, takes a single step towards the room. Her movement results in the unpleasant popping of her knee, having bent it despite the medical tape wrapped numerous times around each leg. She takes another and another, and her steps add the off-beat percussion so missing from the night's concert tune.

With every hesitant, bone-shaking step, the mother's black and silver smile grows wider.

"Come closer, my darling," she calls, "Closer and closer and closer."

The girl's head-swaying grows more violent, and more violent still, until she swings it into the wall with a dull thud. Even so... Even as the stars from the night sky appear to descend and surround her, the young girl with the bandaged knees does not stop walking. Nor do her hands stop twisting. And all the while, the crickets never cease to sing.