Entry #32

Skeleton Life
by SF Johnston


You know those movies where you survive the big disaster and you’re the last person on earth except for the cute girl you meet six days later?

Well, it’s not like that.

Everything falls apart really fast, and yellow bones scatter across a fell-down world covered by rust and dust and silence. You forage for food. You search for people. Skeletons scramble through your dreams.

You never know what’s going to set you off. Last week it was those little plates in the sink, still covered in birthday cake crumbs. Yesterday it was those yellow curtains broken by the end of everything.

Today, a mother and her boy have me wailing into the emptiness, just the yellow bones of them sitting around a kitchen table, all alone.

The TV’s there – I bet they were watching it when that God-awful stuff came down from the sky. I bet they saw it on the news and then there it was in their own backyard.

Sarah blew me kisses with that hand. Cody threw me baseballs with that arm. I was hardly ever there to catch any of them.

I look over at those damn birthday plates again and my knees give out because I should have been here, at the table, but when Cody turned seven I was down at The Double Shot “needing to be alone” and hitting on Darlene.

I want to play catch, Cody. I do.

And there is no cute girl, Sarah.

Just a skeleton life.

Just bones.