Funk-N-Fiction

Amy Christine Parker is delivering our evening story today. A story that touches on loss, hope, and weighing the cost of the choices we make.

Bone by Bone

After her husband’s funeral, Rose’s grandmother handed her the family grimoire. It was dusty with disuse and age, the binding crumbling. Most of the women in their family had given up magic long ago. And so, the book had been long forgotten by all, Rose included. They’d been too happy and content to need it. That is, until now.

“Where did you find this?” Rose fingered the worn leather cover gingerly, something loosening inside her aching heart.

“The attic, under a stack of old quilts,” her grandmother said, her eyes bright as twin stars inside her withered face, her gnarled hands resting on her cane as she looked around at the other mourners to make sure no one was listening. “You can be with him again.” Her voice is low, her breath thick with the scent of butterscotch candies. “It can help.”

Goosebumps spread over Rose’s arms. “Impossible,” she breathes, but despite what she knows about the finality of death, a flicker of hope kindles in her heart. She remembers spells her mother did, how well they worked.

“Not if you’re willing to pay the price,” her grandmother whispers.

Jasper died less than two weeks ago and already the grief’s a living thing taking up residence in her chest, making every breath painful. She isn’t sure how she can go on like this for another minute, much less a lifetime. He would be alive if not for a drunk who got behind the wheel and ran into him as he was driving home.

“I’ve marked the page for you, dear,” her grandmother says. “Read the spell. Then decide.” And with that she hobbles off, making way for a group of women from Rose’s Pilates class come to pay their respects.

When Rose is back home and finally alone; she opens the grimoire to the bookmarked spell. It’s entitled “To Call Back the Departed.”

Sucking in a breath, she reads on:

Required:

Salt (unconsecrated, from the earth)

The seeds of three ripe red apples

Rosemary (fresh-cut)

A bone from the deceased

The blood of the summoner (three drops, no more, no less)

An easy enough ingredients list to compile—well, except for Jasper’s bones. Bile rises in Roses throat. She imagines breaking into his coffin, stealing his corpse and then…

She refuses to follow that train of thought.

Shuddering, she scans the spell’s directions. At midnight precisely, under a new moon, the summoner casts a circle with the salt then lays rosemary in each of its four quarters. The bone goes in the center along with the apple seeds. Then the dead’s name is spoken three times as the drops of blood fall on the bones and seeds.

And then the meat of the spell is said:

By salt, herb, blood, and bone,

Call back what was alive, home.

The veil is thin, the door is wide

Let memory pull you through the divide.

Scrawled in pencil beneath the spell are the faded words: A bone for an hour. A memory for a bone.

Her stomach twists. She would only have an hour with Jasper if she brought him back? But the process of getting the bones…no.

It’s not enough time. She closes the grimoire, shoves it across the kitchen table, then goes upstairs, wriggles deep under the covers, and cries. Jasper’s gone and she is alone.

It takes a week before she breaks down and opens the grimoire again to reread the spell.

It isn’t until a month goes by and her period’s late that she changes her mind.

By the next new moon, she’s done what had to be done and is standing in the backyard, barefoot inside the salt circle in the dress she wore on her first date with Jasper. It’s too tight along her breasts and middle now, but that’s alright.

She’s chosen the bone from Jaspar’s ring finger for this first spell and is wearing his wedding ring on a gold chain around her neck. Nervously, she kisses it before pricking her finger and whispering her husband’s name three times.

She hasn’t done a spell since she was thirteen. Will it work?

There’s no thrum of magic as she performs the spell. Tensed, she waits, her fingers going to Jasper’s wedding band, turning it around and around, her insides quickly going cold.

It didn’t work.

But then suddenly, like watercolor bleeding onto paper, he appears beside her. Her eyes fill with tears as he grows solid, his wavy hair ruffling in the slight breeze, his full lips lifting into a smile.

“Hey you,” he says, his hands caressing her arms, Then he notices she’s crying. His brow furrows. “What’s wrong?”

How does she tell him that he’s been dead these long weeks? She looks up into his gray-blue eyes. They have one hour. She won’t spend it explaining what’s happened, doesn’t want him to know the full weight of his fate.

“Nothing,” she lies, wiping away tears. “I was just thinking about our first date.”

He smiles widely and steps back to take her in. “You wore this dress.”

She nods. “And you brought me violets.”

“We saw that terrible movie. What was it?”

They spend the hour reminiscing. All too quickly, the time is up. Jaspar is midsentence when it happens, talking about how he went home that night and told his parents he was going to marry her one day.

Rose is alone in their backyard again and Jaspar’s finger bone is gone from the center of the circle.

A bone for an hour. A memory for a bone.

But that’s okay. She brought him back. This new memory of him was worth the price.

Hugging herself, she strides back inside the house to fetch another bone.

When Jaspar re-appears, the first thing he does is comment on her dress.

“It’s my favorite,” he says as he gathers Rose in his arms and leans in to kiss her neck.

“Why?” she asks, giggling as the scruff along his jawline brushes over her skin.

He pulls away a little to look her in the eye. “Because you wore it on our first date, remember?”

Rose blinks, ice water filling her veins as she looks down at her dress and tries to recall the date itself. Her mind is a perfect blank.

“You don’t, do you,” he says, disappointment woven into each word.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Maybe it’s because all I can think about is the night you proposed.”

His smile returns as he takes her hand and touches the diamond on her finger. “I was so nervous, I could barely get the words out.”

“Afraid I was gonna say no?” she teases.

He shakes his head. “I just wanted the moment to be perfect.”

“Well, it was.” She grabs his face in her hands. “I love you so much. Then and now. Always.” Then she kisses him, soft at first, but then with growing urgency as his hands travel down her back then lower. She presses herself closer to him, her own hands unbuckling his belt.

After, they lie in the grass looking up at the stars. There’s only a minute or two left of their hour.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” Rose whispers, “I’m pregnant.”

Jaspar sucks in a breath, his gaze traveling down to her belly. “You’re having a baby?”

She nods, her eyes going blurry with tears.

“Amazing,” he breathes as he leans over and gently kisses her stomach as he slowly disappears.

Rose hurries to the porch and reaches for another bone. She’d brought a pile, intending to use as many as she can until night gives way to dawn. As she grabs for a femur, she replays the hours she’s spent with Jaspar so far, but finds that the moments are muddying inside her mind. What had they talked about? Something about his proposal? She reaches for the memory, but it’s fading away.

A bone for an hour. A memory for a bone.

The words pop into her head, the warning in them finally clear.

Every time she brings him back, it costs her one of their memories.

Jesus.

She sinks to her knees.

Twice she’s called him back. What memory had it cost her the first time? She has no idea. She stares at the pile of bones, her heart racing. She can’t do it again.

But the emptiness Jaspar left in his wake grows and eventually she breaks down and decides to try the spell again during the next new moon. By then she’s written down every single memory she has of Jaspar, created a whole journal full. If she can no longer remember, she can at least read about them. It isn’t a perfect solution, but she isn’t ready to give him up, not yet.

So, she grabs another bone.

That second night she uses up eight bones and forgets she and Jaspar spent the first night of their Parisian honeymoon cruising the Seine.

Then her memory of their first fight is gone.

But that’s okay. Who needs to be reminded of something as unpleasant as fight?

Then the first dance at their wedding is gone.

Jaspar and her exchanging vows.

With each disappearing memory something inside Rose begins to shift. When she looks at Jaspar, something’s wrong. Her love for him is less somehow, like all those missing memories have whittled away at it.

But she tells herself that it’s okay. Just as long as she gets to see him again.

There are approximately 206 bones in the human body. Although Rose has more than a million memories big and small of Jaspar, so there’s no way the spells will take them all, she decides to stop by bone fifty-six. Seven new moons have come and gone. She is heavily pregnant and scared to death that if she keeps going, she will have nothing of Jaspar worth sharing with their child since the spell seems to be taking all the most important memories first.

It is finally time to say goodbye.

When Jaspar appears this time, she tells him everything.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I thought if I could just have you back…”

Jaspar’s quiet for a long time, but then he takes her hand in his and squeezes it. “I’m glad you did it because I got to know about our baby.”

“It’s a girl,” Rose says.

Jaspar’s eyes fill. “Make sure she knows how much I love her. And promise me that once she’s born, you’ll bring me back again once in a while so I can see her grow.”

Rose nods, too overcome with emotion to speak.

When he begins to fade this time, she watches calmly. She can let him go now.

In the kitchen, she makes a cup of tea, takes out her journal and starts to read it out loud as the first light of dawn sends light spilling across the backyard where little shoots of green are starting to break through the ground, the first signs of spring. 

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