Fiction
Speculative
Fifteen orphan girls trailed behind Monsignor like a tentacle, our shoes sinking in the sand. The chill of the gray winter day slapped at all our faces, but only my cheeks remained white and inexplicably hot to the touch. A pale fire burned within me that none could explain.
Monsignor stopped dead when he spotted something protruding from the white sand—black bones. Whale fossils, most likely, though now the species was extinct. They lay jumbled on the shore, not so different from the bone collections Monsignor kept at the orphanage. Except these bones were larger. Much larger.
In a rare moment of lenience, Monsignor released us to play on the sand. Only Melee darted away; the remaining girls huddled together. They all knew to stay away from the sea. Everyone knew to stay away. The waters were black and deep, waiting to suck you in.
Monsignor looked like an odd sea bird, gathering his black robes around him, revealing pale sandpiper legs as he tottered toward the large, black, jutting shapes. He made his way awkwardly to where the skull would likely be buried in the sand.
I followed. Drawn not to him, but to the bones. They called to me, their voices nearly clear in my mind…
…in lines we must lay, in death as in life…
Salt hung heavy in every droplet of mist that filled the air around me as I moved silently toward the mighty bones. I could hear the other girls behind me, tittering nervously. They were afraid of the sea, as all good girls should be. As I should be. Yet the bones called me forth, their voices ancient and overlapping.
…let us rest unbroken…
The smallest, the tailbone, lay beneath me. I prized it up with pale fingers and turned it so the point faced west, then pressed it gently into the sand. A burial. I did the same to the next bone, and the next, laying them to rest.
Each bone spoke to me.
…lay me down, oui, just so…
I aligned each bone as I came to it, and now Monsignor, still bumbling about for the skull, was in my way. His back was to me, and his weight leaned heavily against the largest of the bones as he clumsily shoveled away sand with a stick.
…the indignity… the bones whispered. At least Monsignor had uncovered the skull; it lay in perfect position.
"Discovery of a lifetime,” he wheezed.
“Monsignor.” I shouted over sounds of the wind and surf. He flinched away from me. “I must fix…” I trailed off. Monsignor gaped at the neat line of bones behind me, which lay curved as they had in life.
“The bones… How did you…?” He stumbled backwards, releasing the largest bone from beneath his weight.
I reached out, spreading my hands wide as I grasped the bone. I should not have been able to move it. It was solid as stone and deeply embedded in sand at its base. The bone hummed beneath my fingers, its ancient voice resonating within me.
…release me…
Harnessing my strength, listening with my soul, I leaned into the bone, slanting it as it settled into its place in the sand. Nearly there, almost done… Too late I noticed Monsignor lunging toward me, wrapping his long fingers around my wrists as he yanked me from my task. But it was he that was too late. His desperate grasp had helped, not hindered, in pulling the final piece into place.
The bones sighed, deep in my mind, and began sinking into the sand.
“Save them! Save them!” Monsignor screeched, rushing toward the skull. Seawater swirled around his ankles. “Aiiiiiiieeeeee!” he screamed, very much like the little girls he was in charge of. “You, girl! Esperance!” I was surprised he knew my name. “Pull them from the sand!”
He shoved me toward the bones, now nearly halfway sunken. Wrapping my hands around the nearest black shape, I felt only coldness. The bones were no longer speaking to me. I tugged as hard as I could—the bone would not budge. It was amazing I’d managed to move them at all.
The waves curled around my toes, their delicious iciness caressing and enveloping me up to my calves. An emotion overwhelmed all my senses—intensely foreign, yet achingly familiar…
“Foolish girl,” Monsignor hissed, snatching me from the water. I felt like a tree wrenched from the earth, my roots exposed for the world to see. Monsignor hauled me backward across the sand, toward the gaggle of girls waiting behind him. As the seawater dripped from my feet, the emotion they’d brought leached away with it. I grieved for the loss as chill tears pricked at my eyes.
It was then I noticed it, a cold shard within me, like a chip of embedded ice.
I held a piece of the sea in my heart.
“Do you realize what your carelessness has cost me?” Monsignor shouted over the throng of waterlogged girls. We were standing in the foyer of the orphanage. “You, Esperance, will go to my laboratoire for punishment.” Fourteen girls offered up a collective gasp. No one but Monsignor was allowed within the walls of his hauntish laboratory. It housed the collection of bones he spent every spare moment with. They were like jigsaws—ones he could never solve.
“Girls!” he called to the rest. “Lent is over. You have done well in your abstention. Tonight you shall feast.” For forty days we had eaten only flatbread, and only after the sun had set. My stomach flipped with hunger; I craved the thick fish stew that was my personal favorite.
“Tonight we shall eat sole chowder,” said Monsignor, looking at me with a knowing gleam. Only Melee gave me a sidelong glance of sympathy, her blue eyes bright against her copper skin. She was high-spirited and we were often punished simultaneously. The rest of the girls jostled quickly for a position behind Monsignor. They, no doubt, craved protein as much as I.
Dragging my feet across the worn foyer floors, I slipped into the laboratoire. Glass-fronted cupboards lined the walls. Each cupboard was filled with trays, each tray filled with sand. And in the sand…
Bones.
All fossilized. Some small as an eyelash, others as large as my hand. Each complete skeleton worth a small fortune. With the seas as treacherous as they had been for the last century, even the tiniest bone was a prize. Today’s giant whale bones would likely have made Monsignor a millionaire, if men of the cloth were not forbidden to seek riches.
Though Monsignor had ordered me to this room, he’d said nothing of what I was to do inside it. I opened the cupboard nearest me. Dry whispers spilled out, swirling around me like waves from the sea. These bones, though not vibrant like whale bones, had voices all their own.
I lifted out a tray and set it on Monsignor’s escritoire. It came naturally to me, arranging the bones. It took a deep amount of concentration, of listening…
…only a wee little sea serpent, I was…
“Ahem.”
I looked up to see Monsignor looming over me. I was so lost in the bones; I hadn’t heard him. A jumble of apologies rushed to tumble from my mouth, but I bit them back.
“You may eat after you organize all the bones in that cupboard,” he said, gesturing to the door I’d left open. “Esperance…” he said thoughtfully, studying me as if he’d just realized I was human. “The bones. Do they speak to you?”
I nodded compulsively.
“I’ve read of this before, though only in ancient texts. Orateur pour le morts. But that’s nonsense, isn’t it?”
I merely shrugged in response.
“Yes, of course,” he continued. “Nonsense.” With that he left the room, his robes trailing behind him.
Immediately I set the remaining bones to right, for by now they were begging for release. As I placed the last delicate crescent into the sand, aligning it just so, the skeleton as a whole sank downward, just as the whale at the beach had. But this sand is on a tray, I thought to myself. There’s nowhere for the bones to go.
But go they did, sinking softly and peacefully …adieu… they bid me. And I longed to follow them. Surely they were returning to the sea.
And then a human cry, that of a young girl, pulled me back to my senses, back to the orphanage, back to Monsignor’s labratoire.
Melee stood watching me.
“Did you see it?” she asked, her eyes wide.
“The way the bones sank into the sand?”
“No, not that. The…lumiere,” she said, slipping into her native tongue.
“What glow?” I asked, puzzled.
“Bright white, shaped like a serpent. It floated out that window,” she said, pointing. “Did you release its soul, Esperance?”
“I don’t think so. All I felt was the bones. It was like they were speaking to me. Monsignor, he said I was orateur pour le morts.”
“No, Esperance. You are not dark, not evil. You do not speak for the dead. What you are is…” she struggled to find the right word. “A soulever. A soul lifter. You free the souls from the bones.”
“Then I’d better get back to work. There are many, many bones in here. I imagine they all want to be freed, and I don’t know when Monsignor will be back.”
“He was called away, to a man dying in another precinct. You have all night. Here, have this bread I stole for you, and then I’ll help.”
“What have you done?” Monsignor shouted as he burst through the door. Sunrise was just peeping through the windows of the laboratoire. I had been up all night long. With Melee’s help, I’d managed to free all the sea creatures but one—the one that sat in front of me now on Monsignor’s escritoire.
Melee slept, oblivious, in the corner of the room. She always could sleep through anything.
Ignoring Monsignor, I rapidly shifted bones into place. I had become quite adept and could do it very quickly now. The bones of a small fish sighed beneath my fingers as they sank into the sand, disappearing forever. Could Monsignor see the soul as it slipped out the window? I doubted it.
“Where are my bones?” he screamed, tearing through the cupboards. He flung the sand-filled trays onto the floor.
“I set them free,” I said.
“Where?” he screeched, skidding to my side.
“Into the sea.”
Pain shot through my skull as Monsignor grabbed my hair and dragged me from the room. Melee, finally awake, ran after us, begging for my freedom. Monsignor slammed the door in her face. He pulled me through the early dawn, back to the beach where the whale bones had lain.
“You threw my bones into the sea?” he bellowed over the sound of high waves.
I didn’t deny it.
“Then you shall retrieve them.”
He tossed me into the water. At first I sputtered, choking on the cold saltiness. But then it coated my aching throat like liquid silver, soothing it. The heat that had always plagued me receded. The shard of ice embedded in my heart swelled, slowing my heartbeat to a calm ebb.
Finally I had found my place in the world.
Planting my feet firmly in the sand, I burst forth from the shallow water, flinging droplets from my hair as the sunrise shone on behind me. Monsignor stood watching.
“Esperance!” he yelled across the turbulent waves. “Come back! I need your help with the bones! We can be partners!”
I stood still as a statue, the lone calm thing in the wild water. I looked down at my hands, their now-purplish tinge shimmering in the morning light, my fingernails iridescent crescents.
I belonged to the sea. Or perhaps the sea belonged to me.
Slowly, like the bones, I sank down into the water.
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Copyright 2008, Suzette Saxton. All rights reserved. A first edition Edgar Allen Poe is Suzette Saxton's prized possession; it belonged to her great-great-great grandfather in 1907. Suzette's writing career began with poetry at age five. Her first poem is, unfortunately, too distasteful to repeat. She spends every spare moment writing in her pergola, which is located in a tiny northern Utah canyon.
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