"The Closet"

 

"What was that?" Danielle whispered. She was sure that she had turned the front door's deadbolt before heading upstairs.

"What was what?" Ruth mumbled into her pillow.

"That sound. Like a doorknob turning." Danielle could hear the long creak of old hinges. "Fuck," she said as she got out of bed and reached for the pair of scissors on top of the dresser.

She opened the bedroom door slowly, with her breath matching pace, and reached for the hallway light switch while still standing inside the door frame. Much to her relief, a quick glance down the stairs to her left gave her the answer she needed: the coat closet door had popped open.

Danielle stomped downstairs and shoved all of the puffy down coats, still holding their breaths for winter, toward the back of the closet. She shut the door by turning around and throwing her back against it. When she did that, she saw the skeleton, sitting on the second stair from the bottom.

It had short bones all throughout its body, and tiny hands and feet; its skull was disproportionately large, like a full moon tilted close and curious toward the Earth. "I kept trying and trying to get out," the skeleton said in a child's voice, "but I was stuck for a long time." The radial bone of its lower right arm bore the marble tracings of several hairline fractures. "Hi," the skeleton said, tilting its skull so that Danielle could see all the way back into the hollows that should have held its eyes.

"The Cage"

 

After the city fell, Graciele led most of her prisoners into ditches that she and the men had dug by the river, below the level that the water usually reached during the summer floods. There was one prisoner that she kept, though, a girl of maybe twelve who gave her name as Nerri. Nerri she placed in a cage that she made from bones and dry branches, everything dead she could find.

"Set me free," Nerri said one day, grinning at Graciele through low grey eyes as angular as two flints.

"You'd try to kill me if I set you free," was Graciele's simple answer.

"I'll try to kill you if you keep me here." Nerri continued to grin. "As far as I see it, you're already dead."

Graciele regarded Nerri with a tilt of her head; her skin caught the white-hard glimmer of the late spring sun. "I don't think you're fully aware of the accuracy of what you've said," Graciele told her. With two fingers as thin as icicles, Graciele pinched the skin covering her own chin. The pale white skin lifted to reveal pale white bone, and teeth fixed in a jaw that moved with Graciele's laughter. Nerri's eyes dulled.

"I have a secret for you, you green little girl," Graciele whispered, adjusting her skin and coming to stand next to the bars of branches and bone. "You're not the only one trapped in a cage." She thought of the day the curse had landed on her head, and her soul, barely ripe with the onset of adolescence, became bound to the skeleton she now animated and covered in a costume of flesh. She reached inside. "And just like you, I'd like to be free," she said.

She pulled Nerri close and met her with a kiss to the cheek.