Lurking Inside by A.J. Brown

A shadow lurked inside. Where, he didn’t know. Perhaps it was where his heart no longer beat, where no blood pumped through collapsed veins. Or maybe it danced along his skull, touching each bony wall with a blackened finger. Those same walls might crumble if the weight of his thoughts didn’t hold them up.

The skeleton sat on a stool, his feet up on one bar, and his skull in his hands. He wore a suit of brown skin, buttoned down the middle and zipped at the crotch. His shoes were the hides of long dead alligators. Or were they snakes? Possibly just the everyday, ordinary bovine? He had long since forgotten. There wasn’t much to him these days. Bones and skin and more bones. His mind was slipping.

He hears a sound, like fingers raking on glass, cutting with long nails made of steel. He placed his skull back on his shoulders and stood.

Rattle rattle went his bones and click clack went his toes as he tip toed the best he could across a floor of stone soaked through with the tears of old lovers. Out a circular window, he glanced into the darkness, a turn of the head in one direction, then the other.

They were there, the ghosts of lovers past, their hearts haunted by his words, his ways, and his stubbornness. Over there was Maggie, lithe and young with legs all the way up. She had a heart of gold until he opened her up to see if it were so. Beyond her was Sally with her long brown hair and once tan skin. She once said she had butterflies in her stomach, but when he looked, he found none. Sue Ellen was there with her pearl teeth and lavender eyes and her alabaster skin that shone in the night. They were all there. Kelly and Mira and Sandra and Katie and Barbara and Little Annie who loved him when they were just six and he wasn’t so sure of himself.

Another turn of the head and he stared out a second window, shaped like the first, but with a crack splintering from the top pane toward the center of the glass. Their hearts lay, bloodied, and ruined, still thump, thump, thumping beyond the cracked glass.

The sound came again, echoing inside his head, the screech of a thousand women, their cries loud and tortured. One eye socket began to hurt. Staggering, he turned, and they were there, crawling through the one window that had been cracked but now the glass lay shattered on the floor. Others were tap tapping on the other window with their long fingers. They whispered his name over and over, each one in their own voice, in their own way. The second window broke and he felt the pain in the other eye socket, heard the crack of bone.

His hand went to the socket; one finger poked in, found nothing and slithered back out. His head spun and he thought it would twist off his shoulders. He grabbed it in both hands, heard the scraping of nails on bone again and continued his backward spiral away from them, the women with their lost eyes and vengeful souls and damaged hearts.

They came in through the broken windows, like smoke from flames, wisps of what they used to be, lives left in ashes. And they came for him.

He shook his head and pressed against the wall, his parchment suit cold against the crying stone.

They grabbed.

They groped.

They pulled.

Each one took a bone before slinking away, back out the windows and to the ground where he left them. He screamed the scream of a lover scorned, wailed the wail of a broken heart, cried the tears of a lonely soul as, one by one, they plucked their share, spent their worth, and took his being.

And when they were done, he was still himself, the skeleton on a stool, his feet up on one bar, his skull in his hands, the sharp fingers raking across the sides. The sound echoed off the walls of his head, the weight of his loneliness holding them up.

The suit of brown skin was tattered, and a hole was left behind where two buttons should have closed it up. He looked up. Where his heart should have been was a hole, black and rotten and dead … and a shadow lurked inside.