MicroHorror

When I was a child I broke my legs, and now my skeleton hates me.

I’m all healed up and the years have gone by, but it doesn’t matter: skeletons don’t forgive.

I have a recurring dream where my skeleton dances with me. We quickstep and waltz, everything is pleasant, until my wife cuts in. My skeleton watches us, and I feel his jealousy and hate. He covets our flesh. He cuts in, then takes my wife from me, twirling her around the dance floor. She laughs and cries out in pleasure, but the dance ends with his hands around her throat.

The dreams are warnings.

I look at my hand sometimes, and find it has curled into a fist. I stare at my wife, and see in her panic that I have been shouting.

Her bruises don’t get a chance to fade.

It isn’t me, it’s the skeleton, but no one listens.

I tell doctors, but they don’t know what to say. They dispatch me to various specialists who give me stupid prescriptions I tear up.

I forgot about my broken legs for years, blocked it out. It was only recently that I began to understand. It was when Judy left me. When she took the kids.

She knew there was a monster inside me. It hit her, not me.

Not me.

That was when I knew for sure. Not me, something inside of me, but what? And then I remembered.

My skeleton. My broken legs.

My grandfather had told me, on one of those nights in the ward. I was ten, my legs were in plaster. Everything was so sterile and cold. He told me stories to keep me from crying. Once, with a smile on his face, he told me how angry my skeleton was with me.

At the time I had thought he was making a little joke. As you do.

But it was a warning. Like the dreams that would one day come, a warning that skeletons don’t forget.

Now I don’t know what to do. I pace the house. I forget to eat. I can’t shave, I daren’t pick up a knife. It wants to do away with me.

How do you escape your skeleton?

My wife calls me one night. I try to tell her how much I miss her, her warmth, her smile. I want to tell her I forgive her for seeing Jim behind my back… (I could have gone crazy but didn’t)… instead I find myself shouting, it is the skeleton again, my hating, vengeful, skeleton.

Later, sitting naked in the bathtub, rocking back and forth, I whisper apologies for cracked bones through cracked lips.

I’m tired, but I can’t sleep. Skeletons make you sleepwalk. It’s when they get you.

I hate it, now, as much as it hates me.

Why can’t it forgive? What’s wrong with it? It was so long ago.

The end, when it comes to me, seems quite obvious.

On a cold, black, night, after the birds fall silent, and the roads clear of traffic, I drive to the tallest building I know. I take the stairs to the roof, force the door, and emerge to the scene of my own revenge.

I will break more than legs. Punish what’s inside. Save Judy.

I remember, when in hospital, I had a complete X-ray done. Though I was a child, I vividly recall the leering skull, the splintered bones.

You could feel the animosity.

Standing on the roof, I hold my hand up to the moon and stare. I can almost see the bone beneath. How it would like to claw at me, shred me from its frame. I hear laughter, and realize it is my own. Soon the skeleton will be broken again, and there’s nothing it can do

The moon bathes me, it is my second, final, X-ray. For one last moment I am whole.

And then I jump.

And what is not already broken, breaks.

• Copyright: © 2009 Barry Charman