Story Patch
by Caity Scott
All I wanted was a ghost story.
Shovel in hand, I drift across the cobblestone bridge—the one above the milk-drunk stream without a name where black tentacles ebb like smoke through stars.
I do not make eye contact with the stone lions at the iron gate, but I leave whole cucumbers at the feet of the gargoyles; rub their claws and kiss their foreheads. The gargoyles are always your friends.
Crows chatter overhead in their proud, blatty language as my shovel cracks the soil clean as the shell on a hard-boiled egg.
It’s like chocolate cake crumble—the overturned dirt, that is—the way it smells, steams, and tumbles charm over the belly of the cemetery. The earthworms are jellied green. Against the dirt, they are the glowing plastic stars on the ceiling of my childhood bedroom. Weaving, they guide me left, then down, right, then down, until my shovel’s strike is a brass church bell.
Autumn stories: even though there are so many this time of year, so few are ready to be picked. These old soul tales need to age; need to fester, for years, years, years, until they really come into their own with notes of clove and tragedy, cinnamon revulsion, allspice, nutmeg, and terror most foul. True putridity takes time, and store bought just doesn’t cut it.
I find the ripest story bottled, corked, and cradled in the clenched fingerbones of a skeleton. Under scratched glass, ink ripples in the color of primordial nothing: not black, but close to the oil sheen on a crow’s feathers, or something like the swirling bruise tone behind your closed eyelids. Either of those, almost.
When I ask the skeleton if I could borrow the story for just a night, she is all too happy to share, (because aren’t we all when we find just the right story?), and I can’t tell you who came up with the idea, but we both decide to read together right there, right then.
So this dear skeleton and I, we sit in her grave with our backs against the eon-striped dirt. We don’t even notice the twig roots prodding our shoulders, or the nightcrawlers oozing from their sediment subways. I give her my scarf because her clothes rotted away a century ago or so, and her voice is the skip-scratch of leaves across abandoned dirt roads.
And yes, we pretend not to see the crows nestling overhead (and we certainly don’t comment on how quiet they’ve become). They always tell us reading isn’t cool anymore. We don’t want to embarrass them for borrowing a listen.
When we finish, I cover the skeleton in the softest dirt and sing her a lullaby about forgotten shipwrecks and knife-teethed mermaids. I pat the ground with my palms, listening through them for the heartbeat of the earth, and like always, it rings up along my vertebrae in crescendoing glass puffs: we tell stories because we are.
Caity Scott lives in the Pacific Northwest with her spouse and chubby, black cat. When she's not reading about cults or playing video games, she's pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Western Washington University and interning as the Assistant Managing Editor of The Bellingham Review. Her work is featured or forthcoming in The Disappointed Housewife, Sci-fi Lampoon, Sparrow's Trombone, and Infinity's Kitchen, and she can be found on Twitter @smarted_pants.