Skeleton Dance

This is not a story about my old copy of Jason and the Argonauts. We watched it so many times with my mom that the VHS player started growling like a trapped bear cub and it took longer to spit out the tape every time. The stop motion skeletons were my favourite. Aren’t they everyone’s favourite? Ray Harryhausen at his best. The Children of the Hydra’s Teeth standing in formation with their swords and shields, slowly advancing like they’re readying for a waltz. We called them Karl Skellingtons. I don’t remember who started it. It made us laugh, which is the main thing. The Karl Skellingtons scream without lungs, lunging towards our foolhardy hero like a malicious wave of maracas. He dives off a cliff in desperation and they follow him to a watery grave. That scene involved seven plastic skeletons thrown after a stuntman, which had to be captured in one take. No second chances to kill your movie monsters. All those fake bones, lost at sea. I loved that movie. I can never rewatch it.

This is not a story about the lunar eclipse the night before we graduated. The shadows formed pools of raven hollows and the moon was rotting orange. Its face was the face of a capricious child, ready to smile a world-rending smile. We headed into the graveyard that night, fuelled by a steady supply of spirits, flashlights at hand. Everyone was there: Seth, Erica, Tammy, and Alexander. Sulking “don’t you dare call me Alex” Alexander, bitter beyond his years, wiry like poison ivy. He stole glances at me with a mixture of stubbornness, naked longing, suppressed hope and hurt. He tried to kiss me again that night. He hadn’t tried in almost a year. I thought the last gentle let-down would stick. I thought he was over it, that we could be better, that I could save the boy next door. We had clicked as lonely kids, brought together by trivially common bullying. Alexander and Ophelia, waving from a sepia-toned postcard. We wrote notes to each other, pretended the schoolyard was a stage, hid during gym class, weathered in unison our hormonal humiliations. We laughed at hipsters while copying their clothing and pretending to know all the bands too. We showed each other bits of messed up slashers and compilations of accidents. WINTER OF FAIL, the captions would say. I always wonder if I’m unwittingly watching a snuff film of someone’s last day on Earth in some of those clips. Your surfboard slipped. You fell down the stairs. A giggling stranger has captured your twisting, pain-wracked demise. Everybody laugh now. Alexander and Ophelia, friends for life. Everybody laugh. 

This is not a story about the friend zone. I’d like to find whoever invented the concept of the friend zone. Find him and punch him in the gonads. The friend zone, turning connection into a challenge, kindness into an investment and friendship into failure. Our relationship should be a transaction governed by simple rules, he thinks. I give, you give. I listen, you give. I want, you give. You are pretty: you are mine. Sex is intimacy. Penetration is victory. After I’m done with Mr Friend Zone, I’m coming for Indiana Jones, and Han Solo, and James Bond, and all the self-satisfied action bros who taught him that no means yes, that it’s not rape if one person wants it enough, that it’s not abuse if it’s playful. I’d love to round them all up and lock them in a room, dooming them to one another’s company where no cameras can reach. The first time he put his lips on mine, I was surprised. I was in the middle of sharing a recent heartbreak and I needed him to understand how fundamentally unfair life was. He took that as an invitation. I explained that I loved him as a friend. He was stunned, uncomprehending. The word was an insult and a condemnation. He accused me of being blind to what we had. You’ve been staring at The One this whole time and you didn’t even know it. Don’t you see how lucky we are? I did not. He withdrew for a while and spent more time online. I imagine other men there enthusiastically confirming the horrible truth: we are all cruel harpies who thrive on suffering. Vulnerability must be avoided at all costs. Bravado must conceal weakness. He said all the right things for a while. He didn’t try to be the centre of my attention. He seemed to accept our expanding group and my occasional flings. Until he tried to kiss me again and I shook my head, please no. He grabbed my arm and whispered something vicious. He knew which buttons to push. I hadn’t planned to experience that kind of disappointment that night, but when do things go according to plan? We joined the others and there we were, drinking and dancing and beckoning our future amid the tombstones. 

This is not a story about the peculiar environmental effects of an unusual cosmic alignment. Why should the position of rocks in space have any bearing on decaying matter? I don’t know. I never believed in horoscopes and signs and the rest of that exploitative nonsense. Perhaps the same would have happened in the middle of a bright sunlit day. It might be that some people end up at the wrong place at the wrong time and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. All I know is that it was outrageous and stupid and utterly inexplicable and it happened. The dead rose. They burst out of the dirt all around us and just like that, we were surrounded. They regarded us for a time, with not a shred of flesh on them. Just mud and grass, and insects nesting inside their empty eye sockets. Vacant grins on beings that can do nothing but grin. They lifted their arms and pointed at us. Then they somehow shifted their position and they were on top of us. There was only a shimmer and a rustle; I didn’t see them move. They made no sound as they ran their hands through our hair and clasped our heads in a sturdy grip. I looked at my friends as they faced the inevitable. They held us there while we stared into the cavernous depths of their open mouths. Seth fell first. They let him slide to the ground like spent snakeskin. Others followed, left to lie where they dropped without a trace of a recognisable expression. I felt myself drift and fade. It was then that I frantically sought something familiar: the clickety clack of the Karl Skellingtons with their clumsy pirouettes and silly shrieks. All motion stops and starts in the old epic battle. Jason shows up and brandishes his blade in practised flair. Skeletons falling from a cliff, helplessly twitching. Skeletons in operating theatres, standing guard. Skulls and crossbones on pirate flags. The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone: doin’ the skeleton dance.  I was suddenly free. They let go, momentarily. I grabbed Alexander’s hand and pulled him away. We ran as fast as we could, just like when we were little and we raced. Only I was faster. I was always faster. I lost sight of him. I turned around one final time before I escaped, alone but alive. 

This is not a story about the way his eyes looked that last time, before bony fingers were wrapped around his shoulders and he was dragged back: frightened, regretful, pale blue eyes. What I felt above all then was not guilt, nor sorrow: it was relief. Overwhelming relief that it wasn’t me back there, that I made it. The other feelings came later. I saw him when I slept, and I saw him when I woke. These days he doesn’t visit me as often. His image is frayed around the edges and it’s gliding into obscurity. I won’t stop it.

This is not a story about me versus him. Ophelia versus Alexander. Ophelia wins. The patriarchy is dismantled. Our resentments persist and our mutual hatred is justified. Opposing armies gather, eternally at odds. No, I’d like to believe that he was capable of learning, that we all are. We might not have salvaged a friendship, but we could have eventually settled on understanding and respect. We could look back with affection for the journey, with all the flaws and missteps of life as work in progress. This isn’t where we ended up. I am here, and he is back there, where no skeletons dance and time has no meaning.

This is not a story about anything in particular. I just happened to be the one to tell it, and it won’t end here. It’s your turn now.

Your Gift

I remember how beautiful you were: as beautiful as only something that was never meant to live can be.  I saw you staring at me on the dance floor with a hunger that stopped me in my tracks. I felt as if I had been stumbling along all my life in rehearsal for this moment.  No one else seemed to register your presence. They did not matter. There was only you. Everything melted away and we stood on the surface of a silently spinning planet, contemplating each other. I was transfixed and you held me in your sway with the casual cruelty of a butterfly collector. You approached me in a manner that I could not comprehend. One minute you were all the way across the room and the next you were close, so close that I could smell the sparks flying off your skin and the dried blood in your breath. You touched me like an open flame and I roared in response, guided where you wanted me to go. We slid through the crowds until we were out in the open air and the sobering cold. I wanted to speak, but my voice was gone as if it had never been used. I could not tell if my feet were touching the floor any more as you carried me through the night. 

We arrived at the park where the street lights were dim and you pushed me up against a tree, ancient bark whispering through me. You lingered with my hair in your hands and gently exposed my neck.  I remember detaching from my senses and observing our scene as a diorama of an unlikely encounter. Far off into the distance there rose a dark wave of all the emotions I should be feeling: elation, terror, revulsion. It was too remote to make a difference. I was numb, helpless, a bystander in the path of a cyclone. You drew your lips back and revealed your sharpened fangs. It was like a dumb late-night flick, a bad prop, a party trick. There was nothing fake about the pain I felt when you bit into me. I was back in my body and I could experience my vitality slowly ebbing away. I was playing the role I was always meant to play: a vessel for your unnatural, unquenchable thirst. I knew in my bones that this was it. I wanted more from life then. Why should it stop there before I came into my own? Who was going to remember me? I had so many plans and hopes and you took it all away from me.

I should have taken more care with my final mortal thoughts. Regrettably, there was more after all.  You gave me something in return. It was not a new triumphant life, as much as you have waxed lyrical about it. It was the key to a twilight realm of a parasitic existence. You took me under your wing: a pretty playmate to keep you company when the nights grow long and the whims are strong. You taught me how to hunt, how to momentarily stem the pulsating wailing in my veins. I did to many what you did to me, except granting them our so-called gift. You never showed me how to do that and I wonder if you even knew how it happened in the first place. It could be that my rebirth was a fluke. Be that as it may, you claimed that it was precious and rare and reserved for only a few, perhaps no one new from now on. Apex predators hunt alone or in pairs. I have never met another bearing our affliction. We might be the only aberrations to carry this baleful burden.

I eventually tired of your leash. I slipped away and I began hunting alone. For a while, it was enough. I thought I could embrace my condition as a power beyond anything I’ve ever known. The power to enthrall and snuff someone’s light out as I saw fit, all in service to my eternal undeath. When I chose a victim, it was as if it was always meant to be. Every decision of their paltry lives led them to me and I made sure not a single drop was wasted before I discarded them to be forgotten as the years went by. I was the only one who held on to the memories. I came to understand that I, too, was a slave to my circumstances. Power predicated upon others is no power at all. I needed them and their easily extinguished life force. Without them I was a mewling infant, squealing for its milk. The need was everything. I measured time by the intervals from short-lived satisfaction to when the drive to drink became unbearable again. Yes, I’m a seductive myth. Yes, stories are written about our kind. No one sees us for what we are. We are powerless against our immortality’s imperatives. Desperate and alone, casting shadows like monstrous bats while cowering from the suggestion of sunlight. Pathetic in our glowering guises. Slobbering and ravenous and doomed to wander from one fleeting fix to another. 

I looked at mortals with their neuroses and addictions and flickering lives and I envied them.  Some lose themselves in menial pursuits and some try to preserve and enhance every second. Ultimately, they all end up in the same place and that is their great, unrecognised blessing. Transience makes an indelible mark upon the world. What can be more meaningful than the promise of an end and a chance to make the most of a brief existence? This is my most terrible truth: there is no end for me. I found that out that first day I gave up and waited for the sun to finally obliterate me. Here is what happened: I cried and I burned and I was trapped in the most excruciating agony. I was blinded and my skin crackled and charred. There was no comforting void, no relieving silence. Instead, I crawled into a gutter where I lay as a slab of pulverised meat. My feebleness and immobility led me to yet another unwanted discovery: the absence of sustenance is not lethal either. As parched as I was, my thirst just became another source of torment. I had to stew on my suffering until I healed enough to feed on vermin to restore my strength and resume my half-hearted routine. 

Every fable is a lie: nothing can release me from this purgatory. Holy water? No more effective than rain in a puddle. Crucifixes? I wear them in a mockery of divinity. Stakes? They hurt like hell but as with everything else, the wounds heal. Garlic? Utterly useless. Silver bullets? Wrong address. Decapitation? Impossible. I can tear my neck open, slice my fingers and hack at my feet, yet as hard as I try, there is no severing of limbs. I remain sadly solid. I have invented innumerable ways to test my boundaries and I keep crushing against the same old depressing fact: I persist. Impermanence lies forever beyond my grasp. How do I wile away the passing of interminable aeons in this indestructible form? In the throes of my despair, an answer dawned on me, so obvious in its simplicity. It was high time to become reacquainted with my maker. 

At long last, my purpose is clear. It is you. You kept me going for a reason: you can now give meaning to this half-life with a violent and prolonged penance. It was so easy to follow and sneak up on you when you least expected it. You had become sluggish in your self-assurance. I observed you for a while: your trivial nightly rituals and your flashes of unchallenged power. I could see that you, too, were aimless and bored. I was tempted to let you carry on as you have. Could that be punishment enough? No. Time has not led me to kindness and wisdom. Instead, my spite has no limits. I had to demonstrate the depths of my gratitude. I pounced, and here we are.

I have lost count of how long I have kept you starved and bound here. By now you are a skeleton in an ill-fitting skin suit. Your flesh is pockmarked and saggy, your fingernails are long and yellow and your hair is wispy and white. Your teeth fell off so easily from your sweet, rotten gums. Your eyes, those smouldering eyes that held me on the spot on that fateful evening are now so deeply sunken in their sockets that they might as well not be there at all. You are constantly twitching and scratching at an itch that will not pass. Your moans are music to my ears. You are lost in your bloodlust, reduced to your base cravings. I have made sure to fill the space with mirrors. For as much as you can see, you can behold your true nature. You are finally exposed, far from your former glory, such as it was. I sometimes bring others here so you can watch me feed and relish in them. I save the final drips of scarlet so I can let them fall to the floor while you grovel and beg. None for you. Not now, not ever. 

This is not what I asked for, but it will do. It turns out that we were made for each other after all. You moulded me into the monster that I am and I helped you move past the trappings of your predatory nature into the kind of anguish that you had never dared to dream possible. We are locked in a perpetual dance of domination, a hateful embrace for the ages. I am yours in loathing and you are mine in misery. I am never letting go of your withered hand as we enter new domains of depravity. You and me until all stars explode in celebration of our unholy union and the cosmos devours itself. Who knows? Perhaps that will not be the end either. I now have hope. Thank you for this gift.