Bone Fire by Mark Spragg Page B

swatches of blue merle and liver. She squatted at the hose bib to wash her hands, standing when she heard the car door shut. She shaded her eyes, watching a tall woman in tan shorts and a navy-blue T-shirt approach, stopping to stretch her arms above her head, her curly gray hair cut to match the sharp line of her jaw, and Griff thought,
Please, don’t let me fuck this up
.
    “He’s friendly.” The silver Volvo parked behind her was the same color as her hair.
    Griff squatted again at the bib, running her cupped hands full, and the dog stepped forward to lap at the water, watching her, one eye hazel, the other pale blue. When he’d had enough he backed away and sat in the border of dampened earth.
    “His eyes are different colors,” Griff said.
    “Don’t you wish yours were?”
    The woman bent at the waist to drink from the spigot and the dog darted in, snapping at her hair, his back end wiggling as though attached to a separate axis. She pushed him away, laughing,and shut the water off, turning toward the house. She raked her wet hands back through her hair.
    “He’s inside,” Griff said.
    “In the middle of the day?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    She wiped at her chin with the back of a hand. “What about Mitch? He stay indoors all day too?”
    “Mitch died.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.” She moved into the shade the building cast. “Did he go hard?”
    “Yes, he did. He suffered a lot.” The woman nodded, asking nothing more, so Griff added, “He died when I was eleven.”
    “How old are you now?”
    “Nineteen.”
    “Can we step in out of this heat?” She was staring up into the hot, pale sky.
    “We can go in the house if you want. I made up the guest room for you.”
    “I can’t just yet. I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    She extended her hand. “This is going to work out a lot better if you call me Marin.” She indicated the dog. “His name’s Sammy.”
    Griff took her hand. “Everybody calls me Griff.”
    “Like your dad?”
    She nodded and turned and Marin followed her up onto the porch and into the studio, where Griff turned off the radio.
    Marin leaned back against the work island, scuffing a heel against the worn floorboards, rutted and stained in patterns of neat’s-foot, diesel and two-cycle oils, turpentine and creosote. She inhaled deeply. “It still smells like my daddy’s shop.”
    “It’s mine now,” Griff said, hating how that sounded, adding that it was Einar who allowed her to use it. “We moved the tools over to the granary,” she said.
    Marin picked up one of the ceramic ribs, pressing it against her side as though comparing the size, then placing it back on the worktable. She looked at the raw pieces heaped on the shelving. “Do you mostly make bones?”
    Griff stepped to a steel rod held upright in the jaws of a vise at the table’s edge. It was curved gracefully, like a girl’s spine, the five lumbar vertebrae held in place by a variegated and grooved coccyx that was tucked in stiffly, like some docked vestigial tail. “I use the rods and wire to piece them together.”
    “You make skeletons, then?”
    “Sort of.”
    “Are you nervous?”
    Griff took her hands out of her front pockets and, not knowing what to do with them, tucked them into her back pockets. “More than I thought.”
    Marin smiled. “I knew I would be.” She lifted the pelvis up, sighting out the window through its cradle. “Mitch was a sweetheart. I always hoped he’d get lucky and have something quick like a heart attack.”
    “I need you to put that down.”
    Marin lowered the curved bone as she might a chalice. “I’m not going to drop it.”
    “You might.”
    “I guess I might.” She placed it carefully back on the table and Griff stepped forward, squaring it with the arrangement of ribs.
    “It took me a long time to get it right,” she said.
    They listened to the dog circling and finally settling on the porch.
    “How sick is he?”
    “I