Plow the Bones by Douglas F. Warrick Page A

another step forward and the arm burst away in a million tiny specks.
    Oh, yes.
    She was perfect.
    In that simple white dress, her clavicle curving proudly above the neckline. She smiled at him with all of the love in the universe. She redefined love, and Cotton saw his whole life there. The children he would have with her, the grandchildren, the fights, the sex, the books they would read sitting side by side on the sofa, the medications they would remind each other to take, the smiles, the anniversaries, the whole universe of what they would build, and the end, the finality, the loss, and how wonderfully part of it all it was.
    The church was gone. There was a profound nothing around them, a complete absence, a vacuum of any–ness, And in its center was Audrey, smiling, standing with her arms by her side, one foot in front of the other. Looking like an exclamation point.

Funeral Song for a Ventriloquist
     
    WHEN THE VENTRILOQUIST DIED, HIS will dictated that all of his puppets be burned. And so they were. In the middle of the dusty wasteland behind his tent, well away from the other members of the shanty town, they were piled on top of one another, still in their fancy show clothes, with their molded hair falsely combed and parted, with their limbs thrown to strange configurations that limbs do not reach by natural means. Some of the women chewed the insides of their cheeks and lamented the loss, and could not help but think of how smart their little boys would look in that tiny tuxedo or that miniature sailor’s suit. Their limbs — or, let us say, the surrogate limbs they possessed in place of real ones — were not full of muscles and blood, were not anchored by bones, but stuffed with cotton and weighted with sawdust, and so they could be forced into whatever configuration. Wherever they fell, they did so according to their own nature. The pile of dolls did nothing that piles of dolls do not or cannot do.
    However, the ventriloquist was a fine craftsman, much envied by those few peers with whom he had correspondence, and his puppets were masterfully made. This story is tempted to tell that they looked like real people, with flesh and blood and bones to anchor them, people who could walk and dance and manipulate the muscles of their faces so that their eyes narrowed and their mouths manufactured false grins, the same as other people, only crushed into tiny, awkward toddler bodies. But if this story told that, this would be a false story, and it has no desire to abuse the trust of the empty ether to which it’s told. So the truth is this: the dead man’s dolls did not look like living things, and so their closeness to living things is not the reason it frightened the funeral party to see their limbs kinked into terrible angles. The truth is that the dolls looked dead, the scattered shells of things that once lived, cruel things that had disguised themselves, however poorly, as human beings. They looked like things that, while attempting to build their human bodies, had confused children and adults and had therefore crammed youth and age into a single shape. The reason that the funeral party was frightened (before the night bloomed like an oil spill over the place where the sun used to be and the flames explored the puppets, layer by blistering layer) was that they had always been suspicious of the imposters that the ventriloquist harbored. But before, the puppets had sat on his lap, and their spines had seemed straight and strong, and their arms and legs had hung more or less where they were supposed to hang. Now, tangled up in themselves with their eyes staring at nothing and their mouths just barely open, it was as though all of the old suspicions were confirmed. Behold the monsters in abominable repose, laid out and laid open before you.
    So, while the good people of the shantytown stood in a circle and sang funeral songs, the mound of dolls was doused in gasoline and immolated with, at its bottom, the body of the