Plow the Bones by Douglas F. Warrick Page B

late and lamented ventriloquist.
    Oh, goodness. This story has forgotten something in its own telling. It reverses, for the sake of its good listener, the mindless void. The mouths of the puppets, hanging open. People say that ventriloquists make puppets appear to speak. The educated and informed will tell you (or perhaps they will hold their secrets; the educated and informed often do) that it is easy to open a puppet’s mouth. Do nothing. Its jaw will fall open and its words will spill out soundlessly. A puppet’s words infect. They taint. They do this without ever sounding like a thing, without the listener realizing they have been spoken. A true ventriloquist, as those who are educated and informed may or may not choose to tell you, is adept in the art of keeping those mouths shut. And so, while the fire made itself a ladder and climbed itself into the ink–spilt sky, those unfortunates who stared into the burning pile of wooden faces and cotton limbs and glass eyes now filled and blinded with smoky cataracts, also saw the peeking teeth of the condemned, saw their painted tongues curl and burn, and because there was no hand inside their head to shut their mouths, almost heard the secrets they were trying to tell. Their sleep would thereafter be infrequent, and nightmares would take root behind their eyelids, never to be remembered in the daylight except for a clutching desperate feeling in their solar plexus, a rat trapped and starved between their ribs, which lingered for hours after they shot awake like cobras from a basket, tangled in their sweaty sheets.
    A confession. This story began with a lie. This story wanted very much to end here. And so it spun a fabrication within its very second sentence. But this is not the end of this story, as ashamed as it may be to admit it. This is the rest of this story, told into the void as all stories are. Until their end. Whether they like it or not.
    It is said that the ventriloquist was a very rich man, even if he did live in a shanty tent in a shantytown amongst shanty people. It is said that the ventriloquist was deathly afraid of nuclear war and that — with a mere token of his obscene fortune — he built a bomb shelter in a secret place beneath his tent, and he brought a mattress into it, and stocked it with brandy and cigars and newspapers and TV dinners, even though he did not own a TV. It is further said that there, in that reinforced concrete cell where the dead man slept and ate and drank and smoked and read decades–old obituaries, was kept the ventriloquist’s last doll, and his best.
    This story ends with that doll, and the girl who climbed the rusty ladder into the shelter to ask it a question.
    The girl was seventeen and curious. This is not uncommon. The educated and informed will tell you that a curious seventeen–year–old is as common as curdled milk, and only half as easy on the stomach (or perhaps, again, they won’t). She grew up with stories about the ventriloquist’s funeral, nursed on them as a baby and was never successfully weaned. She knew of the tangled arms and crooked legs of the man–child–monsters that burned that night, revealed for what they were. She knew that the people of the shantytown slept in fits, eaten from the inside by their starving rats. She knew that the puppets told a secret, and that nobody remembered what it was. All of that happened many years ago, and still the shantytown stood, tents and boxes, and still it was haunted by the decades–old pyre that once burned on its windy, dusty outskirts, and she wanted to know why.
    So she found the place where the ventriloquist’s tent used to stand, and she found the heavy wooden door beneath the sand, and she pulled on the big brass ring set into its surface until her elbow joints popped and finally the door shuddered and the ground spat it out and the cold airlessness of the shelter gusted up and pushed her hair away from her face. Then she climbed the ladder down.
    The