FICTION

Blood Money Melancholy

By Cameron Vanderwerf     VOLUME 56 No. 2

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We met the skeleton at a party thrown by a friend. He was kind and charismatic, and he graciously accepted the attention directed at him. He wore a suit, which hid all but his skull and bony white hands. His gestures with those skeletal fingers were so precise and graceful. At the bashful request of one tipsy party guest, he untucked and unbuttoned his shirt so we could see his rib cage.

He had many witticisms and entertaining anecdotes at the ready. But he wasn’t self-absorbed. He showed genuine curiosity toward people. By the end of the night, he’d learned a little about each of the other guests. We asked the host for his number so we could invite him to dinner at our place sometime.

Our house was small, but we liked it. It had been a scary and exciting thing, signing a thirty-year mortgage. We were barely thirty years old ourselves. But we loved the idea of spending the next thirty, forty, fifty years together in that house. Maybe with a kid or two, eventually.

We cleaned the place thoroughly in nervous anticipation after he accepted our invitation. Then we primped ourselves meticulously, wanting to make a good impression. We set aside a few solid hours to prepare the meal before his arrival. It wasn’t until the lasagna was halfway done baking that we stopped to consider the idea of eating. Had either of us seen the skeleton eat or drink at the party? We couldn’t recall. But surely he would have said something on the phone when we invited him. Wouldn’t he have?

Regardless, it was too late. He was probably already on his way. And he seemed so nice that we couldn’t foresee him making a fuss either way. So when the doorbell rang, we answered it with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.

He was dressed more casually this time: a polo shirt and khaki pants. He’d brought us a small, slender bouquet of lilies, which looked both beautiful and eerie in his fleshless hands. We found ourselves fascinated with the elegant, antique-looking finger segments, the cluster of bones in each wrist, the progression to radius and ulna, and at last the humerus disappearing into the short sleeves of his shirt on either side. No part of his ossiferous form was held together by tendons or tissue of any kind, as far as we could tell.

We gave him a tour of the house, and he seemed sincerely interested. He complimented the pictures of our honeymoon in South America. He asked how long we’d been married. It had just been our first wedding anniversary a few weeks ago. He congratulated us.

A little nervously, we asked him if he’d like some wine. He laughed and said, no, but thank you. “It goes right through me. Quite literally,” he quipped.

We apologized profusely and explained about the lasagna and our lack of forethought. Kindly, he held us at no fault and said that he should have explained in advance.

We all sat down at the dinner table. We served lasagna only to ourselves. Taking his plate away seemed inherently rude, so we left it empty in front of him. The skeleton sat patiently and said we shouldn’t let our dinner get cold on his account. We glanced between our food and the skeleton as we ate, and we marveled at how well he could convey warmth and amity with a face that had no skin or muscles or eyes. He looked back and forth between us but without moving his skull. Somehow, we could tell when the focus of those dry, empty sockets shifted from one point to another.

“So,” we asked, “how does one get to be a skeleton anyway?”

He laughed, not unkindly, at our phrasing. “Well, I was born this way, I suppose. Of course, I used to be inside a body. Flesh and blood and all that. A man by the name of Oliver Chips. Sometimes I miss it, you know, the warmth of skin and muscle. But no use holding on to the past.”

The skeleton’s name was Dennis, not Oliver. And for over fifty years, Dennis’s entire life was dictated by Oliver’s whims. Oliver had been an accountant. Never married. Liked baseball, indoctrinated at a young age by his old man. Dennis, who preferred theater and live music, found Oliver’s life somewhat dull. “But at least he enjoyed going to the movies,” Dennis said. “Next best thing to live theater, I suppose. And he liked to hike occasionally, which I always enjoyed. Getting out into nature.

“Then, one day, he just died. He’d turned fifty-two years old the month prior and didn’t seem in particularly bad health. I’m no doctor, but I think he died of melancholy.”

We listened intently, paused in our eating.

“He’d had his fair share of heartbreak,” Dennis continued, “which out of respect for his privacy and memory, I won’t elaborate on. I’ll just say that his heart had taken more than its fair share of knocks over the years. And I don’t mean only romantic heartbreaks, but many other types of disappointments too. Oh and there I go, right after I said I wouldn’t elaborate.

“But you see, one day this man—heart heavy with metaphorical scar tissue—hiked near a bog on a cool, cloudy day with just a mizzle of rain. He sat on a log, either to rest or to stare at the brackish water. And he expired right there.”

Dennis looked past us, apparently lost in thought for a moment.

“It’s an odd sensation,” he eventually said, “being someone’s skeleton during the moment of their passing. I don’t like to think about that moment myself. But eventually I made my exit from Oliver’s body after those fifty-two years together and emerged into the nippy, wet day. I walked into town for help and told people exactly where they would find Oliver’s body. The autopsy didn’t show anything wrong with him. Except the missing skeleton of course.”

Dennis laughed softly, then continued: “Oddly, after everything Ollie and I went through, one of my most prominent memories of him is the book he’d been writing. After his fiftieth birthday, he started working on a novel. For fun, mainly, but also potentially for publication. The working title was Blood Money, and naturally the main character was an accountant, like Oliver. But while Oliver was a regular CPA, the character—Dalton Reed—was some type of forensic accountant. And unlike Oliver, Dalton Reed couldn’t help but attract drama and danger and the romantic overtures of mysterious strangers. The plot was labyrinthine but familiar—murder and intrigue and deduction and spycraft and stolen nuclear launch codes, et cetera, et cetera. I think Oliver meant it to be a series, but he passed before he could finish the first one. That makes me melancholy, and I don’t even like those kinds of books.” After a leaden pause, Dennis chuckled a little.

We considered Dennis’s story while we ate. He asked us questions about ourselves, and we answered between bites. We told him about how we’d met: supporting a mutual friend at a chess tournament. We told him a little about our jobs in offices, which were alright. Not what we’d imagined for ourselves, but they paid the bills and had good benefits and a lot of vacation time.

At some point, our curiosity—and maybe the wine as well—got the better of us, and we asked how he could move without muscles. How he could see without eyes. How he could speak without a tongue. How he could think without a brain. Then we apologized for our impertinence, although we were still dying to know.

Dennis didn’t laugh this time. He actually sighed. He informed us that he took no offense, but that he would not answer because the questions were quite boring and the answers were even more boring than the questions. So boring in fact that to answer our questions to our satisfaction would accomplish nothing other than a lethal dulling of the evening.

“What if I do this instead,” he said. “What if I tell you one more story? Your piano reminded me of it.”

During the tour, we’d pointed out the old but functional upright piano that we sometimes practiced on, although neither of us were particularly adept. We eagerly agreed to hear whatever story Dennis saw fit to tell us.

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CAMERON VANDERWERF is a Boston-based writer. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Worcester Review, Moon City Review, The Write Launch, Every Day Fiction, Corvus Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and other publications. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University.


VOLUME 56 No. 2