♥ I Stitched a Tale! ♥
Username: mwahhaha
Word Count: 673
Theme: Anti-V-Day
Entry: Title: Here Lies Us

“Unbleached, untouched till now. Her last breath finally touches the sky, but dirtied. Will rain never come to wash?” Charles said looking down at the ribs, half buried in the earth. They stuck out like pale yellow fingers, arched in a very loose fist.
“I'm calling the police.” She said, rubbing her arms and taking another step back.
“No,” he stood straight and stared at her. “Don't you see it. It's a poem in nature.” He's been published – too many times, perhaps – in things like "Poetry" and "The New Yorker."
“It's human,” she said.
“Maybe,” he said. He bent too close to the bones for her comfort.
“No, it's human. And I'm calling the police.”
He was too gone to hear the beeping of her cell phone buttons. “Do you have a head?” He asked the ribs. Next to the tree, from the storm last night, a branch as thick as his thigh waited to rot. It was this branch he used to dig around the ribs.
“Don't! Stop it!” she shouted. “You're tampering with evidence!”
The police mumbled into the air from her phone, hearing what she said to him through the receiver. She moved forward.
“I'm only looking,” he said.
No matter what, she was not as strong as him, and ended up rubbing her arm again from a shove's distance. The phone fell a maple leaf's distance from the ribs from the push, contaminated in her mind.
Not too long later and, “I've found the skull,” he said. She announced that she was going back to the car. “I want to touch it,” he said.
“Stop it. You touch that, Charles, and I'll never touch you again.” Firmly, she strapped her arms across her chest.
Bent forward over the skeleton, he looked up at her, smiling - until he saw her piercing glare. Resolutely, he sighed and stood up. “Sorry.”
She rubbed her hands rough onto her thighs, as if there was something on them. Pinching her hands between her knees she shouted towards her phone, “Police! We found some bones – human bones, I think – in Lisle Woods. We're uh. . . well, I dropped the phone by the rib cage – and I don't want to . . . I don't want to touch it.”
Charles, ignoring her disgust with the condition of his hands, stuck one under her arm and pulled her away from the phone and body. “Let's go,” he said softly.
“No,” she jerked away from him, but didn't step away. “We can't just leave the scene.” She was short, even shorter than he was, and had to blink up at him through her red lashes. The way the sun lit her freckles and bounced around her hazel eyes was enough to keep him there. It made him glad to hear her say that.
He took his spot by the ribs again. “It really is beautiful isn't it?” She said nothing. “A garden should grow here. Let's plant it.”
“Isn't this against your religion? You can't touch dead things.”
“You're my religion.”
“Then it's still against your religion.” Louder, she said towards the phone, “Police! We're just off of the light blue path's scenic look-out. Please hurry.”
An hour later, she was sitting at the look-out. No police still, and she wasn't about to touch that phone to try dialing again. The sound of Charles digging up bones and soil, his hardworking breaths, and a couple distant bird songs fell soft on her ears. Curling her legs onto the bench, she gazed out at the trees. Earlier, he had sat with her and whispered in her ear that they were “rapturous green mountains harboring a million chirping, roaring hearts.” Some parts weren't so green. She was noticing now, some of the leaves shivered in the breeze in grayish tones. Looking over her shoulder, she felt a pinch in her chest. It was the feeling of taking her heart back.