text by alice sheffer
art by sarina grewal and amani fossati-moiane
bones and things No one seemed to appreciate the curvature of the whale bones as he did. So, his class left him behind, all alone in the museum, to look at the spiny vertebrae hung from the ceiling as they seemed to drift in the drafty room as they would have years ago when the animal was still alive in the water. Everyone thought that he was weird, including his own parents, when he came home from school one day with a crow skull, asking, “Mommy, what kind of animal is this?” The following week, it was a squirrel, then an opossum, and eventually, his bones got too big for him to take home without hearing screams. He was never really friends with anyone, but his newfound interest in bones pushed away not only prospective friends at school but also any parents who
38 summer 2023
would take pity on the boy and push their children to befriend him. Many asked his parents if he had joined a cult. Many asked if he was worshiping the devil, but his parents just smiled and said, “Well, if he were in trouble, we’d know,” (which is so not true). “Just let the boy have some fun.” His parents didn’t say the same thing when his sister brought home a boy. What’s the big difference between a dead bag of bones and an alive bag of bones? And why does it matter that her door needs to be kept open when he’s over? Can’t someone take stock of their collection in privacy? What if they wanted to study anatomy together? It’s safe to say that many, including the boy himself, thought that he was a little different from everyone else. However, that’s not a proper reason to leave a classmate all alone in a museum. Well, the boy knew where to go from the aquatic exhibit; he just didn’t want to. So when the tour guide got tired of waiting for the boy to finish his quiet contemplations, they just continued leading the group elsewhere. The boy was perfectly content taking his time in the aquatic room. The next room over was insects, and he had no desire to rush his art. As he did every
time he went to a museum, he sketched the exhibits that he liked, whether it be a remarkably lifelike painting of a ballerina or pounds of bones held together with steel cable and invisible string. The boy liked to feel his pencil move in the soft curves of bones, see the fullness of life take shape under his hands,
and gaze at his creation once he was done. It’s not like his drawings came to life, so he always wondered why people were scared of him. They called him odd, but the only thing the boy knew that was odd was the number of vertebrae humans had. He dreamed of studying anatomy when he grew up. He imagined that something, hidden, tucked away in the collagen structures, was what he was looking for. So, he searched. Whenever he met a new person, he tried to picture their skeleton. No skin, muscle, nerves, blood, or anything that distinguished alive from unalive. He wanted to see past all that and look at the curvature of the bone, the way it bent with stress and fractured on impact. He wanted to see his