business. She then gave me enough jobs to last the day and told me I could stay another night in the barn if I worked hard. I agreed.
She offered no food, and when night came she went back to the house and pointed me to the barn. I had bone soup again that night, and woke refreshed the following morning. The girl wore the same clothes again, and she had dark circles under her eyes. I noticed for the first time that she was missing most of her back teeth, although the front ones were still intact.
“Ain’t you hungry?” she asked me around lunchtime.
“I’m fine enough,” I told her. I didn’t want to beg food from someone who had so little of it, not when the bone provided for my dinner.
After another day of work I was sent back to the barn, and this time the girl was able to sneak up on me without my hearing her. She threw open the door just as I was sipping from the second pot of meaty-tasting soup.
“A-ha!” she screamed. “I knew you been stealing food. Give that to me.”
I pulled the bone from the pot. “It’s mine. I didn’t steal it.”
“Is that all you’re boiling?” She ran to the pot, pulling it from my hand. She raised the pot to her lips and took a sip.
“It’s just hot water,” she said.
“I know.”
“But I smelled it. I sat out there all the time you boiled it. It was meat and spices. I smelled it the whole time.” She eyed the string sticking from my hand, and the bone buried deep in my palm.
“Gimme that.”
“I told you it’s mine.”
“Gimme!” she screamed, throwing herself at me. The water spilled between us, and I stepped aside, pushing her to the ground. I couldn’t believe how light she was. Then I realized why there were no animals here. This girl was alone. There was no master of the house, no parents, no livestock. She was another outcast of the northerners, left to live out the winter on her own. Or more likely die. She was mad with hunger. She’d kept me around to do the tasks she had no strength to do on her own, and out of a suspicion that I was hiding food.
“Here,” I said. “I’ll show you something wonderful.”
I took her through my routine. Boiling the snow. Dropping in the bone. Drinking while the bone was still in the pot. I passed the soup to her after taking the initial sip to show that it wasn’t poison.
“It’s delicious,” she said. She greedily sucked back the entire pot until the dry bone bumped against her lips, and then she started to refill the pot with snow.
We made soup for the next hour, taking turns drinking the delicious, mysterious flavour. She became so full of life again, right before my eyes. Her hair shined, her eyes sparkled. Was that the way I looked? Was the drink so wonderful that it could restore life to one who was nearly dead?
“We could put it in a cauldron,” she said sometime after we had moved to the house. “We could feed the entire town.”
We spent the next day working, both of us, around the house. I was outside patching up spots where the drafts got in, and inside she was making a place for me in the bedroom that had been hers years before. She lived in the bigger room now, the one where he parents had slept before their death. That night, we made soup and sat by the fire, talking about our lives and how much we had in common.
“Have you only ever boiled it?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“If that bone in a pot of water makes soup, perhaps placing it in a pan would make steaks. Or putting the bone in the oven would make bread.”
“I don’t think so. It won’t work like that.”
She fished the bone out of the empty pot and held it.
“It’s cold,” she said. “I wonder what kind of bone it is?”
“I don’t know. No animal I have ever seen, anyway. I thought for a while it was someone’s finger, but now I don’t like the idea of it being from a person.”
As she held it, and stared into it, I saw a change in her. She started to rub the bone with her thumb, and to hold it closer to herself. She turned her shoulders away from me, ever so slightly. She tried to untie the knot in the old leather string, but that had been knotted for longer than my lifetime, and it relieved me to see that it wouldn’t budge.
“Imagine,” she said. “If boiling it gives you food for one day, then eating it would mean you never go hungry again.”
“No.” I told her. That’s not how it works.”
“Have you ever tried?” She raised the bone to her lips.
I tried to stop her, but she popped the bone inside her mouth and sucked it back. The long string dangled from her lips as she puckered around it. She made a gurgling sound, and started to choke. The colour went out of her face, and the dark circles reappeared beneath her eyes. She started to pull on the string, but couldn’t open her mouth. Her eyes were wide and pleading. I grabbed the string and pulled, but it was like trying to pull roots from frozen ground. It wouldn’t budge.
I watched in horror as the gentle glow she had acquired faded to nothing. She became the same sick, frail girl I had met, and then even worse. Her hair started to fall out in matted clumps. Her fingers, still pulling on the string, started to wither down to skin and bone. I grabbed her lips and forced her mouth open. I could see the bone in there, but it was trapped within her. Her tongue and cheeks had swelled so much that her mouth was full of puffy flesh, with the bone at the centre. I tried to wedge the bone away, but it simply wouldn’t move.
Finally, she collapsed. The bone slipped from her mouth, unblocking her airway so that a long wheezing sound could seep out of her, and the pale skeleton of a girl was dead. Her eyes were still open, now completely drained of colour. Her body was frail and thin and colourless, as if she had been dried up and drained of all her blood.
I looked at the bone, dangling from the string I held. It was dark brown now, almost purple. It looked like raw meat.
I left the northern lands, alone. I wanted so badly to bury the bone and leave it forever, but I worried that it would suck life from the Earth as it had done to that pretty young girl. So now I always wear it. Cold and dark and hard, I wear it all it the time. I may not have a home in this world, but I have a role in it. I’m the one who carries the bone.
I never made the soup again. No matter how hungry I become, I will never make the soup. I can’t. Not after I learned what kind of meat I’d been tasting.
* * * * *
About the Author
I’m a young Canadian author just starting out in the writing world. I like to experiment in genre fiction. I feel that a lot of popular genres are like well-worn trails through a scenic forest. Sometimes I’ll start and end on a particular genre’s path, but along the way I’ll take shortcuts, wander along the shore, and discover a few intersections.
Also by Shaun Tennant:
Blood Cell- A Novel.
And check for updates at my author page.
Bone Soup Page 2