Bone Hollow

by Kim Ventrella

  Gramps smiled, that sad half smile he used when he was getting around to sharing bad news. “How’s your back feeling, Captain?” Gramps always called him Captain, on account of him jumping off the shed when he was six and trying to fly.

  “Fine,” Gabe said.

  “Have a look.”

  He had no clue what Gramps was on about. Gramps was the one with a bad back, not him. Still, he did some feeling around back there just to satisfy him.

  “There’s nothing, Gramps. I’m fit as a fiddle.”

  “Check again.”

  So he did a little more feeling around, and this time Ollie came to help him. He found nothing at first, until he felt a tongue slip in somewhere it shouldn’t have.

  “What on earth!” Gabe said.

  Ollie licked the same spot again, and that was when Gabe found it. A hole, just like the one in his stomach. He poked his finger in, and then shivered. It wasn’t like a belly button at all. The inside was wet and sticky.

  “What is it?” Gabe said. “What’s happened to me?”

  Gramps didn’t say anything for a good long while.

  “This is because of that dang chicken, isn’t it?” Gabe said. And because of Miss Cleo, for sending him up on that roof in the middle of a thunderstorm. If only he could’ve lived with Gramps after his parents died, instead of her, this never would’ve happened. It was all Miss Cleo’s fault. And maybe Gramps’s fault, too, for going off and leaving him.

  Gramps still didn’t answer. He leaned down like he meant to kiss Gabe right on the forehead. The room around them grew fuzzy and started to spin.

  “What’s happening?” Gabe said.

  “Time to go.”

  “Where to?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Gramps didn’t kiss Gabe, though. He stopped short, a confused expression on his face. His eyes looked strange up close, like a roiling thunderstorm struck through with light.

  “What’s the matter, Gramps? Where are we going?”

  Gramps stood up straight again, a frown etched deep on his wrinkled face.

  “Is something wrong?” Gabe said, but it was as if Gramps couldn’t hear him.

  Without another word, he picked up his cloak from where it had fallen on the ground and walked away. He stopped just inside the doorway, ignoring Ollie, who was trying to play a game of “herd the sheep” with his heels.

  “I’m mighty sorry about all this, Captain.”

  Then, despite Ollie’s best efforts, he was gone.

  Gabe would have gone after Gramps, had he not suddenly felt more exhausted than he had in his whole entire life. He sank down into Miss Cleo’s toe cream–scented pillows and fell into a deep sleep, Ollie keeping watch at his side.

  He had no idea how long he slept, but it must have been a good long while, because he woke up in a room he didn’t recognize. No more thousand-dollar mattress, or flowery toe cream sheets. Just a cold metal table like they had in the kitchens at Dena’s Family Diner. And, horror upon horrors, there was Gabe lying on that table naked as the day he was born.

  The first thing he did was leap to the tile and search around for something to cover up with. There wasn’t much in that room at all, apart from tall metal cabinets and a long, stainless steel countertop. Not a sheet or a napkin or a single scrap of fabric to be found.

  He was about to give up hope when he spotted a plastic bag tied up and tossed in a corner. He had an inkling he recognized the contents. Sure enough, when he ripped it open, he found the clothes he’d been wearing just a short while before. He pulled on his underwear first, happy as pie to have it back in its proper place. Then he zipped up his jeans, stuck his feet in his shoes, and smoothed out his wrinkled T-shirt.

  There was a hole clean through the center, and the edges were stained with dark brown mud. Gabe slid it over his head, and he couldn’t help but notice that the holes in the T-shirt matched up exactly with the ones in his stomach and back.

  For a second, he was up on that roof again, watching that dusty old finger descend from the sky. He remembered the eerie whining of it, and the crackle in the air, and the way it tore up trees as easy as plucking the legs off a cockroach. And he remembered falling, but more than anything he remembered wishing he could get down and comfort his dumb old dog. Which begged the question. What had Miss Cleo done with Ollie?

  More than likely she’d kicked him out of the house to fend off the stray cats and coyotes. No way she’d have let him continue sleeping in her bed after she brought Gabe to this … this whatever it was. It looked like some kind of hospital. And maybe a hospital made sense, ’cause apart from his brain aching like a ball of mashed-up playdough, Gabe felt better than ever. Better than he had in his whole dang life. Like he’d swallowed a pack of wild stallions, and now they were snorting and raring inside his chest.

  That had been some kind of strange dream, with him floating in the air and Gramps wearing that oversize cape, but thank goodness it was over.

  “I’m gonna find my dog and demand that Miss Cleo treat him better,” he said out loud, by way of convincing himself he was really gonna do it. “Ollie’s a member of this family, and he stays in my room from now on, or no more free chicken rustling. Who ever heard of letting a no-good chicken sleep in the house, and not a true and loyal canine?” And while I’m at it, maybe I’ll demand that Miss Cleo start treatin’ me like a real, bona fide member of the family, he thought. He didn’t dare say “like a son,” even in his own head.

  Gabe puffed out his chest and stood his ground, pretending like Miss Cleo was standing right there in front of him. Of course, a pretend Miss Cleo and a real Miss Cleo were two entirely different things. He decided he’d better act fast, before he lost his nerve, and that meant escaping this gosh dang hospital.

  “Doc?” Gabe called, his voice echoing around the empty room. “Nurse?”

  There were two doors in the room. The first one he tried was locked. He pushed through the second door easy-peasy and then covered his eyes. Sunlight blasted his face, and Gabe blinked at it in confusion. How long had he been asleep?

  He was just pondering this problem through watering eyes when something wet and slobbery attacked his chin.

  “Ollie, there you are!” Gabe tumbled onto the grass, and the door to the mysterious room closed behind him. He pulled Ollie into a hug and petted his soft, warm tummy. Gabe was pretty sure he’d never been so happy to see someone in his whole dang life.

  Once Ollie had finally calmed down enough to stop licking his face, Gabe looked up to see that the building he’d come out of wasn’t a hospital at all. He was sitting on the grass outside Morton & Sons Funeral Home. The sign closest to the street read, “Saying goodbye in style.”

  “What on earth?” Gabe said, shaking his head at the sign. He kept on shaking his head, giving his brain a good jostle, until he came to the only logical conclusion. Surely somebody was having a good ol’ laugh at his expense. A big, fat practical joke. That’s what it had to be, ’cause otherwise … A nasty thought wriggled at the back of his head, but he ignored it.

  “Well, forget about those jokers, boy. Let’s go home and get some food in your belly. Besides, we need to have a talk with Miss Cleo.”

  Ollie barked and wiggled his bottom in response. He knew the word “food,” and it always made him happy. Gabe often thought it’d be nice to find that much happiness in a single word. His friend Niko had been the same way. She even used to make up her own words, like “scrumdumpulous” for food that you dropped on the floor, but only for a second, and “splendooferous” for when you did something dumb that ended up working out great. Hearing her words always made Gabe laugh. He wondered what she’d call it when you woke up one day and found yourself naked in a funeral home.

  Too bad he couldn’t ask her, since Niko had up and moved away.

  “All this contemplating is giving me a headache,” Gabe said to Ollie. “Come on, boy, last one there’s a stinky, rotten egg!”

  Gabe ran, and he had
a strange feeling he was running faster than he’d ever run before. He leapt over a tall row of hedges onto Astor Street. Ollie made it, too, though just barely. Usually that mutt could outrun him easily, with his long body and powerful legs, but not so today. Gabe took a sharp left at the Pump ’n’ Save, jumping the small fence and taking the shortcut across the Bentons’ farm.

  The fallow field was soggy from all the rain, and Gabe’s sneakers soon got swallowed by the mud. Ollie ran circles around him, too light to sink. He was always excited any time he got to make a mess, like a real dog, which was pretty much never, unless he wanted Miss Cleo to turn the hose on him. Gabe looked down at the sticky brown muck oozing up past his ankles. Gosh dang.

  “Guess I’ve got no choice,” he said to Ollie. He pried his feet out of his shoes and ran over the mud barefoot, going even faster than before. So fast, the mud didn’t have time to get ahold of him. So fast, someone watching from the edge of the field wouldn’t be able to say for sure whether or not his feet touched the ground.

  “Hurry up, slowpoke!” Gabe called as he passed Ollie and leapt over the fence into Miss Cleo’s front yard. The grass was littered with dandelions and raw eggs, on account of her letting the chickens run free. Gabe did his best not to step on any of the eggs, but he couldn’t avoid the occasional crunch. Ollie knew better than to try and gobble any down, as that was likely to result in Miss Cleo chasing him around the yard with her feather duster, or even worse, a switch.

  Gabe busted through the front door without bothering to knock. If Miss Cleo had been home, she would have yelped and told him to come inside the right way or don’t bother coming in at all.

  Instead, the house was quiet.

  “Miss Cleo?” Gabe said, but the only answer was the buzz of the refrigerator and the drip, drip, drip of water in the hall toilet. Gabe went to check the hen room, where Miss Cleo did all her official poultry competition business, but the lights were off. He was all ready to make his demands on Ollie’s behalf, and say a few choice words about that dang chicken, but Miss Cleo was nowhere to be found.

  His room was empty, too, so he decided to check the only other place she could be, Miss Cleo’s very own bedroom.

  The bare skin on his arms prickled as he stepped into the doorway and saw the empty bed. It was piled high with blankets, but there was a dip in the middle, as if someone had recently gotten up without bothering to make the bed. A vase of flowers stood on the nightstand and two more on the dresser.

  Fuzzy images flitted into his mind piece by piece, neighbors and casseroles and sniffling noses. It had to be a dream, surely it did, but then why did everything in the room look so familiar? Ollie leapt onto Miss Cleo’s bed and smiled, like it was the most natural thing in the whole wide world.

  “Get on down here, you silly hound,” Gabe said, but he wasn’t really mad. Not like Miss Cleo’s bed was all that special, no matter what she said.

  Seeing as she wasn’t home, he plopped down onto the mattress himself, releasing a cloud of unmistakable stink: Miss Cleo’s toe cream. Gabe had read in a magazine once that smell has the best memory of any of the senses. Dang if that article didn’t turn out to be true. As soon as he got a whiff of that pungent Miss Cleo stink, he remembered everything that had happened in his dream, and it wasn’t the least bit fuzzy. The casseroles, all his neighbors coming by to see him, acting like he wasn’t even there. Like he had gone and died or something.

  The world started spinning around him at that thought, along with his memories. Miss Cleo and Chase and the others ignoring every word he said. The green bean casserole that Miss Cleo only ever made for weddings or funerals, and there wasn’t nobody getting married. And Gabe, floating along outside his body, unable to move or be heard. But it couldn’t be true. No way. He couldn’t be … That is to say, surely it wasn’t possible that he was … But no, he was still here, up and walking around. He was solid, not like any ghost he’d ever met. And he definitely wasn’t … dead.

  “No, siree,” Gabe said slowly, after thinking on it a while. How could he be dead when he was still here? Still flesh and bone? There had to be some other explanation. “But what?” he said, hoping Ollie might have an answer.

  In response, Ollie flipped onto his back, closed his eyes, and waited for a belly rub. “That doesn’t help, you dang dog.” But then again, maybe it did. Ollie wasn’t much for playing dead, on account of his tail wiggling, but Gabe had once known a possum to play dead for three whole hours before leaping up and scrabbling off into the bush. Maybe that’s what had happened. Only he hadn’t been playing, he’d been in some kind of coma or something. One that lasted a really long time, long enough to fool all his friends and neighbors into thinking he was deceased. Why else would they have acted so strange, and then up and abandoned him? There was no other explanation. All his neighbors, even Miss Cleo, thought he was cold on a slab somewhere, waiting to be buried, but it was all some kind of mistake.

  After all, nobody, not even Elmer from the Pump ’n’ Save, would put a kid in a morgue just for a joke.

  “They all think I’m dead!”

  Gabe kissed Ollie smack-dab on the nose at the thought of it. Not the part about being dead, but the part about his actually being alive. That kiss got Ollie really excited, and Gabe had to take a short break to rub his belly and scratch his chest. When Ollie got that excited, there was no way around it.

  With the bulk of the belly rubbing satisfied, Gabe hopped out of bed, as fired up as a telephone wire in a windstorm at his new discovery. He had to find Miss Cleo and Chance and everybody else in town and pass on the great news. Not only was he not dearly departed, he felt better than he ever had. Chicken or no chicken.

  First, he stopped to give Ollie his food and get him some water. Miss Cleo wouldn’t spring for anything better than scraps and moldy bread, but Gabe always saved him some meat from dinner the night before. He opened up the fridge, only to find his Tupperware full of liver covered in a film of green mold.

  “Yuck! How on earth did that food turn so fast?”

  Instead, he fed Ollie the only other thing he could find, a heap of crusty egg-and-cheese casserole and the last slice of deli turkey.

  Ollie downed it all in under a second, along with a good stomach-full of water, and with that they took off again, this time heading straight for the church.

  As far as Gabe could remember, the storm had come on a Wednesday, so that meant today Miss Cleo would be at church for her Thursday lunch with Pastor Higgins and the Ladies of the Holy Ghost knitting circle/Bible study. Besides, pretty much everybody in town who wasn’t learning or working made a point to stop in at church around lunchtime, since it was a well-known fact that Mrs. Higgins served up fresh-baked apple butter scones at noon sharp to any hungry souls who might happen to pass.

  Racing down Main Street, Gabe was surprised to see a “Closed” sign on nearly every shop. There was only one car outside Dena’s Family Diner, and it had “For Sale” written on the back window in white paint. Ollie nipped at Gabe’s heels as he ran, having about as much fun as he’d ever had in his whole dang life, judging by his dopey expression.

  Gabe sprinted up Very Tall Hill and into the churchyard. His bones were so itchy for a bit of exercise he leapt over three headstones in a row, and then geared up for the fourth. He was just about to take off, Ollie panting happily at his side, when he spotted an odd sight near the church’s side door.

  Just about the whole town was standing around a pile of flowers, holding tiny white candles stuck in the bottom of paper cups. They were singing a depressing rendition of “In the Sweet By and By,” but they stopped dead the moment they saw him, their faces gone white.

  Miss Cleo even dropped her candle, and not a soul seemed to notice when her leopard-print loafer started sending up smoke.

  “Sweet Jesus, protect us,” called a frightened voice in the crowd.

  Miss Cleo kicked out her leg and hollered on account of the fire burning its way up her cream-laden toes. Her ri
ght loafer flew across the churchyard, landing not more than a foot from Gabe. Ollie promptly pounced, tearing at that shoe like it was a fuzzy squirrel dropped from heaven just for his benefit. Gabe would have laughed in any other circumstance, but the whole scene struck him as so dang strange his head started to throb.

  “You didn’t do all this for me, did you?” Gabe said, taking a step toward Miss Cleo. “All these flowers and candles and stuff? ’Cause I’m fine, just look at me. Better than fine, in fact.”

  Gabe waited for somebody to say something, but the only sound in the churchyard came from Ollie, as he disemboweled one-half of Miss Cleo’s favorite pair of shoes.

  “They’ll never believe this down at the station,” said Chip Evans, the voice of 107.3 Hip FM. He stared at Gabe like he was a bona fide apparition, and he kept fumbling for something in his pocket that turned out to be a camera. “No, sir, never in a million years.”

  “Somebody should call the cops, shouldn’t they? Or the ambulance. No, no, better make it the cops,” said Mr. Peters, talking to no one in particular.

  Then Mrs. Higgins made her way through the crowd, her long black skirt billowing around her ankles. “Oh, how the wicked have risen from their graves,” she said, in her best Sunday preacher voice.

  That almost made Gabe wanna laugh, but somehow he didn’t think she was joking.

  “Shush, now,” said Miss Cleo, but Gabe noticed she didn’t come any closer or answer his question.

  “Look, I understand how you might be confused,” Gabe said reasonably, “seeing as I woke up in a funeral home. You all must’ve thought I was dead. But it’s okay.” Though it really wasn’t. “Probably happens all the time, of course not so much since the Middle Ages, but I’m sure Doc Suthers did his best. Anyway, what’s done is done, and I can assure you I’ve got no hard feelings.” Except maybe for that mangy chicken, Gabe thought, but didn’t say.

  He took a step closer, and nearly everyone in the churchyard took a step back.

  “I said I’m not angry, so don’t go acting scared on my account!” Gabe said, growing more than a little ticked.