Bone Corner

Suicide Sickness hit the high-country hard as an ice storm and silent as a blite. Too frequently my rides into town were blocked by processions of mourners. The burials had turned to bonfires with the survivors-so-far circling the departed, howling around the flames. The ash only made it about a mile from the ceremonies before settling on stilled vehicles and once white windowsills. The snows didn’t wash it away, it made it clump and drip and stain everything gray. Burn-burials, as they came to be known, happened after the ground froze, and people kept on needing to be laid to rest. Folks considered several bodies sharing a grave to be morbidly unacceptable—but bodies sharing the flames, I guess that was alright. At first it smelled like people were grilling chicken and burning hair at the same disgraceful cook out. It’s confounding how much human flesh smells like barbecue and how much burning the rotten clothes triggered that gag reflex deep within. At least it was just the older folks back then.

Documentation of the goings on during this time are understandably lacking. Even the scholars weren’t safe, and most of the journalists succumbed to the very thing they set out to document. For many, their manner of demise was reflective of their labors. Writers set their offices ablaze, all their efforts fuel for the flames that did them in. Farmers fell on their pitchforks or hung from their hay lofts. Andy, the butcher was an especially ghoulish scene. Nobody quite knew how he brought the knocking hammer down on himself. The coroner observed the man landed three blows before substantially damaging his brain. Lawmen pressed their revolvers to their temples. Pharmacists swallowed their wares. Even Dean, the fella who ran the soda fountain since the days when I scrounged for coin to buy Penny Candy, was found frozen solid in his walk-in. He had to be left right there until the spring.

The immune among us were said to be worse off than the afflicted when the younger, healthier town folk succumbed to the sickness. I don’t know about that now. I think my people were just lucky to live so remotely, far from the funeral fires, no children among us. Our cabins were twenty-seven miles far off along a road dusted with dismissed things. When compelled, I rode into town in the evenings, after my day’s work. Our weekly supplies were neatly bundled out back of the General Store. Simpson left the sack, I replaced it with next week’s list and some coin. Beyond the dried goods and the occasional purchase of a fresh shirt or maybe a tablecloth for momma, we made do with the minimum of things. Thanks to our remove, we were spared the affliction that changed Bonner City to how it’s known today, Bone Corner.

You asked, so I’m telling. The worst days were toward the end. That’s when the disease changed somehow, Doc Bonner called it an evolution or a variant or the like. The old folks who ended things hard for themselves in the beginning only but introduced us to the shameful sadness of frequent tragedy. “Death was bound for them anyway,” we reminded each other. Better to go peaceful. Don’t raise a fuss about it. “The end ends all for everyone,” went momma’s prayer.

Back when we lost Abattoir Andy and Sheriff Steve in the same day, some among us, Momma included, got to thinking that foul play was at hand. “Perhaps some of the local exploitative types were seeking to cover up malicious intent with cases of the sickness,” was what momma suggested. I couldn’t see it that way. Few could lift Andy’s hammer but Andy. And Sheriff Steve slept with his nickel-plated revolver beside him on the end table since coming home from the wars. He slept with his black automatic held to his heart, practically sitting up on all them pillows. Momma said the man’s eyes closed occasionally like all men under god, but that Sheriff Steve could see in other ways. That’s why he spent all night screaming and talked no more than he had to by day.

Toward the end there, when few of us were left. When we realized that touch and breath carried Suicide Sickness just as well as the corpses, that’s when the profound gloom hastened the final quitting for so many more. Those who’d avoided the germs initially, murdered themselves anyway when they came to know the variant Doc Bonner spoke of meant the sickness had finally come for the children.

The Doc was found cut like he was bleeding himself. He had that knowledge and, may have been working toward a more ancient treatment for Suicide Sickness—just cut too deep. Anyway, that’s what town folks said around quiet meals behind closed doors. I think it was his daughter going the way she did that turned Doc’s heart toward its darkest corner.

She was a Bonner. She was beautiful. And she had the world before her in a town of her great-grand-daddy’s founding. When she walked Main Street, pretty heart-shaped locket 'round her narrow neck, folks stopping just to see her pass, they couldn’t help but look, barely fifteen but beautiful beyond that—they thought she was holding a sparkler. It looked like a sparkler and the Bonners were always a people quick to celebrate. She carried that stick of dynamite in two hands like it was Sunday mass, right up to the café porch. She smiled through the glass panes in the door, according to Mr. Townsend, who ran the place. Then she was gone. She misted the walls pink, blew in all the glass, and left behind a scorched circle, a burnt-halo some called it, that can be seen on Main Street to this day.

Children hanging from white fences, their bottoms three inches off the dirt, their legs stretched out before them so we knew they could have stood up if only they were so inclined… If only Bonner City were founded near a dark lake or a deep canyon, maybe some would have been spared the unspeakable tableaus of the young and old pursuing self-demise and finding it every time.

I suspect it’s over now.

Mother went in her sleep. She underwent no harm but that caused by time. I buried her extra deep and burned the bedsheets to be sure.

Now it’s down to me. I don’t venture to the store, nor to what was the café, not anymore. I ride up some nights. Ride up to the stony hills above town. I see lights on sometimes. Lonely lights, second floor kind of lights. Always behind shadowy curtains. But then the wind will shift, and the smell will come. Sweet smelling, people don’t mention that. After a great dying off, when some are left unburned and above ground to putrefy—sure, it’s nauseating, but it’s sweet too. When it hits me and I’m gagging all alone, that’s when I turn around and head for home. I’ll go down there eventually—but not until the smell dries up and those few lonely upstairs lights go out for good.