FREAKY FLASH FRIDAY: The Sweetest Bones by Nikki Blakely

She’d been skinning a gator when she heard the growl of a motor, the scrape of low-hanging branches against the hull when it cut, and the soft, almost soundless splash of a body slipping into the water.

Accustomed to the sound, she barely looked up from her claws as she deftly rendered flesh from scale, barely noticed when the motor started again, and the boat sped back whence it’d come.

Decades ago she’d been discarded much the same way, her body bloody and broken, nearly dead. She’d been a woman then, and had a name too, though the edges of it, sharp and jagged, had broken off long ago, and all she could remember now were the hollow rounded sounds in between.

It was bad men who drove the boats, bad men whose dead husks were dumped into the brackish water, bad men whose dark dealings led them here, to their watery graves. She didn’t care. She could smell their deceit and treachery thick and festering like an open wound.

The once-woman lifted her nose and sniffed. Amid the sharp, sulfuric stench of the swamp, mixed with the foul, rank odor of bad-men-bones, she smelled something sweet.

A memory, as brief as a fading star, flashed dimly.

Leaving the half-skinned gator on the bank, she slid into the black water, yellow eyes bobbing above the surface as she slithered toward the place the boat had been moments before. She dove under, reappeared, dove again. She reappeared clutching a child, its small limbs hanging slack and motionless in her bone-thin arms.

She buried her face in the matted hair, and inhaled, remembering the smell, remembering when she’d once been a woman and held another child in her arms.

Opening her mouth wide, she shrieked, a banshee’s wail, a wretched, mournful sound that sliced through the quiet like a thunderclap. She knew she couldn’t bring this child back, but maybe she could bring back... something else.

She carried the husk of the child back to the bank where the dead gator lay splayed and waiting. From the bottom of the mire, she scooped thick, black mud, slathered it onto the husk, then wrapped it tightly in the gator skin.

A snake swam up, offering itself, and she snatched it from the water, slit its throat with a claw, then drained the blood onto the husk. An owl flew down, offering itself, and she snatched it from the air, twisted its head, pulled its feathers, and tucked them into the scales.

As she worked, she sang—a haunting, lilting melody, and though her mouth could no longer form the words even if she had remembered them, the song was one that any once-mother would have known.

She cradled the husk of the child in her arms, and rocked back and forth, singing softly, tears falling onto scale and bone and blood and feather, until at last, the once-child opened its yellow eyes, and breathed. 

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Nikki Blakely lives in the SF Bay Area and enjoys writing stories that evoke smiles, tears, laughter, the occasional eye roll, and sometimes even a scream. Her work has appeared in Uncharted, Sundial Magazine, Luna Station Quarterly, Writers Resist, Little Old Lady Comedy, Black Cat Quarterly, and others. You can read more of her work at www.nikkiblakely.com

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Photo by Pixabay