Bad Bones (a horror short story)
A chronically ill young woman spends her days on Bone Reddit, only to learn she’s found a human jawbone on a hiking trail.
Bad Bones by Diana Sousa
The leaves crunch underneath Laura’s boots as she hikes deeper into the woods. The smell of pine and damp earth wafts in the gentle breeze, keeping errant hair strands in constant movement around her face. The air is chilly. It seeps into her muscles, her bones, wraps itself snuggly around the pain that is already there. She’s been wandering for a while, and has lost track of time, but the pain is a reminder—perhaps she should turn back.
But she won’t. It’s rare that she manages to traverse this half-forgotten trail—every two or three weeks, if she’s lucky, when she feels well enough to leave the house—so she’s determined to make the most of it. A few more minutes won’t make that big of a difference – she knows she’ll be sore tomorrow, and the day after, maybe further than that. But she treasures these walks, looks forward to them all month, so she does what she knows she shouldn’t, and keeps pushing forward.
Laura wraps her scarf tighter, burying her face into the soft wool as she scans the ground around her. She’s searching for hints of white and alabaster amid the dark browns and greens of the woods. She’s caught hints of it before, on lucky days—a piece resting on top of a bed of moss, another sticking out of the dirt, still not claimed by the earth. Bones, fossils even, if she’s fortunate and willing to dig further down.
But it’s too cold to try that today, and Laura doesn’t want to push her body too far. She’s already skirting that line, dancing along its edge. So she limits herself to kneeling down every now and then, when she thinks she has spotted something, and brushing the leaves and branches away with a gloved hand. There are a few interesting looking mushrooms that she takes photos of, but her eyes are always searching for something else.
There. Poking out from the soft dirt, more brown than off-white, but still a color that doesn’t quite belong here. Laura reaches for it and pulls it gently from its resting place. It’s a thin piece of bone, about the width of her palm, and it’s longer than most of the others she’s collected through the years. Laura holds it with two fingers to take a closer look, but she can’t quite tell what it is, what animal it might come from. There are quite a few options in those woods—boars, foxes, maybe the occasional—
“Are you alright?”
The voice startles her, and she almost falls back. She’d been so focused on her discovery, she hadn’t heard the two hikers approach. A man and a woman, well dressed for the trail, a bit older based on the gravel in the man’s voice and the silver streaked through the woman’s hair. They stopped and are looking down at her from a hill some ways away. She can see the picture from their perspective – a young girl on her knees, gloves covered in dirt, cheeks red from the cold, breathing fast from the effort of getting there—and the fright they gave her.
She looks vulnerable, she thinks, like prey.
“Oh, I…I’m fine, thank you!”
“Did you find something?” The woman asks as she takes a step closer, trying to take a peek at her hands.
Laura’s heart races against her ribs. She likes this hiking trail because there’s barely anyone on it most days. Other people, strangers, they are… complicated, for someone like her. She has her mask waiting below her chin, but she pulls it up now, a shield against the world, and the possible threats other people carry with them, knowingly or not.
“No, it’s nothing. And oh, look at the time, I really need to go now!”
The woman says something, but Laura can’t hear it as she rushes back the way she came. The bone goes into a pocket, and she zips it closed. Her breathing is loud, confined against the mask, and her heart makes a ruckus as it beats out of tempo. She doesn’t stop, doesn’t look back, all the way to her car. When she finally gets inside, the door slams beside her and its lock clicks in place, separating her from the world outside with a welcoming quietude.
Laura takes deep breaths as she tries to regain control. Her vision swims, but the world stops wavering as she calms down. No one has followed her. Everything is fine.
Hadn’t her therapist mentioned exposure therapy at one point? Laura ignored it then, and almost laughs at it now. It’s clear that wouldn’t go well.
Why does her brain need to overreact like this whenever strangers get close to her? Why can’t she deal with things calmly? Laura feels embarrassed whenever she looks back at situations like this, and yet her body reacts the same way, over and over. Fight or flight, and it is always flight—quickly now, just leave!
But never mind that. She has a bone to identify. She puts her car in reverse and drives back home, a remnant of nerves still buzzing in her veins.
Laura wanted to be an archaeologist, before. Wanted. The past tense isn’t quite right, it’s still something she wants, but when she got sick and had to drop out of university, the path to get there became murkier, more difficult. Since then she’s never felt well enough to consider going back, but it’s always there, at the back of her mind. A what if: the person she could have been before she got sick, the person she had to become after.
Back home, she peels off the layers of clothes one by one. She puts on some soft background music before she sits down, places the piece of bone on her table so she can take a closer look at it. It’s clearly a part of something bigger—there’s a jagged edge where it broke. But she still can’t place it.
Laura picks up her phone and takes a photo of the bone. There’s a forum she frequents, Bone Detectives, where other enthusiasts and connoisseurs discuss their findings, show off their collections, and ask for help identifying fragments just like this one. That’s her plan as she moves to the sofa and collapses there. No sooner does she feel the cushion beneath her, there’s a sharp pain on her hip, and more blossoming down her left leg. Laura sucks in a breath through gritted teeth. She pushed herself too hard—she shouldn’t have panicked, shouldn’t have run. She knows better. It’s been a long path toward acceptance of how her body is different now, of how her ability to do anything has shifted. Laura isn’t quite there yet.
She should have been more careful, she knows. And yet there’s a part of her, under the surface, that is still mad that she has to be so constantly aware of her limits when others get to be so carefree. She barely remembers what it feels like to have that freedom. Most people don’t even consider its existence until it’s too late.
She’s pulling a warm blanket towards her when her phone chimes with a notification. Then another.
SkeletalScribe47
I’m pretty sure that’s a piece of a human jaw?
_Lil-Curio_
Oh, wow! I agree! It’s the ramus, right?
Where’s that hiking trail you mentioned?
Her blood chills. A human bone? That’s definitely not what she signed up for. The possibilities of how it got there rush around in her mind as more notifications make her phone buzz against her hand.
-DoctorSkull-
There’s only one reason you find a human bone in the woods. OP should call the police ASAP!!
Yes. She has to call the police. That’s the correct thing to do… Right?
DontBeSoSternum
Anyone know OP? Maybe someone should call the cops on them.
Laura freezes. It’s true, the police would have questions.
What would they think about her taking a piece of a human bone home with her? They’d want her to explain how she found it, why she collects bones… they might make her take them to the place where it lay in the ground just hours ago. What if she couldn’t find it again? Would that be suspicious? And does that mean she’d need to go to the station? Or, worse, would the police come to her house?
Laura’s throat tightens at the idea. She knows how the police treat someone like her—and she can’t have strangers walking into her home. Her four walls hadn’t contained anyone outside of her bubble in so long. And the last time she had, well…
She tries to snap out of this spiral. There’s a more important question than any of the others swirling in her mind—what happened to the person whose jaw this belongs to?
People don’t lose a jawbone and live. And if by chance they did, that piece of them didn’t just end up in a wooded area in rural Washington, did it? Laura glances down at the remains cradled in her hand. It’s stained a rust color. By the earth? Or blood? She hadn’t seen any others like it in the woods. Had this piece been carried from somewhere else? Or were there more, many more, hidden under the surface?
“What happened to you?” She whispers, turning the bone slowly between her hands.
A sharp pain down her leg pulls her back, anchors her to the current moment. Laura’s not going to make her mind up about anything in the state she’s in. She needs to rest, to let the pain subside somewhat. She doesn’t want to think any more about this, so she’ll decide what she should do tomorrow.
Laura places the bone down carefully on the low table in front of her. Her attention lingers on it for a couple of seconds, before she turns her phone to silent, and covers herself completely with the warm blanket, a shield against the world.
