Seventy Skeletons

Based on last night’s speed-writing exercise at the Clacton writer’s group...


The crew of them came for me. They somehow told me that their on-going job was to cast a net for everyone who was celebrating their 70th Birthday. I looked them straight in the empty eye sockets and asked how they knew I was 70 today? One of them clicked and rattled and shook its jaws like castanets, as if it knew something I didn’t know. A sound and look that patronised me, a supercilious attitude of superiority over a mere human being like me who was still alive, if barely so at my advanced age, an age that had advanced one ratchet of years that very day. Without further delay, the crew gathered around, one of them hauling me up by the armpits upon bony appendages. Another pincered me in my most vulnerable spots with fleshless fingers. Yet another held my head in position with what had once been its own huge yawning mouth that had no jaws left at all. Lifted thus not upon a crew but now a cage of bones, I found myself upon a stretcher or rack of tessellation into the open sky... “Why, oh why?” I shouted. “Because you are seventy,” they answered in unison, despite their apparent lack of lungs or sound-boxes. I then saw God, Himself a giant skeleton, as I was hauled and heaved slowly, ever so slowly, towards His opened bones of arms. “Seventy, Heaventy, Heaventy Poo!” the skeletons sang. This is death, I thought. Until I realised I was dead already and had become part of the interwoven skeletons lifting my body up, lifting me up, as if forever. “Seventy, Heaventy, Heaventy, Poooo!”