SKELETON EARRINGS

Meredith said, she’s too old to wear those, too close to the real thing. I own a silver and white pair; the silver skeletons seem fun, bionic like Wolverine, glitzing like disco balls, shiny like glitter, how we want to imagine our skeletons: having a good time in the underworld. Because the white are the color of bone stripped clean by maggots after years and years the body couldn’t count, cold and dark in a wooden casket once cramped with flesh and worms who have now made their way out of such a lonely place. The bones lying futile, the metacarpals wishing to tug the sleeve over their knuckles. The soil is damp and cold this lowly in the earth. The white skeletons are not sparkly, not placed into the body of super-men, nor made for another lifetime. Only what remains.