The Bone Orchard (prose poem)
1 min readMar 30, 2019
I found the idiot in my building’s hallway: glassy-eyed, of few words, and oddly trusting. I took him with me to the Bone Orchard, where we went to the tree I had planted years ago, and I picked off the final bone, an occipital, hard to find by an untrained eye on a branch almost the exact same shade of grey. I fitted it to the skull of the skeleton in the body-shaped pit before the tree, at last complete.
The idiot did well to provide me with his heart, which I slid into the rib cage, and, with a clap of my hands and an incantation of the correct psalms, began to beat once more.
Yes, it was a shame that the poor idiot boy was dead, but my baby was finally alive.
