Hollow Bones

Chapter Ten.

10.

 

The walk to the gold mine was quiet. Buzzing. Every step echoed excitedly. Twenty minutes and sixteen seconds later, we found ourselves looking into a dark, partially boarded up mine.

A bird’s skeleton lay sunken into the ground.

‘Isn’t it amazing?’ Joshua crouched down to inspect it. He picked up a wing-bone and snapped it. It was hollow. ‘It’s strange,’ he whispered. His voice took on a philosophical timbre. ‘It’s strange how a bird is so fragile. They’re hollow. A gust of wind could just --!’ he clicked his fingers to indicate disappearance. ‘Break their world. I mean, without them, a bird would be too weighty to fly. Their brittleness… allows them to soar…’

We both pondered his monologue.

Delicacy equalled potential. Some nonsensical, dreamlike equation. The thought itself had hollow bones, but it couldn’t fly. It was missing a wing.

In a way, people had hollow bones. People stricken with poverty, loneliness, or surrounded by Death and Dysfunction had emptiness that could only be filled by nothing. Their fragility provided the means and the motives for success.

Everything there had been left as though the people had one day decided to vanish. Dusty tent-tarps hung from pegs. Family photographs rested underneath stained coffee-cups. History had been caught in the making, red-handed. Its eyes shone like a deer’s in the headlights. The place smelled like old tea and mold.

It’s so bizarre… it’s like something from a book. Everything here has been abandoned without a second thought. I wonder why…

 

Joshua spoke as if he had read my thoughts.

‘I wonder why the mine was abandoned, anyway. Like this, I mean.’

He blew the dust off a rusted pickaxe and continued.

‘It’s almost like there was some kind of emergency, or--,’

‘Or the preciousness was lost. Maybe once they took the gold…’

‘They thought it useless.’

Water trickled down a wall and dripped onto the ground, resonating like applause.

‘My grandfather never really talked about it. He just said the miners left during the monsoon season – the rain was too heavy to continue,’ he said.

‘Well, I think they forgot a few things.’

Joshua smiled.

‘You don’t say?’

We laughed like children.

Most of my childhood porcelain laid smashed and three-quarters forgotten in a dank carport. Laughter was the only piece I had left.

For not one reason or another, I posed a question neither of us could answer.