“How many bones can you fit into a hole full of oil?” Ben asks.
“Keep going until see you white,” I tell him.
Ben’s wheelbarrowing bones into oil pits and I’m seven poles into building a fence.
They came here–they came back–for meat and blood. And oil.
“Oil sends them into a frenzy,” I holler to Ben. “They’ll swallow it all before they know what’s in there.”
They can’t digest bone. They suck a man down, snake-like, and hork out his skeleton. Too many bones, they choke.
So we’re going to choke ‘em up and fence ‘em in.
“Freddy,” Ben says, and I spin.
His mouth. On mine.
These days, the first one you kiss is usually the last.
I’m glad it’s him.
________
Like Sharon Stone and the zipper, Dr. Mike McClelland is originally from Meadville, Pennsylvania. He, also like Sharon Stone and the zipper, is intricately beautiful in close-up and alarmingly symmetrical from a distance. Mike has lived on five different continents but now resides in eastern Illinois with his husband, two sons, and a menagerie of rescue dogs. He teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University. Find him online at magicmikewrites.com.