Plow the Bones Read Online Free

THE FIRST ERA, THEY observe him. They watch him burn. It is a slow fire, a terribly slow fire which burns him in stages that last a thousand years. A millennium’s worth of reddening skin, progressing toward blisters that form in the time it takes for generations to be born and to die. They observe as the flames climb him like leeches, blackening him, curling his skin like old paper, revealing (with a flourish, a magician’s handkerchief yanked away) the strings and highways of his musculature. They watch, and take notes, as his organs boil and burst and their contents spill down the grate at his feet, sluicing down and down and down the sheer walls of the forever–long pit below him. They watch his eyeballs liquefy, they watch him as he becomes unable to watch them. They watch his larynx tumble out, then watch the chords behind it stretch and pop. They watch the layers of his penis curl backward one by one, until there is nothing but a burnt bundle of tissue at his crotch shaped like a rose. They watch his teeth fall, note their velocity and the rhythm of their
tic–tic–tic
staccato down the drain, jot down the exact moment at which the sound becomes too faint to hear.
    They watch all of this, and they brainstorm. And when it is all over, they do it all over again in reverse, and see if his pain is any less bearable when played backwards. And then they compare notes.
    — Allow the sensory organs to last longer, or not be destroyed at all. Allow him to see, hear, taste, and feel all of it.
    — Leave his penis. I want to see what happens when we leave his penis.
    — He does not scream enough. Hotter fire? Slower?

    §

    During the second era, they pry apart his mind and climb inside. They want to see who he is, and why he is here. They become like tiny mosquitoes and bleed him of his memories and emotions.
    For a few decades, there is only fear. The terrible (delicious, oh so delicious for them, and oh so fascinating; these things always are) sensation of awakening to a lie you’ve been told, one around which you’ve constructed your entire life. No, no, no, this can’t be real, I can’t be here, I don’t believe in this! It is amazing to them how long it takes for the shock to wear off. The damned can never accept that they are damned. They can never grasp that they have simply chosen incorrectly. What was it that the God–boy had said? About being THE way? THE truth? THE light?
    They relish his fear. They do not become bored of it. Not once in the never–beginning history of their kind have they ever.
    And when they have gorged themselves on his emotions, they dig past them and excavate his life. They find that this man’s name is Gordon Dratch. Gordon Dratch was twenty–eight years old when he fell off a ladder outside of his home and cracked open his skull on his concrete driveway.
    — What a wonderfully comical way to die.
    — They laugh at him, I’m sure. His obituary is it’s own punch line.
    — What else? What else?
    They dig, and they find.

    §

    Witness Gordon Dratch as a child. Thirteen, and angry. He opens the closet door slowly, careful of the creak in the hinges and the scrape against the rough carpet. He ducks inside, holds his breath. The closet smells like peppermint and Old Spice and sweat and that dry, aged stench of all those creepy old people at church. Bald buzzard–headed men and fat mean–eyed women, whose toothless mouths can’t seem to shape the words of the hymns, and therefore just sing off–key animal noises. He hates them. But he’s not concerned with them just now. It’s in here somewhere, his prize, his reward for being quiet and cunning and thirteen. He finds it in an old shoebox that used to hold his dad’s dress shoes. A forty–ounce bottle of pale–brown booze, the label torn off so that the only markings on the glass are the torn white leavings of the paper and the sticky label–glue that held it on. His dad’s stash, the secret stuff.
    He used to find it