Pieces of Him

We woke at six. The cold usually woke me even before that; somewhere just before dawn my two layers of clothing and one thin quilt would stop holding back the wind that blew through the improvised cloth walls, and my shivering would rouse me to the eerie predawn light.

After waking came coffee. We would walk down to the kitchen just underneath the shelter, and the women--the Mayor’s wife, the preacher’s wife, and the Deaconess--would have coffee for us, strong and flavored with cinnamon. It was coffee meant to be drunk black, perfect for waking up a sleepy bunch of gringos to face the day ahead.

When the last cup was empty, around seven o’clock, we walked to the worksite. It wasn’t far from the house; just past Zapateria Jenny and down the footpath. The air was cold and thin in the mornings, and it stung the back of my throat. Sometimes I’d look down the hill toward the city and see the haze of winter pollution hanging in the dried lakebed, around the tops of the buildings of the biggest city in the world. It made the landscape almost surreal, rounding the edges and plunging bits of it into smudgy obscurity like the Otherworld seen through the veil. Sometimes I longed to be down there, in that fog, down where the lights and the action were, where every corner turned might be a new adventure. Other times I’d think of the time I accidentally stepped into chicken guts behind a restaurant, or of the shame I felt when I ran out of money to buy dolls from the poor children outside the great golden cathedral, and I’d cling to the separateness that was the mountain, the travel-group, and my position as observer.

The high bald head of a volcano hung over our worksite. It was barren and remote as a moon, and the changing light on its face told me when morning was slipping away. The other travelers spent their work-time talking and praying that morning; having recovered from the effects of the altitude, I was more interested in moving aside the rocks looking for scorpions or baby lizards. Maybe I would even find some insect I’d never seen before. As I hauled wheelbarrow-loads of rocks away from the place for the foundation, I looked eagerly for anything special among the detritus. Soon, I started finding it.

The first piece of him that came up from the earth was a rib. It was a light, airy thing, small enough that I knew it had to belong to a baby. The marrow was long gone, leaving it hollow as a bird’s bone. It was broken and covered in dust, and it was the first piece of human remains I had ever handled. There’s a strange reverence that comes over you in that moment, no matter how prepared you think you are, no matter how many times you’ve pictured yourself standing inside carefully-measured squares and dusting with paintbrushes. I stood and let myself feel it before beginning to catalogue the bones and set them in their proper place historically and culturally.

Pieces of him, of this baby, came up all that morning. First there were ribs. Then a bit of pelvis. A vertebra, as small and perfectly-formed as a charm for a necklace, came along with skull fragments. And then it was lunchtime, and we walked back to the kitchen for quesadillas and enchilada.

The pale sunlight fell on my dust-covered hands as I ate; I watched it and saw how thin my own skin was, how light the bones beneath the surface.

just causing trouble, please ignore

Is there more?

Will you tell us?

180

thank you

I got a bit impatient, because it seemed to be all mood and setting,
but the life/work/quest/time/death themes all added up by the end.

Some things were a little jarring:

"see the haze of winter pollution hanging in the dried lakebed, around
the tops of the buildings of the biggest city in the world" kind of
jerks me around 'cause I have to stop and think what "winter
pollution" is--oh, since it's a haze, it must be smokey smog, but no,
it's a dry lakebed, but no it's the biggest city in the world--oh,
Mexico D.F. of course.

Simplified, as "Sometimes I’d look down toward the dried lakebed and
see the smog and smoke smearing the tops of the buildings of the
biggest city in the world" it flows naturally enough into the next
sentence it could even be combined with it. (My excessive
alliteration there is a separate issue.)

I got confused about your shame at running out of money. Shame
because you should have more money and should buy all the dolls from
all the children? Shame because you'd been suckered out of all your
cash again by cute kids? I want a clearer picture of what this means.

"The changing light on its face told me when morning was slipping
away" seems to focus on the least interesting verb in the fragment.
"The light changed on its face as the morning slipped away" to me
brings a stronger sense of urgency about time a-wasting.

(Unless, of course, you want to focus on "being told" because that's
what the whole piece is about?)

The "high bald head of a volcano hung over our worksite. It was barren
and remote as a moon" is a wonderful image, and cements the poetic
tone.

Have you considered using it in your opening? Doesn't the mountain
get the sunlight first, so you look up there and see it? That to me
would establish the poetic tone, so I know what kind of piece I'm
getting into. Just a thought.

Really good work. I'd like to see more.

Ummmm... how do you know it's a he? Putting "Him" capitalized in the
title suggest the christic "Him". Is this intentional?

If not, does this relate to some dead child or abortion in this
narrator's past, and do you want to elaborate on that?

...but thoughts of bodies often are to me.

I really like the way the title doesn't become clearly linked to the story until near the end. Makes me feel clever when I figure something like that out...

Many of your sentences are very descriptive and evocative. I think you use them well to set a mood (especially the early morning wake-up!). A few too many are a tad over long, though. Then again cutting down on those sentences (in length or quantity) would be a change of style, and I don't know if that would necessarily be a good thing either.