flash by sharon gunason pottinger
Mulberry Literary Fresh Voices Award Runner-up

Old Bones

We talked among ourselves—not unkindly, mind you—but no one knew what to do. In the end it was the old woman herself, plucking a bit of broken thread from her wrist, who brought the affair into the light. “You’ll have to forgive me. I have begun unravelling.” Some of us laughed as if it were just a belch or some other momentary social gracelessness, but the unease we all felt was there in the room with us as well. Nonetheless, we carried on as before as much as possible. Some of us stopped coming because it hurt to look at the frayed ends where her feet used to be. “Bah,” she said, “It’s just my feet. Give me some help and I’ll come along for a while yet.” If she caught anyone staring, she boomed a laugh at them—”My warp is strong enough to carry me yet. My bones were laid down before the air and the soil had so much poison in them.” When her hands were pale cords, some said she mustn’t be among us because we were all about knitting. I knit her some mittens and though they flapped hollow over the sinews where her fingers should have been, no one suggested she shouldn’t be there with us. And again it was the old woman herself who told us what to do. “When I am nothing but bones, love, hang me on the washing line and let me dance in the wind.” Some days it is a sweet slow waltz; others, it is a circle dance among the socks and towels. In its own time, the wind will take the last of her bones.

Sharon Gunason Pottinger grew up in Indiana. “My heart still beats faster at the sight of a red barn or a field of corn, but I moved to Caithness, in the far north of Scotland, a place of raw beauty and wide open skies that continues to astonish me.” Her work includes a novel, Returning: The Journey of Alexander Sinclair and poetry in New Writing Scotland, Northwords Now, poetry and short stories in Caithness Writers’ anthologies, and online journals Purple Hermit and Tentacular. http://tinyurl.com/sharonspage.