Yorick

Chapter Two

 Roberta’s first thought was that she should call the police.

 Her second thought was, Finders keepers. It might even be worth something. Aren’t human bones hard to come by?

 She was fascinated. There was no sign of rotten flesh, and it had been hidden in the mud, so it must have been there awhile. All the recent rain had washed away enough dirt to finally expose it to the air, so that it was crowning from the soil.

 She bent closer, studying it. She knew from giving birth to Janice that those tight, curvy lines were actually coronal sutures that gradually formed the skull into a solid mass.

 It won’t be safe out here all alone. What if someone else comes along and finds it? 

 People were bound to notice the trampled grass leading to a globular hole not twenty feet from the railing. Kids were curious and mean. What if they tossed it around and broke it? That wouldn’t be nice at all. No, it would not!

 Roberta was overwhelmed by the urge to free it from the mud and carry it away. She straightened suddenly, and peered over the grass like a chubby gopher. The coast was still clear. Even so, she’d have to work fast. She couldn’t get caught playing in the mud along the banks of the Merrimack with a human skull; someone might think she’d had something to do with it. 

 The skull wasn’t easy to dislodge, and she worried about someone coming along, or breaking it with an overzealous jab of her little stone. She sweated and grunted, her eyes skittering around like a nervous hummingbird, until she finally dislodged it with a shout of triumph that echoed over the brooding river. Roberta whipped her head around. Could someone have heard her over the gurgling Merrimack?

 She cradled the jawless thing in both hands, holding it up. Mud clung to the insides of its ocular holes, blacking out the eye sockets. Dirt stained its blocky, crooked teeth and had crusted into the long depressions above where the hinges of the jaw should have been. It was heavy with the earth that filled its cavities, the dirt somehow lending it a melancholy look. 

 Roberta poked a finger into the oval where its nose had once been, leaving a shallow depression in the dirt and feeling a silly urge to sneeze. A clump of offending material fell out of its bottom, disintegrating silently on impact. 

 “You’re very dirty, did you know that?” she whispered. “But I’ll bet you’ll clean up nicely. You must have been here for a very long time. Where is your jaw? You cannot speak if you do not have your jaw,” she giggled. 

 Roberta put the skull down and prodded at the ground with gentle precision. She excavated the arc of its jaw at the bottom of the pit, picking out a small twig lodged between its crooked teeth. The jaw bone was thick and pronounced. 

 “Are you a boy or a girl?” she asked.

 When no answer presented itself, Roberta measured it by pressing the jaw against the bottom of her own jaw. It was much wider than her jaw and overlapped it considerably. Its teeth tickled her chin.

 “You’re not a boy, you’re a man!”

 It had to be. It seemed too thick to have belonged to a woman, and besides, it felt like a ‘him,’ the way she sometimes sensed Andy’s masculine presence around the house, even though he’d been dead for twelve years.

 Roberta tried to reattach the jaw to the skull, because a funny little part of her wondered if it had secrets to tell, just as Peanut’s meows used to speak in a language that couldn’t be deciphered by ordinary humans. Luckily, Roberta was adept at translation, and a name rose from some deep place, as if by instinct. 

 “Yorick. I’ll call you Yorick.”

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