The Ballads of The Skeleton Crew

The Ballad of The Skeleton Crew (1|3)

(№1.3)

Exactly a dozen and a third thereof skeletons were laying perfectly still on the  sand, the skin and flesh impressively peeled back, some shreds of flesh desperately clinging still to the owner of the  bone, yet absolutely with nothing left, nothing to indicate the characters, the living, breathing specimens of before hours they were with desires, and wishes and a family, nothing more but objects, the size and vague remembrance of the human race.

The pink hue of flesh and tinted bones of blood with only some protruding parts decked in frosty, pure white seemed too devastating in the morning, too real to be true, horror and trauma, hitting right where the shamble-like companionship of humanity sat to abhor their own people be cleansed and cleaned like fish or cattle, moronic, lesser animals when they thought to be more of.

Such violence, such horrible crime couldn't be allowed to be shown in blinding light, revealing, truthful, rosy-fingered, humble dawn which made it much too truthful.

They only recognized them gruesomely thanks to the clothes of their own they were wearing that the evil culprits had the audacity to put back on after they committed such horrible crime, such intrusion of privacy and human dignity. Well, they prayed at least for the matching to irrevocably bind owner to true clothes, and have them not, in fact, mixed up to intensify and bring upon other horrors of despair, for they would never distinguish their respectable loved ones for who they were, stripped of skin and flesh and bled dry, eye sockets held in judgmental shade, as if the skeletons were cursing family and friends for their terrible, pathetic end of perishing in deliberate pain and suffering.

Grossly, laying immovably exactly in the middle of the long row, the man with the longest femur, proudest vertebrae and straightest spine, the man in the past claiming to be their leader, claiming to protect his subjects under the name of the respectable king and church further inland, their conceited and deferential ruler, their invincible saviour and protector of the town, had his skull pierced with a long stick, unlike everyone else, further disgracing the ego and status of the people to the very edging end, threads confined in suitable livery glinting in the newly risen sun as wit and strength once contemplated in his ember eyes.

Not only a stick though, it was in fact a flag .

The flag imprinted with a weird foreign instrument, counting many, many vertical, thin cords, held in the devilish colours black and red with golden embellishments.

For blood and darkness. And the gold marking the divine ruthlessness, the audacity they were possessed of to misuse and spit on the heavenly colours of light and paradise itself, when they opened and embraced the gates of hell.

It was them, it could only be.

What other strangers, frightened and hesitant to show their faces upon arrival, had shortly arrived at this very bay, to feast and spoon sacrilegious tones and paint them sinners for inviting, beckoning the demons to poison their hearts and minds with brewing, growling seduction and temptation. They failed, collectively realised in crestfallen contempt, once given into the fantasy and turned their backs onto reality and the plan of an austere life, cut out of pleasure and any joy.

The weird ship-creatures from last night did this to punish them, for unrealizable reasons.

Maybe not for a reason at all.

The village people cried briefly and sobbed for three days straight to honour their deceased, then burning the intruded evil, the stain of mutinous disharmony, penetrating out of the bones of their loved once, all on a public pyre near the beach they were found object and still, cooled and taken from monsters.

The most ludicrous, chilling part dawned only later, when dressed in the darkest nuance of black apparel, mourning the lost, already gone for weeks without end, a masked dome of sorrow and woe encircling the village thick and indestructible, with no means to terminate, that they figured with gnawing horror, what overcame them the very first time to step foot on that cursed beach  how screams were used to lure them in, horrifying yells from a living throat, muttered and dispersed with hot breath and tears running down to beg for mercy. The march was steep and insidious to enter the shared border of Land and Sea, for protected by staggering walls of paramount rock, allowing to listen to the constant clutching and lolling of waves, but tediously having to run around it for a maximal ten minute stroll. Those reasons emanating to believe the culprits left the crime scene in hurry and thrilling possibility of getting caught and only minutes ago, before the storming crowd of brutes and those yearning for their blood would have arrived.