Memoirs of a Skeleton Valet

1. The Map

Arrow sits with her knees drawn up under her chin, brooding over a map of the known universe. It's mostly blank. Her eyes are like mining tunnels, a conspiracy of bottomless pits and lubricated cobalt. The unfinished map has a certain hold on her, something between indecision and pure joy. She seems to feast on the empty space, the pure cartographic vacuum. The only fly in the ointment stands in the map's corner, a signpost pointing off the edge, reading 'WRETCHED MATERIALITY.' Next to it, I suppose for the benefit of the illiterate, she pens a skull and crossbones. For one mortifying second, I think she's drawing me.

The bell dinged, and Mallory returned the carriage to the start of a new line. His phalanges hovered over the waiting buttons as he suffered a stitch of indecision himself. He looked up from the typewriter, cracking his cervical vertebrae from side to side. His bones were blanched a shade lighter than the hazy sky. Depending on the angle of view, he was at any time smiling, frowning, or impassive. He was a skeleton.

Apropos of the typewriter, he also happened to be a struggling author, but was working full-time as Arrow's valet/typist. His machine was an Olivetti, the Pluma 22 model. It was essentially the same as Olivetti's revered Lettera 22, with a few minor differences; it was manufactured in Spain instead of Italy, it used the QWERTY layout instead of the Italian QZERTY, and it came in more colors. Mallory's model was a particularly ravishing shade of lipstick.

He had sat down a little distance away from her, the Olivetti locked between the distal joints of his femurs. In that way, at least, they were alike; the six-foot skeleton and the eleven-year-old girl, both hunched gargoyle-like over their respective projects. The grassy hollow they sat in was still cooled by the morning's shade, the nearby ridge blocking their view of Waterspout Bay. Its namesake vortex was just audible as a distant churning, like an infinite scroll being torn forever.

Mallory broke first. He was famished. He began rooting around, but as usual, his luck was abysmal. Arrow didn't look up until he'd so thoroughly ravaged the field that it resembled a looted burial ground. That roused her, and within five seconds she'd kicked up a hiding skeleton key and tossed it his way. Mallory caught it and immediately gulped it down like so much sashimi. He grunted with satisfaction.

"Writer's block?" she asked, eying the abandoned Olivetti. It sat in the grass like July in a typewriter calendar. Mallory eyed her back as best he could, a rather empty expression. But he had no trouble seeing her; midnight black hair, cut short in the front, the two hemispheres of bangs parted down the middle like the split pages of a batwing manuscript. A ponytail trailed down her back as a single cord, straight and tied at intervals with simple warrior knots.

"Blocked? Quite the contrary," Mallory said. Then, deflating somewhat, "Well...I'm managing...Considering everything." She fixed him with that interrogatory stare, that imperious 'tell-me-more'.

Mallory sighed. "Back in the old days, before you ever appeared, I was quite the prolific radical fiction writer," Mallory began. "But I rattled the wrong cages, and got myself thrown in prison."

Her eyes flashed at the word prison, their ferocious blue imploring him to continue.

"I was stuck in that eight-by-eight cell breathing the same dead air for years. There was no light. I couldn't see anything, not even myself. There were no breaks--no visits to the prison yard, no cafeteria. No psych evaluations or hearings, much less a way to write. Finally, something just broke inside. I lost it. When the Old Government was overthrown and they set me free, and I looked like this." Mallory held up his fleshless arm, empty sockets peeking through the gap between radius and ulna. "Needless to say, my writing's a little shakier than it used to be."

Arrow was silent for a while. "Maybe we can find one of your old books," she said finally. "Would they have it in a library?"

"I'd be surprised. They were officially banned, and all extant copies ordered destroyed. If any survived, they wouldn't be in the ordinary places."

"Just rewrite them then," Arrow said.

Mallory shook his skull. "Can't. My mind isn't like yours, Arrow. Whatever I wrote back then, it was just so. Might as well write a brand new book," he laughed.

Arrow looked skeptical for a moment, but decided not to argue. "Well, chronicling my travels should be good exercise for you."

"I agree. In fact, last night I did actually start something new."

"Really?" she asked, coming closer and craning her neck, as if he was hiding it behind his back. As if he even could.

Mallory nodded, but turned it into a shrug. "It's something different from my old wheelhouse. Nothing revolutionary at all."

"What is it, then?" she pressed. "Poetry?"

"Heck no," Mallory replied (he had gotten in the habit of using innocuous swear-words). "You think I want to be clapped back in irons? No, this is just a bit of harmless fiction on the side."

"But what kind?" Arrow pressed. "Fantasy? Mystery? Historical?"

"My, aren't you nosy today," Mallory said, as only he, completely devoid of cartilage, could. "Why don't you tell me the reason your map is so blank? Eh?"

"You'll know soon enough," Arrow said. "But come on, Mallory. Just tell me the genre. You don't have to show me anything. What is it? Contemporary? Sci-Fi? Romance?"

Mallory said nothing, just scratched a suture in the back of his cranium.

"It is romance, isn't it?"

Mallory coughed loudly. "Could I trouble you for another key? You're so adept at finding raw keys in the wild, it's almost suspicious. What if you scared me up an ornate little brass number? Or perhaps something gold with a gem set in it?"

"I can't believe my skeleton valet moonlights as a romance writer," Arrow cackled.

"And what do you moonlight as?" Mallory shot back. "What's so wretched about this so-called 'Materiality' you visit? Some sort of side project of your own, conveniently located just off the blank map of everything? What, it isn't all peaches and cream out there?"

Arrow's smile boiled off in an instant. Her voice was a like a creature clawing at the bottom of a dry well. "Don't you dare." Then she turned her back on him so sharply he flinched, and she folded back up like a paper-crane over her map. Mallory took a few tentative steps after her, unable to escape the feeling that he was a monster.

"I'm sorry, Princess," he said softly.

Arrow shook her head. "Try not to call me that. Incognito, remember?"

"Of course. Of course."

Arrow stared frostily into the infinite void of her undrawn map. "This, here, is the only true reality," she said from a cold distance. "Kill anyone who tells you different."