I Am Yours
by Stephanie Macias
Because the house was built over a burial ground, I had skeletons. They came up through the floorboards and rattled over me. All through the night their milky skulls sprouting like mushrooms, their hardening, and then their sudden rude clatter. The bomb of my heart going off.
This was right after you left the house with a purse and a suitcase and a vague promise to come back for the rest. As if the rest was what ailed me. As if we had not been plucked from the same womb on the same day, never to be parted. As if more drawer space would placate me. Don’t bother, I said.
We had been going to a lot of funerals lately. It was our new normal. At this age, people said as though we’d entered a new kingdom. Sickness and death like uniforms we were given. Even you and I had recently been afflicted with a honking cough loud enough to call down the geese flying overhead. You threw bread at them and they looked at you like you were new. But anyway, the funerals got me down, too.
The skeletons? Well.
When they sold us the house, they had to tell us. A new law required them. Reluctantly, they explained the headstones had been moved from the land but not the bodies. This was a more common practice than we thought. The world was a graveyard, you said, taking it in stride. We were at a funeral, and you wore that baggy black dress with room to steal casseroles and bags of rolls and cartons of cookies. We had picnics sitting on our living room rug, barefoot and supported by an exorbitant amount of pillows, remembering the dead by the silly things they’d done. Naturally, talk turned to the dead beneath us. You knocked on our floorboards and said, How old do you think they are? I guessed ancient, but you knew better. We’re the layer of plastic debris over the ancients, you said. We’re trash.
So you left, and the skeletons showed up, and then the skeletons did not leave. They hung around the house like Halloween decorations, Dia de los Muertos specifically and although I am Mexican American I despised the heavy-handedness of this new development. They sat on the couch and the kitchen chairs. They hid in closets and shook like rattlesnakes. They glided down the hallway waiting to see me, and when they did, they flew up to me and shook. Yes, yes, I said, brushing them aside like beaded curtains. I guessed they were hungry. But for what?
I set out bowls of water and, as custom dictated, offerings of food—oranges and apples and cookies and foil-wrapped candies, the same contents of the brown bags our grandmother gave us as Christmas gifts. I lit candles and prayed my grandmother’s prayers, but when I opened my eyes, they were still there. The one sitting in your spot on the couch had crossed its legs.
You told me it was not me it was you, and I laughed because I really did think you were trying to crack one last joke before you left. But I quieted when I saw the sad look on your face. It is me, I said. You didn’t argue then.
I thought we had decided, without saying it out loud, that we would die together. We were born together after all, why not? No man or woman had convinced us otherwise. You told me I’d done nothing wrong, that it was just time. And I said, Who is she? because this was one way in which we were different. You said that you didn’t know who you yourself were. I said, Easy, you’re my sister and I am yours. You said not to make things harder than they had to be, and I said, Have you met me?
A few days after the skeletons got in, I asked the neighbors if they’d noticed anything unusual in their houses, pests and whatnot. The guy on our right, Alfonso, with the rosacea and the little white dog you always threatened to steal and kiss to death, he said he had no pests thanks to Ricardo, the dog, and he did that thing where he spoke in Spanish because he thought you and I should have done the work of learning Spanish even though our parents had declared us American and kept Spanish to themselves like a spy code. But I understood him enough. The woman on our left said no, she hadn’t noticed mice, and if I had them I’d better take care of them or she’d have to charge me for her pest problem. She said it all through a slit in her door, chain in place. She was younger than us and a recluse, we guessed. A peek into her house always revealed darkness and the blue glow of a technological heart at its center.
Back in the house, the skeletons clacked in unison when I walked in. Yes, yes, I said, I’m home.
We had a cat and he lived to be eighteen. A vet came to our house to put him down. He hadn’t eaten in ten days because of his kidney disease. When you carried him to his towel on the couch where in the past few weeks he couldn’t stop himself from peeing and there under the towel was also a pee pad, when you carried him there and set him down he just laid his head against your thigh, done with all this. Then a lifelong friend of ours who came often for dinner, a man we’d known since high school, punctuated his eighty-something years with a cancer death. We’d fought over him when we were teenagers, you pretending but also you winning.
Is that why you’re leaving? I asked. Too much death that touched us? It’s touching everyone, you said. Exactly, I said, feeling my throat constrict and pushing my voice out with more force than I meant. Exactly, it’s both of us, I said. We have to cling to each other! I was yelling now. Why would you not cling!
Remember the abandoned house we found that had no roof over its second story? We were on our nightly walk, it was still ninety degrees, and you had gotten adventurous with our route. We went in and found a room that still had a bed and was open to the stars. We climbed on and jumped like children. Look up, you said. But when I did, I stopped and sat on the mattress. You kept jumping and looking up, and I have that vision of you burned into my memory which recalls along with it the pain in my lower back as punishment for being so reckless. I’d never been cut out for your easy attitude, and I figured myself flawed.
Since our neighbors were no help, I called our cousin, the last one on our dad’s side, and told her about the skeletons. You’re kidding, she said, but when she came over she saw. At first, she screamed every time they rattled. Then she turned on the TV to the news station and told them to catch up. They glowed in the watery light like moon-lit limestone.
How many are there? she asked.
Ten so far.
It feels like more. And the children?
What about them?
We were whispering in the kitchen. She’d shooed away the ones who’d taken up residence at the table, and now they all sat around the TV like there’d been another Mars landing.
It’s too bad, she said, and leaned away from me.
She looked healthy, but that meant nothing. We were all expected to distrust health because we were spent and could be struck down at any moment.
I’m going to sew them some clothes, she said.
That’s the last thing they need, I said.
You haven’t slept, and the last thing you need is to be waking up because of these rude ghosts. Then she left to buy supplies—I could pay her back, she said.
You told me not to try and find you. Well isn’t that stupid, I said. What about emergencies? You said that every day was an emergency now. God, I said, Say what you mean, and you said, Let me be alone. Then added, Alone-alone. You’re going to make me wait until we’re skeletons ourselves, aren’t you.
When our cousin returned, she sewed baggy suits made of bedsheets she bought at a thrift store—you can pay me back, she said again—patterns with small colorful flowers, plaid and striped, and one in black and one in red for the children. They did not fight our cousin as she lifted their bones into what was essentially a onesie. She left holes for the hands and made hoods so they could still watch TV, which they all did as if they came from people born in the last century and had TVs all their lives and this was the one comfort they were looking for, not my meager obligatory gifts of folklore.
Where’s Mina? our cousin asked as she shouldered her purse.
Groceries, I said.
She didn’t believe me, but she also couldn’t imagine us apart. She crimped her mouth and left.
I slept to the hum of the TV in the living room. Eventually, though, I was awakened by the sound of muted clatter. The children in their black and red onesies had come into my bedroom and were poking me, testing the virility of my paper skin, each poke harder and deeper. Their finger bones were particularly sharp. Stop, I finally said, and they glided away, bumping into each other and rattling down the hall. I went into the living room and crossed my arms, waiting for them to look at me. They turned their hooded reaper faces in unison. No poking, I said, wagging a finger. They turned back to the TV.
After you left, I waited a couple days before I called. Have you changed your mind? I wanted to know. I do miss you, you said. Well then? I said. You told me it wasn’t that simple, that you were doing this for you and for me. When I said I didn’t want your charity, you sighed. I didn’t cry, but I said, Will you come back if you get sick? Which was a very real possibility, and really we were just waiting for the ailment with the heaviest hammer. No, you said. Then who is she? I said. After a quiet in which I could hear the happy refrains of music and the singing of a spoon against a teacup, you said, You’d never let me go. You’re wrong, I said, and hung up as a way of proving you wrong.
The next night, an adult skeleton patterned in ivy came into my room and sat on the bed next to me. I woke up and looked into its cavernous face. I felt the fear I had on that very first night. It placed a bony hand on my chest, and that hand crawled like a spider up to my neck, but then it kept crawling up under my chin and then onto my face and into my mouth. It reached in and gagged me before I could stop it. I rolled away, disturbed by the effort it took. Leave, I told it, and I expected it to melt down through the floorboards but it only stood and drifted out of the room. I locked my door.
During the day the skeletons went about their business like they weren’t interested in me at all. I think you would have liked this existence, stealing from funerals and eating among other dead and cataloguing their bones because you always had those notebooks where you wrote down the things you saw. I could see you walking in and not being surprised at all that I was living with bones.
The next night, though, they piled themselves against the bedroom door, drug their blanketed bodies across the wood, clacked their jaws. The door creaked with the pressure of their pushing. I knew I had to call someone who was not our cousin.
In the morning, I called you and when you answered, already exhausted by me, I said, There are skeletons in our house.
Your house, you said.
Fine, who should I call?
You paused. Like dead people?
Sort of. Come and see.
I’m far away now, you said.
Days or weeks?
Too far to help. But I still love you, of course.
Of course, I said and hung up.
I went to Alfonso next door and said, Come see this. And he did, carrying his little white dog in his arms, and when he saw the skeletons in their onesies, each head sensing the new presence in their domain and turning toward him, the dog began barking and scratching Alfonso’s belly with its painted claws and Alfonso himself choked on his own spit. They won’t harm you in the day, I said. But Alfonso backed out the front door and fell down the front steps. His little dog ran back to my door, and I caught him. No, no, I said, and he bit my hand. Alfonso couldn’t move, and that was a whole thing. We had to call an ambulance and when they arrived, Alfonso pointed at my house and the medics thought he meant me and called the cops, and I said, No, he means the house. I have skeletons, I said. Which was what they told the cops when they arrived. One of the cops cuffed me, and the other two went into the house.
You would have been better at getting out of this mess. Our mother called me her Bottle Rocket. You called me a Hothead Who Carried Her Own Matches. Inflexible, a nurse once said. But you would have calmly explained to the cops that we’d had a haunted house idea and spent way too much on skeleton decorations. That was all they were, you’d insist, decorations. And you would have given me a look like shut it babe, and I would have obeyed because what you were was a North Star, the First Cool Breeze After Summer, Relief. But instead, there was just me shouting that this was an outrage and how dare they cuff an old woman and the two cops finding it easy to ignore me and going inside and finding ten hooded skulls swiveling on ten spines.
Gunshots went off inside the house.
You’re killing them! I yelled. Again!
The cops ran out, their eyes like marbles.
You killed them again, I said.
The bullets did the trick. The skeletons stopped rattling, and a forensics team collected them and carried them away. The cops asked me many questions about where and how and when and then why. And for this last question I had many answers. I said that maybe we should stop moving headstones without bodies. I said that maybe we should cremate everyone like they do in Japan. I said that maybe we were dealing with a new kind of haunting in a country so shrouded in self-inflicted grief. They wrote down none of these answers, only stared at me through squinted eyes. I’m not a murderer or a wizard, I said.
When they left me alone—but not totally because a cop stood nearby as if I’d bolt at any moment though I can’t imagine where to—I watched the street for your car. I watched the street and thought I could reach you via telepathy—it happened to twins didn’t it?—and you would feel a vibration in the air that told you to come here because I had to tell you about this crazy thing that had just happened to me, that Alfonso had been wheeled off on a gurney and that I was holding Ricardo even though he’d bitten me and was now licking off the crusted blood from my fingers, and how I kissed his head and he allowed it, oh and the skeletons in their onesies carried out in black bags like dead seals, the bullet holes in our walls and how I’d gotten so used to the cackle of bones that I lay awake all night hoping for a skeleton to mushroom up from the floorboards or for you to bust a hole in my ceiling, float down and jump on my bed and tell me who the hell I am and what the hell I’m supposed to do now.
This was right after you left the house with a purse and a suitcase and a vague promise to come back for the rest. As if the rest was what ailed me. As if we had not been plucked from the same womb on the same day, never to be parted. As if more drawer space would placate me. Don’t bother, I said.
We had been going to a lot of funerals lately. It was our new normal. At this age, people said as though we’d entered a new kingdom. Sickness and death like uniforms we were given. Even you and I had recently been afflicted with a honking cough loud enough to call down the geese flying overhead. You threw bread at them and they looked at you like you were new. But anyway, the funerals got me down, too.
The skeletons? Well.
When they sold us the house, they had to tell us. A new law required them. Reluctantly, they explained the headstones had been moved from the land but not the bodies. This was a more common practice than we thought. The world was a graveyard, you said, taking it in stride. We were at a funeral, and you wore that baggy black dress with room to steal casseroles and bags of rolls and cartons of cookies. We had picnics sitting on our living room rug, barefoot and supported by an exorbitant amount of pillows, remembering the dead by the silly things they’d done. Naturally, talk turned to the dead beneath us. You knocked on our floorboards and said, How old do you think they are? I guessed ancient, but you knew better. We’re the layer of plastic debris over the ancients, you said. We’re trash.
So you left, and the skeletons showed up, and then the skeletons did not leave. They hung around the house like Halloween decorations, Dia de los Muertos specifically and although I am Mexican American I despised the heavy-handedness of this new development. They sat on the couch and the kitchen chairs. They hid in closets and shook like rattlesnakes. They glided down the hallway waiting to see me, and when they did, they flew up to me and shook. Yes, yes, I said, brushing them aside like beaded curtains. I guessed they were hungry. But for what?
I set out bowls of water and, as custom dictated, offerings of food—oranges and apples and cookies and foil-wrapped candies, the same contents of the brown bags our grandmother gave us as Christmas gifts. I lit candles and prayed my grandmother’s prayers, but when I opened my eyes, they were still there. The one sitting in your spot on the couch had crossed its legs.
You told me it was not me it was you, and I laughed because I really did think you were trying to crack one last joke before you left. But I quieted when I saw the sad look on your face. It is me, I said. You didn’t argue then.
I thought we had decided, without saying it out loud, that we would die together. We were born together after all, why not? No man or woman had convinced us otherwise. You told me I’d done nothing wrong, that it was just time. And I said, Who is she? because this was one way in which we were different. You said that you didn’t know who you yourself were. I said, Easy, you’re my sister and I am yours. You said not to make things harder than they had to be, and I said, Have you met me?
A few days after the skeletons got in, I asked the neighbors if they’d noticed anything unusual in their houses, pests and whatnot. The guy on our right, Alfonso, with the rosacea and the little white dog you always threatened to steal and kiss to death, he said he had no pests thanks to Ricardo, the dog, and he did that thing where he spoke in Spanish because he thought you and I should have done the work of learning Spanish even though our parents had declared us American and kept Spanish to themselves like a spy code. But I understood him enough. The woman on our left said no, she hadn’t noticed mice, and if I had them I’d better take care of them or she’d have to charge me for her pest problem. She said it all through a slit in her door, chain in place. She was younger than us and a recluse, we guessed. A peek into her house always revealed darkness and the blue glow of a technological heart at its center.
Back in the house, the skeletons clacked in unison when I walked in. Yes, yes, I said, I’m home.
We had a cat and he lived to be eighteen. A vet came to our house to put him down. He hadn’t eaten in ten days because of his kidney disease. When you carried him to his towel on the couch where in the past few weeks he couldn’t stop himself from peeing and there under the towel was also a pee pad, when you carried him there and set him down he just laid his head against your thigh, done with all this. Then a lifelong friend of ours who came often for dinner, a man we’d known since high school, punctuated his eighty-something years with a cancer death. We’d fought over him when we were teenagers, you pretending but also you winning.
Is that why you’re leaving? I asked. Too much death that touched us? It’s touching everyone, you said. Exactly, I said, feeling my throat constrict and pushing my voice out with more force than I meant. Exactly, it’s both of us, I said. We have to cling to each other! I was yelling now. Why would you not cling!
Remember the abandoned house we found that had no roof over its second story? We were on our nightly walk, it was still ninety degrees, and you had gotten adventurous with our route. We went in and found a room that still had a bed and was open to the stars. We climbed on and jumped like children. Look up, you said. But when I did, I stopped and sat on the mattress. You kept jumping and looking up, and I have that vision of you burned into my memory which recalls along with it the pain in my lower back as punishment for being so reckless. I’d never been cut out for your easy attitude, and I figured myself flawed.
Since our neighbors were no help, I called our cousin, the last one on our dad’s side, and told her about the skeletons. You’re kidding, she said, but when she came over she saw. At first, she screamed every time they rattled. Then she turned on the TV to the news station and told them to catch up. They glowed in the watery light like moon-lit limestone.
How many are there? she asked.
Ten so far.
It feels like more. And the children?
What about them?
We were whispering in the kitchen. She’d shooed away the ones who’d taken up residence at the table, and now they all sat around the TV like there’d been another Mars landing.
It’s too bad, she said, and leaned away from me.
She looked healthy, but that meant nothing. We were all expected to distrust health because we were spent and could be struck down at any moment.
I’m going to sew them some clothes, she said.
That’s the last thing they need, I said.
You haven’t slept, and the last thing you need is to be waking up because of these rude ghosts. Then she left to buy supplies—I could pay her back, she said.
You told me not to try and find you. Well isn’t that stupid, I said. What about emergencies? You said that every day was an emergency now. God, I said, Say what you mean, and you said, Let me be alone. Then added, Alone-alone. You’re going to make me wait until we’re skeletons ourselves, aren’t you.
When our cousin returned, she sewed baggy suits made of bedsheets she bought at a thrift store—you can pay me back, she said again—patterns with small colorful flowers, plaid and striped, and one in black and one in red for the children. They did not fight our cousin as she lifted their bones into what was essentially a onesie. She left holes for the hands and made hoods so they could still watch TV, which they all did as if they came from people born in the last century and had TVs all their lives and this was the one comfort they were looking for, not my meager obligatory gifts of folklore.
Where’s Mina? our cousin asked as she shouldered her purse.
Groceries, I said.
She didn’t believe me, but she also couldn’t imagine us apart. She crimped her mouth and left.
I slept to the hum of the TV in the living room. Eventually, though, I was awakened by the sound of muted clatter. The children in their black and red onesies had come into my bedroom and were poking me, testing the virility of my paper skin, each poke harder and deeper. Their finger bones were particularly sharp. Stop, I finally said, and they glided away, bumping into each other and rattling down the hall. I went into the living room and crossed my arms, waiting for them to look at me. They turned their hooded reaper faces in unison. No poking, I said, wagging a finger. They turned back to the TV.
After you left, I waited a couple days before I called. Have you changed your mind? I wanted to know. I do miss you, you said. Well then? I said. You told me it wasn’t that simple, that you were doing this for you and for me. When I said I didn’t want your charity, you sighed. I didn’t cry, but I said, Will you come back if you get sick? Which was a very real possibility, and really we were just waiting for the ailment with the heaviest hammer. No, you said. Then who is she? I said. After a quiet in which I could hear the happy refrains of music and the singing of a spoon against a teacup, you said, You’d never let me go. You’re wrong, I said, and hung up as a way of proving you wrong.
The next night, an adult skeleton patterned in ivy came into my room and sat on the bed next to me. I woke up and looked into its cavernous face. I felt the fear I had on that very first night. It placed a bony hand on my chest, and that hand crawled like a spider up to my neck, but then it kept crawling up under my chin and then onto my face and into my mouth. It reached in and gagged me before I could stop it. I rolled away, disturbed by the effort it took. Leave, I told it, and I expected it to melt down through the floorboards but it only stood and drifted out of the room. I locked my door.
During the day the skeletons went about their business like they weren’t interested in me at all. I think you would have liked this existence, stealing from funerals and eating among other dead and cataloguing their bones because you always had those notebooks where you wrote down the things you saw. I could see you walking in and not being surprised at all that I was living with bones.
The next night, though, they piled themselves against the bedroom door, drug their blanketed bodies across the wood, clacked their jaws. The door creaked with the pressure of their pushing. I knew I had to call someone who was not our cousin.
In the morning, I called you and when you answered, already exhausted by me, I said, There are skeletons in our house.
Your house, you said.
Fine, who should I call?
You paused. Like dead people?
Sort of. Come and see.
I’m far away now, you said.
Days or weeks?
Too far to help. But I still love you, of course.
Of course, I said and hung up.
I went to Alfonso next door and said, Come see this. And he did, carrying his little white dog in his arms, and when he saw the skeletons in their onesies, each head sensing the new presence in their domain and turning toward him, the dog began barking and scratching Alfonso’s belly with its painted claws and Alfonso himself choked on his own spit. They won’t harm you in the day, I said. But Alfonso backed out the front door and fell down the front steps. His little dog ran back to my door, and I caught him. No, no, I said, and he bit my hand. Alfonso couldn’t move, and that was a whole thing. We had to call an ambulance and when they arrived, Alfonso pointed at my house and the medics thought he meant me and called the cops, and I said, No, he means the house. I have skeletons, I said. Which was what they told the cops when they arrived. One of the cops cuffed me, and the other two went into the house.
You would have been better at getting out of this mess. Our mother called me her Bottle Rocket. You called me a Hothead Who Carried Her Own Matches. Inflexible, a nurse once said. But you would have calmly explained to the cops that we’d had a haunted house idea and spent way too much on skeleton decorations. That was all they were, you’d insist, decorations. And you would have given me a look like shut it babe, and I would have obeyed because what you were was a North Star, the First Cool Breeze After Summer, Relief. But instead, there was just me shouting that this was an outrage and how dare they cuff an old woman and the two cops finding it easy to ignore me and going inside and finding ten hooded skulls swiveling on ten spines.
Gunshots went off inside the house.
You’re killing them! I yelled. Again!
The cops ran out, their eyes like marbles.
You killed them again, I said.
The bullets did the trick. The skeletons stopped rattling, and a forensics team collected them and carried them away. The cops asked me many questions about where and how and when and then why. And for this last question I had many answers. I said that maybe we should stop moving headstones without bodies. I said that maybe we should cremate everyone like they do in Japan. I said that maybe we were dealing with a new kind of haunting in a country so shrouded in self-inflicted grief. They wrote down none of these answers, only stared at me through squinted eyes. I’m not a murderer or a wizard, I said.
When they left me alone—but not totally because a cop stood nearby as if I’d bolt at any moment though I can’t imagine where to—I watched the street for your car. I watched the street and thought I could reach you via telepathy—it happened to twins didn’t it?—and you would feel a vibration in the air that told you to come here because I had to tell you about this crazy thing that had just happened to me, that Alfonso had been wheeled off on a gurney and that I was holding Ricardo even though he’d bitten me and was now licking off the crusted blood from my fingers, and how I kissed his head and he allowed it, oh and the skeletons in their onesies carried out in black bags like dead seals, the bullet holes in our walls and how I’d gotten so used to the cackle of bones that I lay awake all night hoping for a skeleton to mushroom up from the floorboards or for you to bust a hole in my ceiling, float down and jump on my bed and tell me who the hell I am and what the hell I’m supposed to do now.