The first time I pulled a skeleton from the ground, I wasn’t even four years old. I’d wandered away from a church picnic while Daddy sat in the shade turning the crank on our old ice cream maker and mopping sweat from his forehead with a faded red bandana. Nana found me on my hands and knees just inside the tree line, chubby fingers plunged deep into the rich, black dirt.
Dovie girl, she had scolded.
You can’t be takin’ off like that. It’s danger— She froze when she saw me holding a pale finger bone out to her like a prize in an Easter egg hunt. Then her eyes caught fire and she opened up wide enough for me to see clear down her throat when she threw her head back and hollered, “Del! Come look what Dovie’s got! Come see what our girl can do!”
Daddy left the ice cream to melt and scooped me up quick as summer lightning. In one move, his strong hands knocked the bone from my fingers and the damp earth from the front of my dress, and I wailed as he carried me back home.
“Like her mama, God help her,” my Sunday School teacher whispered as we passed. “And her grandmother.” The words wormed their way into my ear, even over the sound of my own shrieking.
“Cryin’ for the dead,” one of the old men added. There were always a handful of them gathered like crows outside the little coffee shop on Mud Street. And the rest agreed like a Greek chorus.
But they were all wrong. I wasn’t worked up over whoever that finger belonged to. I didn’t understand enough back then to weep for someone who was only bones. Somebody I didn’t know, besides.
I was crying because I knew I wasn’t gonna get any of that strawberry ice cream Daddy had been churning. And I’d had my mouth set for it so bad.
I must have been dreaming about that day, because I wake up craving the taste of fresh strawberries cold on my tongue. But as soon as I sit up in bed, I know what it was that pulled me out of my dreams, and it wasn’t the memory of ice cream I didn’t get thirteen years ago.
My teeth are chattering louder than the shuddering air conditioner propped up in the attic window. My whole body is humming. Vibrating at a familiar frequency.
I can feel the dead deep in my bones.
Copyright © 2025 by Ginny Myers Sain. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
