Little Bones
By Chuck Wendig • Jul 10th, 2009 • Category: ExcerptLittle bones—most no bigger than marbles, some like long teeth—spill out. More specifically, these are hand bones: carpals like driveway gravel, metacarpals like Lincoln Logs, phalanges like dog treats or the tips of umbrellas. All pale, bleached, clean.
Ingersoll does not touch them. His own fingertip floats above them, as if following along with the text of a children’s book or a Bible page. He nods and mumbles something in the affirmative. To everyone else, it’s inscrutable, but to him, it’s something as plain as day, no less clear than a highway billboard.
“Good,” he says, obviously satisfied. He scoops the bones back up, and places them in the pouch once more. He kisses the pouch the way one might kiss his mother.
He stands again, and looks in Randy’s red, raw eyes.
“You stopped buying from us,” Ingersoll says. He licks his lips, shaking his head. “That is a shame. I like to think we offer a solid product for reasonable prices. But you can save yourself here, you know. You will whisper in my ear what it is I want to know. You will tell me all you can of your new supplier. If I am satisfied, if you tell me what I need, then I will spare your life, and instead only take one of your hands for its bones. Are we clear?”
Whimpering behind his own blood-caked sock, Randy nods.
Ingersoll smiles, and presses his own ear to Randy’s mouth before plucking out the sock.
“Speak,” Ingersoll commands, and Randy spills it all.
• • •
Outside the meat locker, Ingersoll towels off.
The white towels, handed to him by Harriet, grow swiftly red with each wipe.
Ingersoll hands over a plastic snack-sized baggie to Harriet. Contained within are the mostly-meatless bones of not one hand, but two.
“Bleach them,” Ingersoll says. “Purify them with sage smoke. Then give them to me, I will choose which ones if any belong in my satchel.”
Harriet nods, takes the bag. She shows no signs of disgust. Frankie, on the other hand, has a look like he might throw up in his mouth.
“You,” Ingersoll says, thrusting his finger against Frankie’s sternum. The finger itself is thin, delicate, like an insect’s leg, but it still feels to Frankie like it might punch through his breastbone and puncture his heart. “Dispose of the body.”
Swallowing a hard knot of what might be puke, Frankie nods.
Chuck Wendig is a 30-something freelance penmonkey. He's written too much, and should probably stop, but he won't. At present, he's written for, or developed, over 80 books for White Wolf Game Studios. He's had a handful of short stories published. He's written a couple screenplays. He's thinking about branching out into menus, pamphlets, or witty doormats. Give him a wide berth, as he might be drunk and untrustworthy. He currently lives in the wilds of Pennsyltucky with a wonderful wife and two very stupid dogs.
Email this author | All posts by Chuck Wendig
Hey, gross.
This excerpt makes the characters seem a little arch, but what do I want out of a dozen paragraphs? No, what I love here are the crazy, confident details. Like, “tips of umbrellas” — that’s excellent.
• Can Harriet show us she’s not disgusted by showing us something else, like her calmness or her cool?
• Ingersoll really talks like that, huh? I’m having trouble getting my internal actor over some of the formality and stiffness in his dialogue. “…I will choose which ones if any belong in my satchel.” It sounds like he’s saying it for our benefit, like he’s laying pipe, and given how much the narrator knows about hand bones from the beginning, do we need Ingersoll to lay pipe for us when the narrator’s standing right there?
It’d seem more natural to me if he just asked for them to be purified and returned to him, then he says, “I’ll choose which I want,” as he shakes his satchel of bones. But I’ve only known him for twelve paragraphs, so I could be wrong.
Entirely fair.
Ingersoll’s supposed to speak that way — this is later in the book (past the midway point), and this pattern of speaking is called out earlier (in a non-excerpted excerpt!). He’s actually Eurotrash, and speaks with that nebulous Eastern European voice.
I’m actually almost done the book. Might be done it by the end of this week. Maybe beginning of next.
That’s exciting.
Ingersoll is the name of an intensely annoying tennis student in Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. For some reason, while reading it, I imagined Ingersoll as the grown-up version of the kid in Jest, with the horrible whiny nasal voice and everything.