The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
The Joke Goes Like This
by Elaine Pascale
The joke goes like this:
Q: What do you call a skeleton that stays out in the snow too long?
A: A numbskull
Only the joke ceases to be funny when you find your daughter digging at the hard, cold, ground, trying to reach the possibly frozen, likely decomposed, carcass of her cat.
“Why would you do that?” I shook her shoulders a bit too hard once I had her back inside the house.
“I dreamt that Johnson needed me. That he was cold.” Her blue eyes were wide with sincerity.
I remembered what it was like to believe in dreams.
My daughter had taken Johnson’s death hard. It was the first loss she had experienced. She had been too young to remember her father leaving.
The joke goes like this:
Q: Why do skeletons hate winter?
A: The cold goes right through them
Only the joke ceases to be funny when your daughter has collected the hardened and bitter bones of Johnson and placed them in her doll carriage. He had been buried in the shade where his body would be reduced quickly. She said that in her dreams she warmed the bones and Johnson came back to life.
I remember when I believed in dreams. I dreamt of a happy marriage, of a loving family. But the coldness of my marriage had gone right through me.
I let my daughter speak of her dreams. I let her ramble about everything and anything she wishes. My dreams were first squashed when I had been quieted. I had to let him talk. His thoughts were important; his ideas came first. I had to be quiet, and in the quiet I lost myself.
The joke goes like this:
Q: How did the skeleton know what would happen next?
A: He could feel it in his bones
Only this joke remains funny when extra bones are found with Johnson. I had buried him in the shade, as well. There would be no attempts to warm those bones for regeneration. It had been easy to say that he had left as he had truly left me with nothing. I was empty long before he became a skeleton and he hadn’t suspected a thing.
Fiction © Copyright Elaine Pascale
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com
More from Elaine Pascale:
The Blood Lights
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Jezzie Mitchell is in anguish; with her brother’s murder still on her mind, she’s noticed strange behavior among the girls in the residential treatment center where she works. Is there a connection between the contagion on Cape Cod and the deadly Bahamas vacation that changed her life?
Jezzie reaches out to former lover Lou Collins, a scholar who has chased proof of the lights for decades. Will he be able to solve the mystery of the lights in time?
Intensely competitive, reporter Bridgette Collins knows the lights are a way to secure fame in her career. And while it’ll put the final nail into the coffin of her ex-husband’s career, she vows to know the secrets of the lights. Even if it means unleashing a world-wide epidemic…
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A terrifically creepy story.
I like this! A different way to bring a story to life — use skeleton jokes! Good one!