Bone Deep

by K.C. Mead-Brewer

She can’t stop thinking about her skeleton having sex every time she has sex. Her skeleton, this thing that will remain well after she’s dead, but will no longer get to have sex. Even bad sex, she wants it. Not in a creepy or addictive way. It’s just that she wants her skeleton to be happy, to get as much as it can get before she dies and it spends the rest of its years lying alone in a box, a toy no one plays with anymore. Sometimes while she’s having sex she thinks about her partner’s skeleton and what a gift she’s giving to let it startle ecstatic against her own. She’s been so careful with her skeleton, never breaking a single one of its bones (though she does have a powerful desire to glimpse it, even if only a screaming splinter through her skin). Hugging herself, she hopes her skeleton feels it. She hopes it knows who’s being hugged. She hopes it doesn’t feel like a hostage inside her. She hopes it's all consensual and rapturous and understanding. She hopes that heaven is her skeleton’s turn, the chance for it to live raw to the world, secure in the knowledge that, deep within, there is love.

K.C. Mead-Brewer lives in Ithaca, New York. Her fiction appears in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Joyland Magazine, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Tin House’s 2018 Winter Workshop for Short Fiction and of the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.