Symphony of Bones

By Thara Michaelis

Every once in a while, the roaring and convulsions of the battle woke Molly, but then at

last they subsided, and all Molly heard was the slow, sustained breathing of the people inside a

cocoon of books. Her family had been a scholarly one, lecturing philosophy instead of what

people praised as active politics. As the first bombs fell, percussive forces wrapping around the

forms of the much attended, and most fraught with yelling, government buildings, the faculty

fled with their children and any students they had managed to knock some sense into. Only one

place, the elders decided, was safe: the catacombs of the long displaced Praiga people; no one

knew where they went after displacement. The reasoning? No one looked back at history

anymore, especially that of another people. What the world was coming to.

The catacombs were deep underground. And it had been the hobby of the professors in

engineering to strengthen the integrity of the yawning chasms. However, not only were the

chasms yawning, but the blanched skulls were too. Yawning with laughter, splitting their faces

into northern and southern hemispheres. The skulls displayed an absolute uproar of mirth. The

joke? When they were both skin and bones, they had not gone to such folly. Their leaders had

been sensible. These people, they thought, huddling in our graves. What a show! Maybe we

should try to rise and protect them. A good portion of the skulls doubled over.

Every person observed the vigil of orbless eye sockets and said nothing. Funny, the skulls

could not stop commenting. For example, the girl, Molly, decidedly refused to look like a

refugee, with twisty copper curls pinned up just right and high heels tripling the tower of

London. How she managed to stand up in a cave was beyond the skulls. Her bags had been

packed with a similar attitude, producing numerous misfortunes for her and an epic miniseries

for the skulls. Luckily for these bobbing heads, everyone else displayed the same lack of

common sense, though in a more scholarly bent. In the end, there were more books than blankets to keep warmth and hope in the toes of the living inhabitants of the catacombs.

Our roommates! The skulls chattered with glee, a mischievous shadow to their eye

sockets. Book knowledge, it seemed, did not come before survival when one has a while to think

and experience the uncomfortableness of sleeping in open air. The skulls rather approved of the

moral.

Another quake sounded, skulls clattered their applause, anticipating action by the

roommates of the catacombs. Molly, for her part, rolled over and let out a long, musical snore,

the beginning of a concerto of sleeping sounds. The skulls witnessed, solemn in the set of their

teeth, respectful and pondering in the bow of their brows. Oh, how they adored the concerts

there.

Thara Michaelis is an English and Spanish double major at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She first fell in love with literature as a grade schooler when reading Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Since then, Thara has fell further and further into the world of the written word and would someday like to become a published author of fantasy. For now, Thara is focused on her college experience and is the design director for UNL’s student-led Laurus Magazine and the president of UNL’s Nebraska Judo Club (readers/writers can kick ass).