Temple of Bones

by Kim Dawson

Disclaimer:  No oracles were consulted for the writing of this story.

The first tears

You sit on the wooden bench seat outside the court room, waiting for your name to be called.  A disheveled looking sailor storms through the glass doors with a small dead fish.

‘But what am I supposed to do with this?’ He asks you.

“Take it in there’ you reply cruelly and you point to the court room. The sailor stormed in, only to be dragged out by security a few seconds later, waving the dead fish in the guard’s face.   ‘But what do you mean you don’t want it?’  He asks the guard. ‘You’re the one that gave it to me.  You gave it to me.’  The sailor reads the seasons in parrot fish and mullet, as the police stand in the back paddock eating the grass and flicking flies away with their tails, waiting to be called.

It is the first time you had been called to court for a crime you had committed many times with two of your friends and classmates. You were the indignant instigator. They followed you into trouble.  It was the adults that made these wacky laws, not Albert and Eadie who sat there on the bench with you, waiting for their names to be called.  Your anger masks your guilt, as you kick the carpet.  You are the eldest of this young tribe; it is your responsibility to navigate these chaotic worlds without the humbug of the gavel, the pompous wigs, the judges scowl and the smug police prosecutor, a large Guernsey steer.  Steely eyed you stare as the judge reads out your trespass sentences.  Meaningless fines for felons who can’t afford to pay.  Later you, Albert and Eadie throw your fines into the ocean and the sea is never severed or divided, not by pieces of paper, or by pieces of metal that fell from the sky.  Drones, satellites, boats, sky scrapers, rockets, engineers were forever sending metal into the sky and failing to pick up after themselves.  Yet the ocean grew around them, like a tree that swallows a fence post, and converts it into a shell.

The place that is now heavily guarded by cows you name the temple of bones.   They are trying to modernise the temple for tourists, they do not want you lurking around trying to mess with their magic, as if turning everything uglier is some kind of spell. The temple is your home, although you could never lay claim to it, as a whale could never lay claim to the sea.  On the loneliest of days, you often hold conversations with ancient bones.

To enter the temple, everybody walks upon the golden sand, enclosed by the rib cage of a long dead humpback whale. How could any authority lay claim to whale bones and charge admission, and fines?

Still pissed, you stormed down the beach screaming ‘I’ll be back’ at the men in fluoro vests hanging out of bobcats and cranes, splitting the air with the screeches of metal on metal, which sound like a whale song.  That night, after disappointing your dad with your behaviour, you dream that you are walking down the rib cage that crowned the sky like a moon and stuck up out of the sand like straight rootless trees. You light a fire in the belly of the long dead whale and sit watching the flames dance for a time, all the colours of the rainbow exploding from the wood.

Your dad has been ill and his skin has turned grey.  Because he is sick, he can’t work and not working makes him feel useless and unproductive.  He works for the government in town drafting submissions and getting them rejected.  You can’t understand how he feels as you love having him home, grumpy and sick as he is.  He has a bad heart. He showed you the x-rays of the blockage after they injected radio-active dye into the veins.  It looked like a fish hook.  Albert and Eadie will probably be laying low today, and you are bored.  You decide to light the fire you dreamt of for real tonight, and wander around gathering drift wood, before you go to visit Albert and Eadie to tell them of your plan.

The day after you all lit the fire, red coral moves from the warmer waters down to the harbour.  Sea urchins had been eating up all the kelp beds and overnight the harbour has become a reef. This means the end of squid fishing, and somehow you feel responsible.  But you are excited also, because the red coral seems to mark the beginning of things, and your dad is getting better, finally.  Your dad would never believe there was any connection between his health, the coral and the fire, but you tell him that even the surgeon’s skilful hands are guided by another’s.

The inward spiral

Two days after Albert, Eadie and yourself lit the fire, the whale bones are fenced off with smooth black plastic walls you couldn’t see through.

‘We need to see it.’ said Albert.

‘We’ll meet here tonight.’ you state assuredly.  ‘Eadie has some torches.  We might need them tonight.’

It’s a new moon’ says Albert in agreeance.

‘Let’s meet at ten.’ said Eadie, not keen on late nights.

You set your alarm and fall asleep quickly after dinner. You dream that you are a ships wheel, and you are guiding the ship to shore. The devils at the helm slide down the side of the boat, and back in to the sea.  You wake to the alarm and walk outside to breath the cool night air. Over the fence a sapling has grown into a huge tree in the manner of hours.  In it’s branches it holds up the moon, like a monk holding up a bowl as an offering.

The temple has survived attempts to modernise it a couple of times.  Out the front stands a faded map to direct the lost, the only marks remaining are a yellow star with the words ‘you are here’ written in the middle.  You think that this adds to the ethereal nature of the temple. I am here you say to yourself, but where are Albert and Eadie?

Eventually a sleepy looking Albert shows up.  Eadie had obviously overslept so the two of you scale the fence to see what is going on.  At first, you think it’s some crude amateurish attempt to recreate the whale over the bones.  The white whale looks like a ghost.  But as you touch it you realise it is blubber, real blubber.  Albert, ever the scientist, takes two samples and puts it in his old lunch bags.  You take one.

‘Do you think that the whale is coming back alive?’  you ask Albert.  He doesn’t answer. You stay awake all night, watching moths spiralling inwards towards the unnatural light of your bedside lamp.  Particles spiral inwards towards the sun. The whale’s flesh spirals inwards towards its bones.

For the next week the murmurs of the Whales return become waves of disbelief.  The enclosure remains guarded and you notice a tolerance and kindness spreading through school, through the neighbours, even through the cows, who are sometimes caught smiling and dancing in the sand around the enclosure.  The seagulls play with the cows, chasing away the flies, and the pregnant moon is caught laughing with the sea, drawing her up to meet the sky.

Albert remembers the blubber in his lunch bag, and rubs it onto his feet at night to keep his feet were warm.  The next day you and Eadie see Albert walking on the water.  You laugh at the sight with delight. Albert walks on water for the next three days.

The last dance

The whole town watches, as the now fully formed whale, floats above its enclosure before floating out to sea.  It was a gift that was given by the ocean a long time ago, and now it taken back, as we stand at the shore, as we stand at the wake.