I sit in an amphitheatre surrounded by an audience of skeletons. Some are white like cattle skulls in the desert, picked clean by carrion birds and bleached by the constant gaze of an unblinking sun. Others are the sallow yellow of old ivory, covered in dust and cobwebs. Not all are human.

A young woman stands before the stage, long hair pulled back in a tight bun, tapping a pen against the bottom row of her teeth and surveying the multitude of bones inhabiting the many rows of seats. She has my face and my figure; were she to speak her voice would have the lilt and cadence of my own. She does not speak. The Director of Bones has little use for words.

I fidget in my seat. Her gaze has settled on the bones of a small dog resting with his head between his paws in the seat to my left. I look to the Director with beseeching eyes but I do not speak. She extends one arm, palm up. Slender fingers end in long, tapered nails, lacquered red like a migraine. Her index finger curls in a gesture of beckoning.

The small dog rattles to life and sits up, phantom ears pricked in anticipation of the Director’s instruction. She nods and he rises from his seat.

The spring-loaded theater seat bucks upright, shudders on its hinges and comes to rest. Padless paws click across carpetless floor. The skeletal dog lopes toward the stage, a sinewy layer of muscle tissue weaving over and through his bones, beginning at the muzzle and creeping down the length of his body. A flush of pink skin smoothes over the tangle of ligaments, and shiny black fur pushes up like eager tulips through melting snow. He ascends the steps to the stage and in the reveal of footlights the illusion of life is consummate. Pen rapping a disquieting staccato against her teeth, the Director regards me as the spider does the mayfly. I shrink back in my chair. The house lights go down.

A wicked and canny black widow, she spins old memories into new fictions, wordlessly summoning her actors from their seats in the audience. She conducts her play like a fever dream, switching out actors and sets unceasingly, calling upon the bones of family, friends, pets, and old lovers whose corpses I cannot hide shrewdly enough to evade her ineluctable casting call. My beloved little black dog, whose absence is a splinter my mind has been unable to avulse. My father, redolent of whiskey and grinning at me with wolf’s teeth. Spiders, legs thick as pencils and brown hairs long and stiff as bristles on a hog. An old rotary telephone, tocsin shrieking, demanding to deliver some crushing bit of bad news. Shrunken grey creatures with impossibly large eyes like oilslicks. The Director stages it all and dredges the riverbeds for more bones to star in her profane exposition. Relics retired and cordoned off are indelicately sifted through, cracked apart and tossed onstage.

A seat snaps up in the darkness behind me and I cover my face with my hands, muttering futile supplications into my clammy palms, willing the dissolution of the approaching footfalls back into the haze of faded memories. I know who has come to haunt me and he is a sweet and obsolete lie.

Warm hands cover mine. Gentle, insistent fingers probe the cracks between my own tightly clamped digits, spreading them, curling over palms slick with nervous sweat. My hands fall away, useless as prayers. A memory set upon recollection will not be denied. Resigned to his embrace, I press my forehead to his chest. His shirt smells of my bedclothes.

"You’re not real," I tell him. "You’re just dusty old bones."

He whispers wordlessly in my ear. The house lights go up. Alone in the amphitheatre, I study my palms.

"Just bones."