The Skeleton’s Scrapbook
by John Mara
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Jo, too, climbs out of bed at the stroke of midnight, right on Boomer’s heels. She slinks past the den just as Boomer pours his bourbon. She makes her way to the study, her private workspace. She locks the door behind her and heads straight for the dusty trumpet mounted over the mantle. From inside its bell, she retrieves the letter from Slim that arrived the day he was shot. It ends:
Be ready for a small surprise, Jo. I want us to start the rest of our lives together.I will love you always,
Your Slim
What might’ve been with Slim? Was it a rebound thing with Boomer? More recently, Jo’s been weighing: Should I roll the dice and change all of our worlds?
Jo looks outside into the fog, and two apparitions capture her attention. An obscure force rattles the window. The fog billows into the study when she opens it, and two small spectral shapes appear. They don’t speak, but they flare wide smiles, happy for even a brief moment with their mother in her world.
“Yes, their human sentience has progressed nicely,” Jo says. Their blue eyes now have a lustrous quality, and their flowing hair has taken on the color of Jo’s. Jo caresses their smooth skin, and then she embraces them both. “The DNA mutations are working.”
Jo conducts her gene therapy procedures in a lab at the state university. Ten years ago, she changed her college major to study quantum physics and genomics. Today, she does grant-funded research in these fields. But she may be going too far: her university colleagues fear her recent work oversteps ethical boundaries.
With time short, Jo stays on task. She injects each of the spectres with one syringe, and then she draws their bodily fluid with another. She’ll extract their DNA and resequence it in time for next year’s life-regenerating injections.
With the syringe work complete, a larger spectre floats through the window on Little Jo’s signal. “That lock of hair did the trick,” Jo says. Slim’s ethereal form swirls when she tries to embrace him. She sobs instead until she gasps for air, elated to access him finally in any stage of non-death.
Jo remembers the limited time and gathers herself. She waves a test tube through Slim’s spectre to capture a sample of his misty essence. Even in his primitive state, she’ll extract enough genome to begin his DNA editing. “But Slim’s DNA will take years to catch up, a lifetime,” she says. “unless I somehow accelerate his treatments.”
As Jo expects, the spectral forms begin to dissipate, and her three visitors waft out of the window. The child spectres try to pull Jo with them into their dimension, but their peak energy drains all too quickly. The breeze dissolves them into the night.
At the window, Jo notices a scrapbook the spectres left behind. She settles under a blanket on the couch to read it. The scrapbook takes her on a journey into a world that should have been. “It still can be,” she says.
When she closes the window, Jo sees the engagement ring that was left under the scrapbook. She thumbs through the scrapbook again while she contemplates the ring. “I do, Slim,” she finally decides. She slips on the ring. “I would’ve said it in 2010, and I say it now. I do.”
“It’s time to change the game,” she says. Jo has formulated a new, risky method to connect quantum worlds. If successful, it would unite her should-be family for ongoing DNA treatments. With Slim’s ring on her finger, she has no choice but to try her controversial procedure. “Nursemaid ethics be damned. All of our worlds are at stake.” Whether it works or not, she’ll at least escape the ten years of her make-believe life with Boomer.
* * *
The rising sun awakens Boomer. He drags himself out of his private world and back to the bedroom for a little extra sleep. Jo’s not there. But he’s not worried; Jo often reads in the study when she can’t sleep.
He goes to the study and tries the door. It’s locked. “Jo?” he calls. No answer. The Boomer busts open the door with a single shoulder thrust, and a breeze rushes through the open window.
A blanket lies crumpled on the couch with a scrapbook set on top of it. The bookcase that held all of her research material is empty. Even that rusty old trumpet is gone.
He reads a note taped to the front of the scrapbook. It ends:
It’s time our lives take on a new dimension. Read the scrapbook, and you’ll understand.Goodbye, Boomer.
Jo
The note puzzles Boomer. He looks out of the window, but the rising sun blinds him. He sees nothing.
Boomer brings the scrapbook back to his den and searches for more clues about Jo’s disappearance. He shudders when he sees his wife’s 2011 wedding portrait. “It can’t be!” Yes, he recognizes Jo’s wedding gown, but he’s the best man. And the groom? “It’s Slim!”
He needs help from his friend, so he fills a tumbler. He flips the pages with his eyes popping. “There’s Slim and Jo. With two kids! Visiting me in the city!” He finishes the scrapbook and the tumbler. “I can’t go on with Jo, not now.”
He closes his eyes and breathes deeply, meditatively. Boomer’s back in the foxhole with Slim. His head spins from the whiskey and so does the foxhole. Slim spins to his left and then switches back to his right, over and over. Boomer’s eyes flash open with an epiphany: “Switch!” The bottle has shown him a perfectly simple solution. Had Slim been to his left in the foxhole, rather than to his right, their fates would’ve switched, too, when the sniper’s bullet arrived.
Boomer knows what he needs to do. He can step aside to let Jo and Slim make their What Would’ve Been scrapbook real. Ten years of undisclosed pain pour out of him. Boomer cries uncontrollably and then laughs breathlessly until he hyperventilates. He crushes the tumbler and slashes his hand, and then takes his revenge by heaving the liquor cart. He’s lost his grip. The Boomer’s a bloody madman.
He joins a few chairs in a huddle and calls the reverse switchback play he mastered in his football days: “One, two, switcheroo.” He cradles his old army helmet like a football. Boomer cuts sloppily to his left and then switches back to his right, over and over, as he chants wildly, “One!-two!-switch-er-oo!”
He puts on the helmet and rubs the dent in it with a newfound perspective on life, death, and the space in between. He pulls on his old Afghan War uniform and then burrows behind the couch. Slim is to his right, as on that fateful day. He reaches for the revolver, his salvation. He knows it’s the salvation of Jo and Slim, too. He’ll be six feet under, six feet out of their way.
Boomer runs his signature play. He pops his head up on the left and then switches back to the right, over and over. He flares a wide, crazed grin. The switch worked! Slim is now safe on his left, and he’s on the fateful right. All of their worlds are about to change. He tucks the gun just beneath his helmet. “Boom!” The cat’s not so quick any more.
* * *
Back in the in-between world, Sarge tidies his desk to kick off a new day of military precision. He still chuckles about the fugitive skeleton he let get away. He cashed in some favors with the army brass for them to overlook his indiscretion. “There goes that promotion.” Sarge nearly ended up on the mountain himself.
Just then, a bewildered skeleton materializes out of the fog. “Ah, a new customer. Good for business.” He enters the name ‘Unknown’ in the census book. “No dog tags, no name. Them’s army regulations.”
The new skeleton cradles his helmet like a football and begins his slow trek up Skeleton Mountain. The Switcheroo Kid got more than the six feet he bargained for. Unknown climbs into his assigned location: the former resting place of good ol’ Slim in the Afghanistan War wing. “Good for Slim,” Sarge says. “The army brass must figure he won’t be back.”
It’s time for Sarge to start the day’s resurrections, but something about Unknown has him baffled. “That new hero has a neat hole in his forehead,” he says. “So how come there’s only a dent in his helmet?”
Another helmet on his desk — the one Slim left behind when he scrammed — catches his attention. He does a double-take. “Can’t be.” His eye sockets bulge. “It’s gone!” He rubs the spot where, for ten years running, there’s been a fatal bullet hole. In its place, Slim’s helmet now sports only a dent. “With no bullet hole there, Slim never would’ve detoured here!” To check his reasoning, Sarge frantically searches the census book for Slim’s name. “It’s gone, too!”
The paradox of the two helmets wholly befuddles the sergeant. He wants to solve the mystery, but all the distractions have him late getting the risings started. He flips over the hourglass instead and looks to the high heavens. “Neeext!”
* * *
Back in Springville, Jo hugs her husband to begin another ordinary day. “Remind your parents, hon. They’ve got both kids next weekend.”
“Why?” Slim says.
Don’t you remember? It’ll be our ninth wedding anniversary!”
“Oh yeah,” Slim says. “Then that reminds me. I’ll be home late tonight.”
“Why?”
“I’m attending evening Mass after work. My army buddy died in a foxhole ten years ago today.”
“That was sad,” Jo says. “I never got to meet him. What was his name again?”
“He blew things up. We called him the Boomer.”
Copyright © 2020 by John Mara
