Free The Bone Parade by Mark Nykanen

she’s Anne Bancroft in
The Miracle Worker
,” Diamond Girl shakes her head at her mother, “but I don’t
think
so!”
    She’s a pistol, and apparently a bit of a film buff to boot. Well, let’s see how she likes this one. Let’s see how they all like this one.
    I dim the lights and turn on the tape, and as promised up pops Julie Andrews singing in
The Sound of Music
.
    But then there’s a rough cut, if you’ll excuse the pun, and they’re no longer hearing the marvelous voice of Ms. Andrews but the screams, and they are chilling, of a young girl.
Family Planning #8
’s, as a matter of fact. Just a little younger than Diamond Girl. She’s strapped to a table, and she’s staring to the side. She pulls at the leather restraints, and each effort produces a show of muscle that I suspect only I am appreciating, though Sonny-boy’s eyes are wide open. Perhaps he’s never seen a naked girl, aside from his cellmates. I presume their bared flesh holds little interest for him, though there’s no telling with this family.
    The camera looks down on her. The lighting is harsh (I’m no cinematographer), but the focus is good. And now the camera starts to tilt in the direction the girl is looking. Slowly, we begin to see that she’s watching another TV where the writhing figure of a woman lies on a stainless steel table beneath a cover of what appears to be green clay. It is, in fact, alginate, the gummy material dentists use to take an impression of teeth. The woman is choking to death; her ghastly green body has become one long spasm. Her grunts are extremely disturbing.
    “There’s more to come,” I say with impressive eeriness. At least I think so, but Diamond Girl doesn’t miss a beat:
    “Oooo,” she coos, “real spooky, dude. Can I go first,” she adds in a bored voice. “So I can get the fuck out of here.”
    But she’s the only one talking. June, for once, is speechless. Jolly Roger stares at me, and Sonny-boy has lost all fascination with frontal nudity, and is crying again.
    “That was her mom, right? The one that was choking.”
    “That’s very observant of you, Diamond Girl.”
    I can hear the wariness in my voice. She’s done this to me, made
me
wary. I don’t like that, not one bit, but I’m intrigued.
    “So I’ll get to see something like that too?” She smiles at her mother, who isn’t looking; she’s leaning against the cage with her head down.
    “Maybe I’ll make you go first, and let her watch,” I say.
    “No,” she says, cocky as a one-eyed whore in the land of the blind (to give a new twist to an old line), “you’re not going to do that. You’re going to kill her first, then my dad, then my brother, and then you’re going to kill me.”
    She’s right, but how does she know? I actually want to ask, but I’m not going to concede her anything. Then, as it turns out, I don’t have to because she says, “I know because that’s how I’d do it.”
    I observe them for hours on a monitor in my bedroom. I have three cameras, two set into the walls and one in the ceiling right above them. I’m certain they haven’t noticed. There’s not that much to see; a camera’s eye is quite small, and the walls and ceiling are unfinished, rough in appearance.
    But I see a great deal. June has just finished playing another in an interminable round of tic-tac-toe with Sonny-boy. This one went on for more than two hours of drawing Xs and Os in the dirt, then smoothing them over with her palms, playing without talking. They’ve been doing this for weeks.
    Jolly Roger sits leaning against the wall most of the time, and when he does move he grips his lower back, like he’s got a disc out. He hasn’t complained, hasn’t said much of anything in days.
    Diamond Girl watches her family as intensely as I do. When Jolly Roger tried to talk to her yesterday, she told him to “back off.”
    I’ve caught her staring at the walls and ceiling too, as if she suspects that I’m watching; and after