Free Plow the Bones by Douglas F. Warrick Page A

locked inside his own body, pounding his fists against the walls and screaming, No, damn it! Don’t do this to me now! Give it back, it’s mine, it’s been mine for eighty–four goddamned years! It’s my body, my mind, let me have it back!
    “You’re running out. I understand.” Eisley stood up, brushed his hands down the front of his brown pants, the pleats standing out from the shadows they cast. They were too long on him, bunching around his well–polished loafers. This was the way with Eisley. Everything always polished. Everything always just slightly ill fitting. “I hope,” he said, his eyes disappearing again behind the great white flood in his spectacles, “that you’re right, Cotton. About this being the last, I mean. I hope that quite sincerely.”
    The things in the shadows, slick and black, smiling with their whole faces, crawled forward. Cotton closed his eyes again.

    §

    He changed his major after that lecture with Professor Eisley. There was some fall–out. His father was an engineer. His grandfather, too, and even though neither man ever said anything, Cotton was sure they both felt a little betrayed. In the end, biology offered something to Cotton that engineering never would. It was the same something that had him up nights on his honeymoon in Jamaica, long after Audrey had fallen asleep. Just watching the bugs gather on the porch light of their small bungalow. It charged him. Because despite what Eisley said, and in part because of it, biology was about life. Every organism on earth had this crazy seizure of energy and emotion for a short period, had the chance to change everything, and then fizzled out and died. Maybe with a big romantic exclamation, a Cotton Lee kind of exit. Maybe with a period. And then there was something new. Something to change the things the first creature changed, change them even more.
    And, of course, there was Eisley. Eisley in his office with his books and desk and his lamp that seemed to be designed to send that glare over his eyes. At every opportunity, Cotton would take a spot as Eisley’s lab or research assistant. Cotton with his white lab coat digging through the riverbanks or furiously scribbling notes from a thousand books about tree frogs or taking dictation as Eisley paced around his office with that weird lunatic sending lightning bolts from his brain. And yet, no matter the project, no matter how excited and crazy he became, there was something dishonest about everything he did. Like all of this was just to fill time. To keep up appearances. Because Eisley, Cotton knew even then, was the king of liars.

    §

    “How long?” asked Cotton. He could see the shiny wet head of one of the shadowy things, the lamprey–children, the sucker–babies, just cresting over the metal guardrail of the bed. He could hear them everywhere, maybe fifteen of them in all, crawling across the walls and the ceiling like lizards. Chattering. “How long, Dr. Eisley?”
    Eisley put his hands in the pockets of his blazer and grinned a little. “A long time, Cotton. They’ve been around for a very, very long time. And, I suppose, so have I, though not nearly as long.”
    They crawled between his legs, pawing at those perfect deep pleats in his pants with their bulbous fingers. They were like his children, swarming around him, looking up at him with such a clear expression of fondness that they almost looked human. But they weren’t his children. He was their chauffer, their custodian, shuttling them around in the shadows all around him to find the next dying fish. They’d been doing it forever, maybe, and maybe Eisley wasn’t the only one. Maybe he wasn’t even Eisley, or maybe there was no Eisley and he sprang fully–formed into the memories of all of their flailing supper–times, granting context and familiarity and anesthetic. Maybe it didn’t matter.
    Their grins disappeared. Their mouths changed. Cotton watched the skin around their dark slimy lips stretch