Free Bone Music by Alan Rodgers Page B

common sense, cleaning up a girl who’d begun to fall apart!
    Emma shook her head and went back to the kitchen for more coffee.
    Lisa followed her.
    “I’m scared, Mama,” Lisa said.
    Emma bit her lip. She wanted to wail, or shout, or — something. She wanted to find God and ring his ears for letting her daughter fall into such a state.
    She really did.
    And as she thought that blasphemy, the last bits of her faith slipped away from her so quietly she didn’t even notice.
    She bit her lower lip.
    “I’m frightened too, child,” she said. She kept trying to think. Rot was about germs, wasn’t it? And germs hate heat, and they hate disinfectants.
    That was no help at all. What was she going to do, boil her daughter? Pickle her in rum?
    And that was when it came to her, the terrible idea that she never should have thought.
    Alcohol.
    There was rubbing alcohol in the cabinet, wasn’t there? Emma stepped into the bathroom, opened the cabinet, and found a half-empty bottle of rubbing alcohol.
    Not enough. Half a bottle of alcohol wasn’t enough to wash a girl falling apart with the rot. They needed more — a whole tub full of the stuff. “You wait here in the closet, baby,” Emma said. “I’ve got to go to the grocery.” She stooped, kissed Lisa’s forehead — and felt more tiny fragments of Lisa’s skin flake away on her lips.
    They tasted like cured meat.
    Emma tried not to think about the flavor, because the more she thought about it the more she wanted to get sick, but whether she thought about it or not the taste of preserved meat followed her all the way to the store.
    And home again to Lisa, huddled and crumbling in her closet. Lisa was asleep there when Emma got back.
    “Lisa?” Emma said. She pulled the clothes aside and looked into the closet. Lisa was curled up in the corner of the closet with her head tucked into her chest and her hands folded over her stomach. “Lisa, are you awake, honey?”
    Lisa looked up and nodded. The whites of her too-small eyes were dull yellow. “Mama,” she said, “I’m scared.” She looked afraid, too. She looked terrified.
    Emma bit into her lower lip. “I’m scared too, baby. Come on.” She put up her hand to help Lisa up, but Lisa didn’t take it. She stood up on her own, and when Emma moved aside she walked out of the closet.
    “What’re you going to do, Mama?”
    “I’m going to give you a bath, baby. With something that’ll stop what’s happening to your body.” Emma said. “You get yourself undressed and get in the bathtub, and I’ll get everything ready.”
    Lisa looked like she didn’t really believe what Emma was saying, but she did as her mother asked all the same. When Emma got to the bathroom with the shopping bag Lisa had her nightgown up over her head. She finished taking it off and stepped into the tub without even turning around.
    “Put the stopper in the tub for me, baby,” Emma said. She took a bottle of alcohol from the bag, carried it to Lisa.
    And something down in her heart started shouting at her, telling her she was about to make a terrible mistake.
    A terrible, terrible mistake.
    But that was silly, wasn’t it? Silly. Lisa was sick and she was falling apart and Emma had to do something, didn’t she? Something, anything to save her?
    The voice in her heart said it was better to do nothing, but that had to be wrong, didn’t it?
    Had to be.
    And so despite the best counsel of her heart Emma doused her daughter in spirit liquor.
    Spirit liquor.
    The old word, the real word, for the alcohol in liquor is spirit. The reason we use that word is lost so far back in time and drunkenness that very few recall it, but it’s no mistake — there’s magic deep in alcohol, and not just intoxication.
    Lisa was a dead girl made live by necromantic sacrilege, as magical as anyone who’s ever walked the earth. When Emma washed her in that spirit liquor she made a mistake she never stopped regretting.
    “This may sting a little,” Emma