Free Prophet of Bones by Ted Kosmatka Page A

something, and the woman with the white shirt turned and said, “Some people have nicknamed it the hobbit.”
    “What?”
    “Flores man—the hobbit. You know, little people three feet tall.”
    “Tolkien would be proud,” a voice contributed.
    “A mandible, a complete cranium, segments of a radius, and left inominate.”
    “But what is it?”
    “It is what it is.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Hey, are you staying on?”
    The question was out there for three seconds before Paul realized it was aimed at him. The woman’s brown eyes were searching across the fire. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m staying.”
    Then the voice again, “But what is it?”
    “That is the question, isn’t it?”
    Paul took another swallow—thinking of the bones and trying to cool the voice of disquiet in his head.
    *   *   *
    Paul learned about her during the next couple of days, the woman with the white shirt. Her name was Margaret. She was twenty-eight. Australian. Some fraction aborigine on her mother’s side, but you could only see it for sure in her mouth. The rest of her could have been Dutch, English, whatever. But that full mouth: teeth like Ruteng children’s, teeth like dentists might dream.
    She tied her brown hair back from her face, so it didn’t hang in her eyes while she worked in the hole. This was her sixth dig, she told him. “This is the one.” She sat on the stool while Paul took her blood, a delicate index finger extended, red pearl rising to spill her secrets.
    “Most archaeologists go a whole lifetime without a big find,” she said. “Maybe you get one. Probably none. But this is the one I get to be a part of.”
    “What about the Leakeys?” Paul asked, dabbing her finger with cotton.
    “Bah.” She waved at him in mock disgust. “They get extra. Bloody Kennedys of archaeology.”
    Despite himself, Paul laughed.

10
    This latest evidence brings us to the so-called dogma of common descent, whereby each species is seen as a unique and individual creation, discrete from all others. Therefore all men, living and dead, are descended from a common one-time creational event. To be outside of this lineage, no matter how similar in appearance, is to be other than man.
    —Journal of Heredity
    Bone is a text. It writes its history for those able to read it.
    When Paul first started at Westing, he often worked late into the evenings. Many nights in the bone room, he would lay the skeletal remains out carefully on the clean blue felt, articulating the pieces, forming an assemblage. He matched the bones in front of him to the perfect image he held in his head.
    But now, as he sat alone at the bottom of Gavin’s pit, he found that no perfect image rose up in his mind. He looked at the bones, and his imagination failed him. The lights cast strange shadows across the phalanx of chalky gray-white material. Heat from the lamp made steam in the damp air. The pit smelled of earth and muck.
    Somewhere above him, it was almost morning, just before dawn. In a few minutes, the rest of the camp would wake and the day would start. The team would congregate and climb down into the pit to continue the dig. Paul had woken early, needing one last look at what couldn’t possibly exist.
    “What are you?” he whispered into the silence of the pit. He gently blew dust away from the surface of the bone.
    Anatomy textbooks say there are 206 bones in the human body, but this is not strictly true. There exists a range of variation. The number of vertebrae in the coccyx, for example, is not fixed in the human species. Some people have more, some less. Also, there exists in some individuals of Mesoamerican ancestry an extra cranial suture. By virtue of its presence, this additional suture creates an additional bone: the Inca bone, which lies at the base of the skull in direct conjugation with the lambdoid suture and the sagittal suture.
    In spite of what the Bible says, men and women possess the same number of ribs.
    Bone is what remains of us