Free Prophet of Bones by Ted Kosmatka Page B

after we’re gone. It’s as close as you can get to a permanent record of our lives.
    It was in the silence and austerity of the bone room that Paul first learned that bones can answer you. They can whisper their secrets across a distance of millennia.
    Now he adjusted the light. With a latexed hand, he brushed the dirt away. Here was the radius, impossibly small. Like a child’s arm, though beside it rested a portion of tiny jaw—the adult molars already worn smooth.
    Bone is made primarily of soft collagen and crystalline calcium phosphate. Although resistant to change and to decay, it is rarely featureless. Bone is the scaffolding on which our lives are slung, and it shows the marks of this interface. The stronger a person is, the more they mark their skeleton. There are foramina, tubercles, grooves, and tuberosities, the raised marks of muscle and ligament attachments. There are signs of trauma and healing, the stresses and strains of our lives, written in bone. And other secrets.
    Bone is recycled by the living body. Calcium is laid down and picked up in a repeating pattern of formation and resorption. A never-ending cycle of birth, growth, and senescence. Like nature itself.
    From above came a sound, the rattle of the tarp, pulling Paul from his reverie. Then a voice called down, “Paul?”
    “Yeah,” Paul answered.
    “You’re up early today.” It was Gavin. “Didn’t expect to see you down there.”
    “I was checking on one last thing.”
    “Everything okay?”
    “Yeah. I’m good.”
    “You need anything?”
    “No, I’m done here.” Paul stood and gripped the ladder. He clicked off his light and climbed back up to the land of the living.
    *   *   *
    Days passed.
    The dig continued. The rain continued. Jungle heat and jungle sounds. The hack of machetes on firewood. The chatter of men.
    Flores.
    In the distance, the Wae Racang River hissed white static against the rocks, an ever-present roar that played background music to the clamor of the busy camp.
    By the fourth day, Paul had grown tired of watching everyone work. He had his samples carefully sealed in their protective lozenges. Until more bones were discovered, he technically had nothing to do, so he gave himself a job. He joined the local labor force and helped carry buckets of soil between the sieves.
    At first the Manggarai workers eyed him suspiciously, this strange, big American with the Asian face, but as the hours wore on they gradually warmed to him. Cebong Lewe they called him, and later, sitting around the campfire, one of the researchers explained that this meant “bathe long,” referring to Paul’s habit of taking a dip in the river at the end of the workday. He lumbered among them, toting buckets of soil in each hand. He could carry more than they could, but he couldn’t squat, couldn’t kneel in the dirt, hunched for hours over the sieves. The workers rotated in their duties, first carrying buckets, then taking turns working at the fine-mesh grates. After only minutes at the sieves, Paul’s knees were screaming. His calves burned like fire. He was too big, too heavy to fold himself up like that. He traded jobs with one of the bucket carriers, who seemed confused by the offer of trade. Paul realized the Manggarai viewed the bucket carrying as the work and the sieving as a break.
    Back in the United States, Paul’s principal form of exercise had been kayaking. He paddled the cold waters of the Chesapeake for three seasons of the year, pulling himself along with the strength of his arms.
    Now Paul trudged the buckets back and forth—his body, he discovered, being particularly well suited to the role of pack animal.
    The native population of Flores divided itself into a half dozen tribes: the Lio, the Sikka, the Bajawa, the Endenese, the Ngadha, and the Nagekeo. Some of the tribes were related, others not at all. Paul had studied a book on the island’s history on the long flight over. Flores sat in an intertidal zone