The Bone Reader of Tucson by Dana Wall

The bones spoke to Angelina the way other women heard gossip over garden fences. Snake vertebrae whispered of rain coming from the east. Coyote teeth predicted claim jumpers and cattle thieves. But it was the human bones that spoke loudest, and those she kept hidden beneath her floorboards, wrapped in red silk stolen from a dead Chinese merchant’s shop. Each bundle reminded her of her own lost child, the daughter whose bones she’d never found to read.

Today, the sheriff’s wife brought a child’s knucklebone.

“Found it in the wash,” Mrs. Hamilton said, her black mourning dress attracting the desert heat like a curse. “Tell me if it’s Tommy’s.”

Angelina didn’t need to read this bone to know. Three months ago, she’d warned the sheriff about Tommy—how the boy’s future scattered like buckshot when she cast her bones. But men like Hamilton didn’t listen to Mexican widows who lived alone at the edge of town, not until their sons vanished into the desert’s hungry mouth. She’d been invisible to them even before Pablo died in the mine collapse, leaving her with nothing but his broken bones to read their shared future cut short.

She took the bone anyway, letting her fingertips trace its sun-bleached surface. The story rose up like heat waves off sand: Tommy running from something that moved like a man but wasn’t, something that wore a preacher’s coat and smiled with teeth made of darkness. The boy had tried to hide in Mission Creek’s dry riverbed, but the thing that wasn’t a man had found him there. Just like it had found Elena, six years ago, when Angelina’s daughter had gone to fetch water and never returned.

“Your boy died brave,” she said, because that’s what mothers needed to hear. She didn’t mention how Tommy had screamed, how the thing had opened its coat to show a ribcage full of stolen children’s bones. She’d seen that ribcage in her dreams for years, searching the collected bones for Elena’s familiar shape.

Mrs. Hamilton’s hands trembled as she reached for her purse. “I can pay—”

“Keep your money.” Angelina pressed the knucklebone back into the woman’s palm. “But tell your husband to stop looking. What took Tommy isn’t finished hunting.”

After Mrs. Hamilton left, Angelina pulled up the loose floorboard where she kept her most powerful bones. They were arranged by type—cattle rustler fingerbones, desert rat skulls, rattlesnake fangs. But it was the jarful of ravens’ wishbones she needed now. She’d been collecting them for years, trading dried herbs and folk remedies to boys who’d shoot anything that flew.

The bones clattered as she spread them on her table, arranging them in a pattern old as the Spanish missions. Her grandmother had taught her this, before the consumption took her, leaving Angelina only a spine picked clean by desert winds to remember her by.

The wishbones told a story she already knew: the thing in the preacher’s coat had been here before. It came with the drought years, when children were easier to tempt with promises of cool water and shade. It wore different faces then—a schoolmaster, a traveling doctor, once even a Tribune reporter looking for stories about the Territory.

Angelina gathered the wishbones back into their jar. Tonight, she would need to visit her grandmother’s grave, to ask forgiveness for what she planned. Reading bones was one thing—breaking the rules about life and death was another. But she had watched too many mothers in black dresses, heard too many bones whisper their children’s last moments.

The sun was setting when she heard boots on her porch. Sheriff Hamilton stood silhouetted in her doorway, hat in hands.

“Mrs. Ruiz,” he said, using Pablo’s name like a shield. “About Tommy—”

“You want to know if he suffered.” Angelina didn’t look up from the bones she was wrapping. Each one felt like a promise she’d made the day Elena disappeared—a promise to other mothers, that their children wouldn’t become memories wrapped in silk. “That’s not why you’re here.”

Hamilton shifted his weight, leather creaking. “Two more children missing. Martinez girl and the Cooper boy. Tracks lead to the old mission.”

Now she met his eyes. “You didn’t believe me before.” Just as no one had believed her about Elena, about the shadow she’d seen near the well that day.

“I believe my wife. She says—she says you know things.”

Angelina tied off the last bundle of bones. “The thing you’re hunting isn’t human anymore. Maybe never was. It collects children’s bones like I collect ravens’. Uses them for something worse than reading.” She thought of Elena’s smile, of the way she used to braid crosses from desert grass. Some memories were stronger than bone-speak.

“Can you stop it?”

She thought of her grandmother’s warnings about using bones for more than reading. The old woman had seen this coming, perhaps—had taught Angelina the forbidden rituals not just for knowledge, but for vengeance. For justice. She thought of Tommy’s knucklebone in his mother’s trembling hands, of Elena’s empty bed, of all the children she couldn’t save because no one would listen to a Mexican widow’s warnings.

“Yes,” she said. “But you won’t like how.”

That night, Angelina walked into the desert carrying her grandmother’s spine in a sack made of burial shrouds. Elena had helped her weave the first of these shrouds, before the thing in the preacher’s coat had taken her. The old mission’s bell tower cut a broken tooth against stars sharp as bone splinters. Inside, she could hear children crying—some alive, some only echoes trapped in stolen bones. She wondered if Elena’s voice was among them.

She didn’t need to read the bones anymore to know what would happen next. She had her grandmother’s spine, and the knowledge that some monsters could only be fought with borrowed death. The price would be high, but she was tired of mothers in black dresses, tired of bones whispering stories that ended in screams. Tired of being the one who survived to read the bones of the dead.

Perhaps this was what her grandmother had prepared her for, what Elena’s loss had taught her—that sometimes love meant becoming the monster that killed monsters. That justice sometimes wore a widow’s face and carried dead women’s bones.

Angelina untied the shroud and began her work. Tomorrow, the sheriff would find seven living children and one dead Mexican widow with a spine made of desert-bleached bone. But for now, she had monsters to kill, and her grandmother’s last lessons to complete. And somewhere, in the darkness beyond death, Elena was waiting for her mother to read her bones one last time, to tell her story not in screams, but in victory.

Dana Wall

Image by No Way from Pixabay – Bones of a spine with short pieces of ribs attached laying on stony ground.