Headstone

This is the beginnings of a story I started writing quit awhile ago. I decided to pick it up again and begin rewriting it. This is only a blurb. It's something of a scifi horror.

Born from soil soaked with bestial urine, a worm fights consciousness. It barely cries in its half asleep state. It is a quiet infant, which means it will one day grow into a volatile beast. 

A voice from above shushes the wiggling thing. It’s a larger beast, gentle and loving in its nurture, which means it will badly hurt the worm one day. 

I hope you remember what I am telling you. I know you have only just been born, but this is very important. Birds will peck at you, feet will squish you, rain will cease suddenly and you will suffer. 

Vulnerable thing, when you see brutal sunshine; don’t turn away. This is where it starts. 

My name is Headstone, after my grandfather who loved headstones but never got one of his own. I was told he died a poor leper. He tumbled in an ugly way, like a beached whale, in some gravel field where he laid to rest with nothing but his own bones to signify he once existed. My father found it so pitiful that he gave me this equally macabre name. I hated it so much when I was a little thing. Now? In my walking death? In my working tomb? I find it fitting enough.

Headstone stumbles, regains speed, and stumbles again with every hot puffy breath heaved from their bone dry mouth. They were stupidly late for the train this morning- a whole five minutes! The horrible dingy contraption made of skunk pelts and big giant ribcages grunts and burps along the rusty iron tracks. In all honesty, the train really isn’t that fast, it barely runs really, it chugs along at probably fifteen miles per hour. But Headstone is short and stocky, not fast at all, so their tongue swings out like a dog and their knees begin to ache and all of these other awful unhealthy things as they try their very best to catch the only train that runs today.

“Last ride to the Ostymill! Last ride to the Ostymill!” yells the boxboy from the back patio of the train. 

Headstone wants to yell back, I know you unthoughtful ignoramus! I’m trying to catch up! I’m trying I’m trying I’m trying! Instead, they sort of grunt angrily and mouth breathe some more.

At last, they begin to reach the train, holding out their arms like a toddler wanting to be picked up by its mother. 

Ah! There, they grasp the railing and heave themselves up over it, falling flat onto their back against the beetle-eaten wooden patio. Headstone catches their breath, thoroughly relieved they will not be late or missing from work today.

“Y’alright there?” 

Headstone looks up through their eyelashes, squinting away from the beating white sun parallel to them. The boxboy is standing over them, seemingly mildly concerned, but more so like he’s bored and looking for something to occupy himself with, rather than that he actually cares. 

“Yeah, it’s fine, yeah” Headstone says as they push themselves up on their hands and knees. The boxboy looks them over before curtly swinging around and entering the door into the rattling train car. Headstone clumsily follows behind him. 

The only light inside the car is the daylight misting in through the windows. It’s furry and boney everywhere. Black and white raggedy fur and yellowing bones, in an anatomically inaccurate and tubular way, as if a child crushed a skunk in its mean little fist until it was cylindrical and could be used as a building block. one big petrified corpus running on bone oil. There are no seats on the back of the train, one must succumb themselves to sitting on the matted floor.

There are only three other passengers in the car: on the left there is a middle aged woman with short curly hair, adorning a loud sundress. Headstone recognizes her, they had probably chatted sometime or the other. The most striking thing about the woman is the mountain of bags sitting beside her, all full to the seams, seeping pink liquid and smelling rancid, like month old corpses wrapped in bubblegum and fished out of a septic hole. 

There is a nervous young boy in the far left corner, dressed in muddy gray. His right hand is missing, the femur bone sticking out of the appendage, the skin having healed around the wound. On the right side of the car there is a bearded man neurotically scribbling in a journal with an ink-tipped chicken foot. His eyes are bloodshot and his clothes are stained in yellow. Headstone adjusts their gray earflap cap and tussles sweaty black hair out of their eyes. They look over at the bulging pile of bags and gag discreetly at the odor, very decidedly sliding down the right wall of the car. they sit a few feet away from the man, turning away while trying not to get a whiff of whatever’s in those bags.

“Oh, Headstone, hello dear,” says the woman once she notices them. 

“Uh, yes, hello uh,” Headstone kicks the watermill in their head, searching for a name. fortunately, the woman begins speaking again before she can realize Headstone's ignorance.

“I’m on my way to the confectionery, you see. I’m picking up some violet gelatins for my nephew. It’s his birthday on the 200th, you see. His party must be splendid, as all birthday parties are, as you must know,” Headstone does not know, their birthdays had never been splendid, “I’m picking up a whole box, which costs fifteen orblets nowadays! Can you believe it? Ugh, what all this bonerucking and dustmuckage has done to this town. I’ll say, you’re on your way to work right now, aren’t you Headstone?”

“Uh, yes, I am, yes.”

“Oh, these sorrowful youths working bone until they are worked to the bone.” she dramatically sighs, poofing up her hair and adjusting the tiny round spectacles on her nose. Headstone thinks about the bones in their body and how chipped and cracked they must be. Beatle-eaten looking bones, full of holes and built upon poor infrastructure. How sad, but everything is sad, so a thought like that is ultimately unremarkable. 

The train slows and screeches to halt. An unlatching sound comes from the square side door and it pops open. The man with the chicken's foot stops writing suddenly, quickly looking outside of the windows before jumping up from the floor and stuffing his journal and writing utensil into his trousers. He practically sprintes off the train, but not so well as it appears he has a bad leg. Headstone watches him limp and pull up his pants, running out into some sand and gravel. There is not a building in sight, and the sky is gray. 

It may have been five more minutes or twenty more minutes or forty long years, But the train arrives at Headstone’s place of work. The Ostymill chugs into view, slightly obscured by the dark gray smoke of the train's chimney. The mill is a series of disconnected stone slab walls with no roofs and no floors. Some a bit crooked and some crumbling into heaps. The primary building, though barely a building, resides at the very front. It is the tallest structure and has a golden metal gate with two arches that bloom into ornate and flowery sculptings. Utterly useless and only for show. Metal machinery can be seen littered about the place. Tall sharp-toothed sheerlegs bending with visibly strained pulleys, spidery grapples hoisting large rib cages from one station to the next, rusted skid loaders squealing as the unoiled joints struggle to push a heap of ost into the unending mountain of bones collected at the back of the mill, towering over the dusty field as it is all the eye can see.