K is for Knucklebones
Continued from 08/12/2026
She glanced at the basement door the lock on the outside and felt Jonah’s small hand in hers. His fingers tugging at her grip, he did not want to go down. Destiny pulled anyway. The voice had promised that if they hid well enough, Elsie would never find the bones and the bones would be theirs.
“No,” adult Destiny moaned as the memory tried to infect her mind.
The parlor snapped back around her. She was on her knees before the mantel; the photograph crushed in one fist. Her other hand pressed to her mouth, not hard enough to stop the words from coming out.
“I didn’t lock it,” she whispered. “I didn’t.”
From the dining room, the bones rattled once.
Not agreement. Not denial. A prompt.
Destiny looked at the photograph in her hand. Jonah’s printed face had wrinkled where her fingers clenched it. On the back, Elsie’s sentence had changed. The ink still wet.
Before the counting. had become Before she closed the door.
Destiny made a guttural sound that scraped against her throat. The house remained silent, waiting for her to correct it, waiting for her to lie.
She could have said, I didn’t. She could have said, I was a child. She could have said, It made me.
Instead, Destiny lowered the photograph to the carpet and forced herself to say the only sentence that felt honest.
“I don’t remember closing it.”
The floorboards under her knees relaxed with a long sigh.
From somewhere below, a child began to knock back.
Destiny stayed on her knees until the knocking stopped.
It did not fade. It counted itself out. Eight soft knocks, patient and hollow, each one rising through the floorboards into the bones of her legs. When the last knock came, she knew without wanting to that something below had finished waiting.
The photograph lay face up on the carpet. Destiny did not pick it up. She was afraid the words on the back would have changed again, and more afraid they would not have to.
She stood, her knees cracking. Across the hall, the dining room waited in a strip of gray morning light, the table and chairs ordinary, yet out of place. The bones sat scattered near Elsie’s notebook. The one that had rolled beneath the sideboard was back with the others.
She noticed that first.
Then she noticed the basement door was open.
Not wide. Only a hands width. Enough for the darkness beyond it to show itself. Enough for the smell to enter the room. Wet dirt, old stone, mouse droppings, and the sour sweetness that had been waiting under every other smell since she arrived.
“I closed you,” Destiny said.
The door gave a small inward creak, as if to argue the point.
On the dining table, Elsie’s notebook lay open to a page Destiny had not seen before. She did not want to look but couldn’t stop herself.
Do not bring fire below. Do not bring mirrors below. Do not bring the bones below unless you mean to feed what taught them to speak.
Destiny read the warning twice. Then she looked at her hands.
The velvet pouch was already in her left fist.
She opened her fingers with a soft moan. The pouch dropped to the floor, but the red string had tangled around her ring finger, looped tight enough to blanch the skin. For one terrible second she thought of Jonah’s hand slipping in hers on the stairs, and the memory came with the sensation of small bones grinding against her knuckles.
She tore the string loose and left the pouch where it fell.
Destiny went to the basement door with both hands held against her chest, fingers folded into fists to keep them honest. The dirt trail crossed the threshold and vanished down the stairs. She stood in front of the opening and listened.
Nothing moved below.
Then, very softly, from the dark under the stairs, Jonah said, “You came back.”
Destiny closed her eyes. Elsie’s warning rose in her mind: If it speaks in the boy’s voice, do not answer aloud.
She pressed her lips together until they hurt.
“I knew you would,” the voice continued. “You always came when I counted.”
To be continued 08/26/2026
Richard Schiver 
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