Richard Schiver

Author: RichardSchiver

Weekly Writing Challenge 07/15/2026

K is for Knucklebones

Continued from 07/08/2026

The following pages were worse because they were much neater. Elsie’s handwriting had become careful, reverent, each line spaced like scripture.

The bones are not dice. Do not shake them for sport. Do not cast them in anger. Do not cast them where mirrors may see. Never ask the same question twice. Never ask a question whose answer you already fear.

Destiny read the rules once, then again, slow enough that each sentence became heavier than the last. The house had gone quiet. Even the rain seemed to be holding its breath.

On the next page Elsie had drawn the seven bones in different arrangements. Each pattern had a name. The listening hand, the shut eye, the crooked ladder, the open mouth. The drawings were precise. Beneath them were translations in a strange shorthand.

Hand: something hears.
Eye: something sees.
Ladder: something climbs.
Mouth: something answers.

Destiny glanced at the bones on the table. They had not changed position, but now that she knew the shape had a name, she could not unsee it. The listening hand. Seven small pieces curved toward her, as attentive as a child pretending not to eavesdrop.

She turned another page.

Each throw allows one question from the living. Each answer permits one question from the dead. Speak plainly. Lie to the dead and you owe a chamber.

The word chamber had been underlined so hard the pen had torn the paper.

Destiny pressed her thumb against the tear. The paper gave beneath her skin. For one mad instant she imagined pushing through it, into some small dark room on the other side of the page.

Below the rule, Elsie had written a warning in smaller letters:

A chamber may be a room. A chamber may be a memory. A chamber may be the mouth, the hand, the sleep, the name. The dead do not need doors if the living make room for them.

A sound escaped Destiny, too small to be a laugh and too dry to be a sob.

“Dead people don’t ask questions,” she said.

From upstairs, a floorboard creaked. Then another. Two careful steps, directly above the dining room. Ceiling dust drifted down through the light in a pale line.

Destiny slammed the notebook shut.

The bones clicked.

Not loudly. Not enough to be sure. But when she looked down, the bone marked J.V. had shifted away from the curve of the hand and was now pointed toward the staircase.

She pushed away from the table, backing into the parlor, unable to stop staring at it. Her heel struck the leg of the piano bench, and the bench scraped an inch across the floor. The sound too loud in the heavy silence.

In the mantel photograph, Jonah’s printed hand still gripped her printed wrist. Tighter now, she thought, then hated herself for letting the thought escape its prison.

The notebooks remained on the table. She should have packed them away. She should have put the bones back in the pouch, tied the red string, locked the box, driven through the rain to the hotel she had canceled. Instead, she returned to the chair.

There are moments, Destiny would later think, when a person does not choose the haunted thing. They choose not to admit they have already chosen it.

She opened the notebook again, deeper this time, past the lists of names and the diagrams, until she found a page where Elsie’s handwriting had broken its neat discipline. The ink slanted downward. Several words had been crossed out so fiercely they were unreadable.

It is not Jonah.

Destiny stopped breathing.

The next line had been written larger.

It learned about him from us.

Beneath that, almost hidden in the crease of the binding, Elsie had added one final instruction:

If it speaks in the boy’s voice, do not answer aloud. If it speaks in your voice, leave before you remember why.

A slow cold opened inside Destiny, not in her chest but behind her eyes, as if a window had been raised in a room she had not known was there.

Upstairs, the child began to count.

“One.”

Destiny closed her hands around the edge of the table.

“Two.”

The voice was Jonah’s. Of course it was. High and soft and slightly breathless, the way he had sounded when he ran too far ahead and called back from places she could not see.

“Three.”

At seven, the bones on the table rattled once.

At eight, Destiny whispered, “Stop.”

The counting stopped.

For three heartbeats, the house was silent.

Then, from the ceiling, in a voice that was not Jonah’s but hers, younger and bright with fear, came the answer.

“You first.”

To be continued!

July 15, 2026
Weekly Writing Challenge 07/08/2026

K is for Knucklebones Pt 3

Destiny read it twice. Then a third time, because the first two readings refused to change the words into something sensible.

She should have put the key down. She knew this with a clarity reserved for bad decisions as they are being made. Instead, she slid the key into the lock.

The click was small, but the house heard it anyway.

The radiator knocked once in response. The kitchen window gave a soft pop in its frame. The piano in the parlor exhaled one low, silent note. Destiny froze with her fingers on the lid until all sound died into silence.

Inside the sewing box there were no needles, no thread, or folded scraps of cloth. There was only a black velvet pouch tied with a piece of red string. The same one that had caused her so much trouble as a child. Beneath it a stack of small notebooks bound by the same red string.

The pouch looked soft, it wasn’t, the fabric stiff with age. When Destiny lifted it, something inside pressed back against her palm with the hard insistence of knuckles beneath the skin.

A smell rose from inside the box. Dust, candle smoke, and the sour-sweet odor from beneath the floorboards. Her mouth filled with the taste of pennies.

She untied the string.

The bones slid out onto the table before she tipped the pouch. There were seven of them, each small enough to close in a fist, polished yellow white with age. They did not tumble randomly. They arranged themselves in a loose curve, like fingers waiting to be counted.

Destiny pushed back from the table so quickly the chair legs screamed against the floor.

For a moment she was not thirty-two. She was eight, crouched in the pantry with Jonah beside her, both trying not to giggle while Elsie called from the kitchen, “Ready or not.” Something dry clicked in Jonah’s cupped hands. He whispered, “Your turn to ask.”

The memory vanished as quickly as it appeared, leaving only questions in its wake.

She leaned over the table. Tiny marks had been carved into the bones, not letters exactly, nor were they symbols she recognized. They looked like cuts that had healed badly. One bone was darker than the others, almost brown at one end, as if it had been held too close to a flame.

Another bore two initials.

J.V.

The carving was fresh. Not new, exactly, but wet-looking, raw in the grooves, as if the bone had been wounded moments before she opened the box. Destiny touched it before she could decide not to.

It was warm.

Not room-warm. Not warmed by her hand. Warm like something that had only moments before lay beneath living flesh.

The table lamp flickered.

Destiny snatched her hand back. The seven bones remained in their curved arrangement. A hand? Was that what Elsie had called it? The memory teased with the promise of a revelation before it faded.

The listening hand?

She had not remembered that phrase in twenty-four years.

From upstairs, directly above the dining room, came a child’s voice.

“Destiny?”

Her name came down through the ceiling with the softness of someone speaking through blankets.

Destiny did not move. Her pulse beat in her throat, in her wrists, behind her eyes. She waited for the practical explanation to arrive. The wind. A neighbor. An animal in the attic. Her own mind, exhausted and cruel, refused to provide one.

The voice spoke again.

“You left me counting.”

Destiny did not go upstairs. Her body wanted to. Her legs tightened toward the staircase as if some older part of her had already decided, but she kept both hands flat on the dining room table until the urge passed. The bones lay between her fingers. None of them moved.

“I’m not doing this,” she said.

The sentence had barely left her mouth before the radiator knocked once, sharp and disapproving.

She forced herself to look away from the ceiling and toward the sewing box. The notebooks waited beneath the place where the pouch had been, tied together with the same red string. The top one had no title. Only one date, written in Elsie’s cramped hand. October 12, 1998. The year Jonah vanished.

Destiny touched the cover. It felt greasy, as if it had been handled by many people. Or by the same person far too often.

She opened it.

The first pages were lists of names. Some she recognized from town. Children who had died in creek floods, farm accidents, fevers before vaccines. One boy struck by a train on the bend near St. Bartholomew’s. Others were only initials, ages, and little marks like the carvings on the bones. Next to several names, Elsie had written one word.

Answered.

What did it mean?

July 8, 2026
Weekly Writing Challenge 07/01/2026

K is for Knucklebones

The inspiration for this story is Christopher Golden’s short story titled: The God Bag. It appeared in the 2021 anthology, Beyond the Veil from Flame Tree Press. Here’s a link of you’d like to check it out. Beyond the Veil

Without further adieu, let’s get into it.

Continued from 06/24/2026

Filled with disgust she looked at the door, at that narrow slit of emptiness, her gaze returning to the porch to find the footsteps had faded with the memory of that day. Taking a deep breath, refusing to reconsider her decision, she pushed into the house against the warnings filing her mind.

The house received her without welcome. This had never really been a home. It was more a way station on the trip to adulthood and the freedom to escape into a wider world where the shadows were simply that. She tried the light switch inside the door without success. The bulb had probably burned out. Using her phone’s flashlight the wide beam slid over framed photographs hanging from the wall, the umbrella stand, and the old radiator beneath the window.

Nothing moved. Nothing had to. The house had always known how to sit still in a way that made it feel deliberate.

Placing her suitcase at the foot of the stairs she tried the light switch at the end of the hall. A faint yellow glow answered from the parlor on the left, offering some comfort from the shadows. She closed the front door; the soft click of the latch answered by another from the depths of the house.

It’s just the pipes. Old houses clicked, they sighed, and they settled. They did not listen. They did not repeat things back.

Destiny crossed into the small parlor. She had expected dust sheets to be covering everything, white and ghostly, but it all remained uncovered. Stiff back chairs gathered around a long table. She remembered silent meals around that polished surface. The three of them eating without a word being exchanged between them. The silence preferable to the alternative.

In the corner stood a glass fronted China cabinet filled with assorted salt and pepper shakers. Elise has collected them with her most cherished filling the top shelf. Several sets had come from other countries, silent testimony to her grandfather’s travels across the globe while he served his country. She never knew her grandfather he had died shortly after Destiny’s mom fled the house.

Maybe that’s why Elise was always so bitter?

In the opposite corner stood a piano that had not been tuned since Jonah disappeared. Between them a fireplace interrupted the flow of the wall, the mantle above full of framed photographs. One was of her grandfather in his uniform, next to it was a photo of Elise, much younger, yet still severe. Destiny’s mother in a graduation gown next to a baby photo of Destiny. The last photo caught her eye and stopped her. She and Jonah as children, squinting into the sun, Jonah’s hand wrapped tightly around her wrist.

She did not remember that. She remembered him as always running ahead, always vanishing around corners, daring her to catch up. She remembered him as motion and seeing him holding onto her caused her stomach to tighten.

“Fine,” she said to the room because the quiet had become too heavy. “We’ll do the easy things first.

The easy things were not easy. Elise kept receipts from grocery stores that no longer existed, church bulletins folded in half, glass jars filled buttons, boxes of rubber bands that had gone brittle with age. Destiny worked at the dining room table, sorting everything into three piles, keep, trash, uncertain. The uncertain pile grew faster than the others.

Every so often a soft sound came from upstairs. A board flexing. A dull thump. Once she thought she heard a child clearing its throat. She did not go looking. It never helped in this house.

Near midnight, with the rain thinning to a whisper, she found Elise’s sewing box in the bottom drawer of the sideboard. She recognized it immediately. The dark walnut polished to a high sheen, brass corners that glowed in the soft light, a lid inlaid with a mother of pearl moon. As a child she had always wanted to touch that moon more than anything else. Elis had slapped her hand once, hard enough to leave an angry red mark and said. “Some things open only because they want out.”

The box was locked, which made things simple, it would go to the uncertain pile. As she moved to place it on the pile something rattled inside. Not shifted. Rattled like a pair of dice in an impatient hand.

She held her breath, the box resting on the table between the piles of Elise’s life. The mother of pearl moon caught the light, glowing faintly blue. From upstairs came an answer. Tap, tap, tap, from the ceiling directly above her head.

“No,” Destiny whispered.

The box rattled again, softer, as if searching for a response.

Destiny busied herself with the piles of papers, sorting, and resorting. From within one of the manila envelopes a small yellow envelope, like the one used to hold a safe deposit box key, hit the table with a distinct click.

From above her head the house answered with a tap of its own.

She looked inside the tiny envelope to find a small key wrapped in a piece of yellow legal pad paper. Shaking it out she unfolded the paper to reveal Elise’ cramped handwriting.

Do not ask what already knows your name.

To be continued!

July 1, 2026
Weekly Writing Challenge 06/24/2026

Let’s try this again. Starting from the top with a new story for the letter K

K is for Knucklebones

The rain followed Destiny from the highway to the county road, and finally to a narrow muddy lane where the trees crowded so close they brushed both sides of the car. Low gray clouds rode along the treetops, deepening the claustrophobic feel that threatened to overwhelm her when she entered that narrow lane. A small part of her wanted to turn back. Take the hotel room she reserved and settle these matters on a day when the sun shined bright enough to dispel the shadows filling the forest.

As she came around the final bend the farmhouse emerged from deep shadows, carrying some of the gloom with it. Crouched at the end of the drive, dark windows like eyes watching the relentless passage of time, filled with secrets she’d rather not explore. As she stared at the house she realized the sound of the rain had changed. No longer soft, it tapped on the roof like impatient fingers warning her away.

The house had not changed as much as she hoped. A part of her wished it would burn to the ground and take all its secrets with it. Instead, it remained standing, though it seemed to have grown more tired since the last time she saw it. The shape was the same. The steep roof, the attic window like a third eye, and the kitchen addition her grandmother Elise called temporary, though it had been there since she was nine.

She and her brother Jonah moved in with their grandmother after their parents were killed in a car accident. She was the only surviving relative they had, and she welcomed their intrusion with a touch of suspicion. Before then they had only ever visited with their parents and never stayed overnight.

The thought awakened an old memory of Destiny in Elise’s parlor when she was seven, searching through the cabinet that had always been kept locked. Small jars lined the shelves, filled with what looked like herbs and spices, though nothing was labeled. On the second shelf from the top was a small black bag next to a stack of notebooks. She clearly remembered reaching for the bag, filled with a sudden need to know what it contained, the clear sound of movement coming from within as her fingers closed around it. The memory faded without resolution and Destiny struggled to remember ever seeing Elise with that bag out.

“It’s only a house,” Destiny said, her voice small inside the empty car.

Elsie had been dead for eleven days. The lawyer said there was nothing urgent, just papers, keys, and ordinary debris left by a life that refused to end neatly. Destiny waited until her delays became unreasonable. She made lists. She booked a hotel in town, then canceled it. She told herself it would be safe enough to sleep one night in a dead woman’s house. But as she gazed at the tired house that had once been as familiar as an old coat, she realized it would have been better to keep the room.

It would have given her the distance she needed to keep the old memories at bay.

Under the porch roof with her suitcase next to her and her phone in one hand, she stared at the narrow gap where the door had opened with a single touch. Who left the door unlocked?

The hinges squealed as the door moved in response to a soft breeze, or an old ghost escaping its prison. Stop it! She demanded of herself.

A damp smell rolled out. Wallpaper paste, cold ash, and wax. Beneath all of it was a sweet, animal scent that made her think of butcher paper folded around bones. A thought so out of place with what memories remained. Only a couple were happy. Her time spent with her grandmother who insisted she call her Elise, had not been bad. But neither were they any good. Her last glimpse of this house had been through the rearview mirror as she drove away into her own life.

Small muddy footprints crossed the porch from the steps to the threshold.

Where did they come from?

The prints were narrow, bare, the toes spread as if the child spent most of their life barefoot. She reached toward one and stopped. The length was familiar in a way that made no sense until a memory escaped the walls she had placed around it. Her own foot at eight years old, in the mud beside the bone mill while Jonah shrieked with laughter because she stepped on a frog.

The memory flashed briefly before slamming shut.

To be continued!

June 24, 2026
Update 06/22/2026

First and foremost I want to apologize for vanishing like I did.

At the end of April, during a routine checkup I received some news that shocked me and brought my mortality to the forefront of my consciousness. I’ve always known that I wouldn’t live forever, but at 67 I figured I had another twenty to thirty years left in me. I may still have that much time left, but the news I received drastically changed my outlook on my diet and the things I’ve been putting into my mouth over all these years.

I was diagnosed with stage 3A chronic kidney disease. Which is considered the first step towards dialysis. Which was scary for me as my mom went through dialysis three times a week before she died, and every time she was left feeling drained. She would feel so bad afterwards that all she wanted to do was die. Eventually she refused the procedure entirely and passed at the age of 77.

She did have other health problems that I don’t have at this point and hopefully will never develop. She was a type 2 diabetic and had lost a leg to that disease. She also refused to take care of herself like she should.

The news made me take cold hard look at what I had been eating and adjust my diet to help combat the diseases progression. While stage3a cannot be cured, it can be managed. That’s what I’m fully focused on now, managing the disease to slow or stop its progression.

Like I said, I want to stick around for another twenty to thirty years, and I’d like to remain as healthy as humanly possible during the remaining years I have left. There are many more stories I want to write and share with my audience. More books searching for their unique voice I hope everyone will enjoy.

I’ve also changed the direction of the story I had been writing for the weekly writing challenge. Working with the scientific jargon for the story overshadowed the emotionally charged elements I was striving to impart. K is for Karst will be replaced with K is for Knucklebones. While the game has been around since the times of ancient Greece, I’m brining a ghostly twist that I hope everyone will enjoy. I may revisit the Karst in the future, but it wasn’t speaking to me on the same level knucklebones is.

Until Wednesday then.

June 22, 2026