When I originally started doing this challenge it was to help me focus on writing short stories, something I’m not really that good at. To help me really focus my time I would only allow myself one hour to get 500 or more words done for each installment. But with this one I’m trying a different approach, a voice different than my own, a voice I’m not entirely familiar, nor comfortable with. I hope I’m pulling it off. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for stopping by.
K is for Knucklebone Contd.
Destiny whimpered in her throat and clamped her hand over her mouth. Not to silence herself, but to make sure the voice had not come from her.
She waited for the counting to start again, but the silence continued unabated, surrounding her with a promise she failed to keep. The quiet was worse. It settled over her. pressing down until she felt the weight of the house above her. Ceiling, floorboards, empty bedroom, an attic as dark as a held breath.
Leave, the thought offered the promise of escape. Stand up. Take the keys. Drive until the road had lines again, where the gas stations were bright, and no one knew this house ever had your name.
Instead, Destiny reached for the notebook.
The page with the rules waited open as if it had never been shut. Each throw allows one question from the living. She read the sentence until it became a dare.
She gathered the seven bones into her palm. They were heavier than they should have been. Not by much, only enough to make her aware of them as separate little weights, each one pressing a private cold onto her skin. The J.V. bone remained warm.
“One question,” she said, and hated the tremor in it.
The house gave no answer.
Destiny closed her fist around the bones. She did not shake them. Elsie had written not to shake them for sport. That careful, obedient child still lived in Destiny and did not want Elsie angry. She simply held them above the table and opened her hand.
They fell without sound.
No clatter. No tap. The bones struck the wood as if the table had become soft flesh and accepted them. They lay scattered in what might have been a pattern and might have been nothing at all.
Destiny leaned closer. The carved marks were no longer merely marks. They shifted when she tried to focus, becoming slashes, then hooks, then letters she recognized only from the corner of her eye. She blinked hard. Her vision watered. The bones settled into meaning.
NO.
Her throat closed.
She had not asked the question out loud. She had only formed it, silently and completely in her mind.
Is Jonah dead?
The answer sat on the table, impossible, intimate.
“No,” Destiny whispered. She did not know whether she was reading or denying it.
The bones twitched.
Not all of them. Only three. A brief adjustment, small enough that another person might have missed it. But Destiny saw because she had been staring too hard to blink. One bone rolled a quarter turn. Another slid against it. The J.V. bone dragged itself across the tabletop, leaving no scratch, nor trail. Only a darkening line in Destiny’s mind where it had been.
The marks changed.
BELOW.
The house answered.
Something knocked beneath the floorboards.
Destiny jerked her feet up onto the chair rung. The knock came again, directly under the table this time, dull and patient. Then a dragging sound followed, slow enough to be deliberate, as if a hand were moving through packed earth below the dining room and feeling for the underside of the floor.
She should have run. Instead, she slid from the chair and crouched, every joint moving with the unwilling care of someone approaching a sleeping animal.
The underside of the dining table was glossy with moisture.
At first she thought the old wood had sweated in the damp. Then the moisture gathered into a shape. A palm, five narrow fingers, each fingertip dark with dirt. A child’s hand print blooming from the wood, upside down, wet and shining.
Destiny stared at it until her eyes hurt.
“Jonah?”
The hand print flexed.
The fingers did not move like fingers. They lengthened only a bit, smearing downward, becoming less like a print and more like something pressing through from the other side. Destiny raised her own hand without meaning to. Her palm hovered beneath the table, inches from the wet mark.
Don’t touch it!
Her hand rose.
When her palm met the print, cold went through her so fast she thought she had been cut open. The hand print fit her hand exactly.
Not Jonah’s hand. Not a child’s hand.
To be continued 07/296/2026
Richard Schiver 