Making Friends

The humans stood clustered by the bus stop as the October rain pelted at them sideways from a dull grey sky.

Milton Downere felt a snake of nervousness coil inside of him. This was it, the big test. It had been so long since he’d interacted with people in earnest. All his interactions had ended in running and screaming. But not this time, no. He had learned his lesson. He had refused to let reality’s rain extinguish his hope. But now he had to navigate a human body once more. And this one had deteriorated since its end. He held its bones together in a rough sketch of the human form. He jerked towards the group, clicking and clattering. ‘Easy does it,’ he murmured, like a pilot coming in to land. ‘Easy does it.’

Most people had their backs to him, with umbrellas raised to the downpour. Hoods covered heads, pockets enveloped hands. A shiver rolled from one person to another, and many individuals sniffled in the cold. A collective sigh heaved the shoulders of all. A deep, wide puddle reflected their mirror images at them from the curbside. The nearest person—a woman—turned to face him, a brolly held aloft like a flaming torch.

Milton froze, the rain rat-tat-tatting against the exposed skeleton. He’d scared off the last lot, and he understood why. He’d had no physical body back then and appeared before them as a spirit. Milton’s recollections of what it was like to be human had faded somewhat since death. But if he squinted and strained, he remembered that ghosts were scary. An easy solution, though. Find an abandoned vessel and move on in, like a spectral hermit crab. He forced himself to stand his ground and not flee. He tried to smile, but the bones he’d stolen from the ground had no skin on the face. ‘Come on, Milton,’ he said through the chattering jaw. ‘Hold it together.’

The woman’s eyes widened, and her face paled. She dropped her brolly to the pavement and brought her hands up. She screamed, mouth wide enough to see her tonsils. Now unhindered by the umbrella, the torrent soaked her to the bone. In seconds, her hair plastered to one side of her face.

Milton jumped, startled by the screech. He lost his concentration and dropped some of the ribs and a vertebra from the spine. The jaw slipped free and clattered to the floor. He’d heard that shriek before and knew it was a sign of bad things. He raised his hands—a collection of narrow bones—in an ‘I-mean-no-harm’ gesture. ‘Oh no, oh please don’t scream, I want to make some frie—’

The rest of the group spun around with the timing of a well-choreographed dance. Reactions ranged from terrified to defensive. An older man with sparse grey hair stepped in front of the crowd. He had a face that said he’d endured much more than walking skeletons. He pressed a button on his umbrella and, in one swift movement, slashed at the air between them. The brolly collapsed, and the man wielded it like a jouster’s javelin, heading straight for Milton.

Milton turned and ran. He darted away from the bus stop, over the road, towards the treeline. He dropped bones like breadcrumbs in his wake as his focus shifted from keeping it together. Escape was now priority number one. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he repeated as he wobbled away, shedding skeletal fragments. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’

From behind came the shouts and jeers of the angry mob. Their vicious footfalls clumped down on the pavement. Something whizzed past the thing Milton used as a head and whacked into a tree trunk next to him. It was the older man’s umbrella.

The ghost of his heart thudded in the echoes of his chest. He didn’t know what would happen if they caught him—not much, he guessed. He could vacate the body and find a fresh one. It was the unpleasantness he feared. Whoever said, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me,’ had never lived as an anxious ghost. He crashed through the bushes and the trees, no longer caring for his ungainliness. ‘Oh, oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’

The bangs and cracks followed him through the greenery for a minute. At last, they gave up and fell silent.

Milton sighed and slowed to a stop. They’d left him alone. But now he was alone. Again. That was the thing about being dead that nobody warned you about: it was bloody lonely. He hadn’t moved on from this plane because he hadn’t wanted to leave his friends behind and was worried they’d be too sad. But now, he had lingered for far too long and forgotten how to go. All he wanted was a friend or two. Was that too much to ask for? They didn’t like him in spirit form; they didn’t like him in the vacated remains of one of their own. Milton was beginning to suspect that they plain didn’t like him. He collapsed under the eaves of a nearby tree as the rain pattered on the leaves overhead. He squelched into the dirt and relaxed, letting go of the bones. It was a tough job holding yourself together these days. The fragments of the skeleton plopped into the mud.

The rain splashed over the branches, trickling down the arms of the trees. All around, the bushes rustled. The sigh of the planet whispered out upon collision between earth and water. Shhh. Shhh.

The precipitous lullaby soothed his injured soul. Milton lay there, bobbing up and down like a boat on a gentle tide. He watched the leaves twitch as droplets bounced from one to the next. Even though his very form was nothing more than a stirring breath, Milton exhaled. ‘Oh dear,’ he said.

The rain let up to a gentle drizzle, yet the greenery still shivered with movement. Squeaks and animal cries formed a choir in the woods, backed by the drone of rain—a parade of tiny creatures. The procession increased with every passing second.

Curiosity buried his woes for a moment. Living creatures fascinated him. What were they doing? What were they thinking? He floated upright and watched them go by. After hesitating, he drifted along and followed the train of movement. Milton left the bones behind. He sailed until he came to a clearing and saw what all the commotion was about. ‘Oh?’

A dead deer lay in the dirt ahead, and many woodland critters feasted on the corpse. They came and went, chittering and chirping, glad to have met. The brush rustled with the movement of animals. They kept passing Milton, speaking to each other in their languages. The deceased creature was well-liked.

Milton pouted. What did the dead deer have that he didn’t? The creature’s spirit had since departed, whereas the skeleton back there had had a soul inside. He had a personality, but that thing over here was hollow. There had to be something more to it, something he was missing. He drew in for a closer look.

A rat climbed atop the deer’s mass and ripped a strip of flesh away, revealing the bone beneath. The rat sat there, holding the meat in its tiny paws, and gobbled it with its gnawing teeth.

Milton’s dead heart sprang to life. That was it. That had to be it: flesh. He looked over at the skeleton he’d used and now saw it for what it was—naked. The deer had tissue still stuck to its bones, but he’d get nowhere acting as an animal. No, he’d have to think of something else. Milton shot back into the skeleton again, reanimating it sans several pieces. He crawled out from beneath the branches, clicking and clacking.

The tiny animals squeaked and fled in every direction, abandoning their find. Not even the beasts wanted Milton in this form. The bushes rustled as the creatures disbanded their woodland gathering. Then, all was still once more. Save for the pitter-patter of rain trickling down through the guttering of the leaves.

The hope he’d cradled inside like a flickering candle flared once more. He scrambled to the animal’s carcass on all fours. He went to work with the bones he’d recycled from the cemetery—many were not in use. Milton carved through the rotting meat of the deer with his pointed fingertips. He slapped the decayed handfuls of flesh into the gaps between the bones. A bit in an eye socket here, some smushed through a ribcage there. He threaded some guts through the ulna and radius of one arm. He made a patty of fat and meat and smeared it over the top of his skull. He grinned and hummed as he did so, joyous and full of hope once more.

‘I’m sure to make friends now!’