Your Smallest Bones

Your Smallest Bones is a collection of short fiction built on the sounds we make when we run out of sounds. Can you hear them yet? All you have to do is help an ex-lover push a grand piano out onto a frozen lake. You have to break both of your thumbs in perfect symmetry to grow up. You have to bind mattresses like books, with all the classics penned to them, just to get some sleep. You heard them with the smallest bones, inside your inner ear. Somedays, there is perfection in the quiet of your hands pressing play on the braille love letters of a blind man. Somedays, life sounds like an earthquake detector while you're in the shower. Then you hear your neighbors sounds. On the day of her husbands funeral, a woman recreates a stick-up from her favorite western. The sound of an eccentric marriage nearly lost to the mislabeling of coconut juice. Or in a tea garden after a conversation with a child, a man finds heaven as he timidly describes hell. Can you hear it now? Across town when a pianist loses his hearing, he paints the color spectrum along his piano keys to regain his favorite lost notes. Meanwhile, a girl next door carries a prayer, from the lions she feeds, into a song, for a parrot she adopts. These stories play the out-stretched gasp, they play the shiver, the hope whisper, and the buckling fear.