Dancing Skeletons

Skeletons Dance Before You and a Mime Sings


A skull rises, disturbing smoky clouds, at the far end of the table you sit at. It blurts two Spanish words at you in a tone so melodic your fear is shaken. Its skeleton bones begin to dance over the keys of a piano while another white-faced skeleton stabs into the clouds with a saxophone’s cutting squeal. Head and hat tipped to the sky. The other’s mouth sings too. The piano keys at his feet begin to move as he dances on them, as he dances on my ivory table. More sound flows as the skinless man’s brass covered shoes shake the table’s edges. He dances from end to end awakening all the other sleepers from the dead of that night. Tinkering piano, a head lifts, the sax sings, so does a skeletal jaw,

In my sleep I eat you. Immersed in the pain of our world. You will know what happened to me. I have black tears, black like my love.

Music drowns his voice and tears out for a second. The music subsides & he sings again:

Call the seamstress, call the call the flower girl, give some water to them both.  Tell her to give me a kiss.

Skinless kness shake over the tinkering tinkering tinkering piano keys that clink in time with stone like bones. Saxophone. The man’s feet creak up and down; he jumps while his knees knock. His dancing leads him to song. A guitar beats out a bass line. A nod and an acceptance of the sound. Vocals begin again,

Forget, and I don’t have you. You’ll forget me beneath the river, while I am far away. And no one will understand you, in the moonlight of my life. You forget me-ee-eee…(fades)…eee.

The skeleton collapses into the chair he came from but the whole room becomes lit with a smoke like that which first surrounded him.

This week a mime is in town to imitate the singing skeletons. The mime glares and her lips shutter under the great weight of her soul. Some words are heard then felt; though she never speaks, her words are felt then heard:

I can’t support myself, though forgetting saved me.

Piano notes interrupt: pi pi pi pi bububle buh buh buh bu bu bu.

The stars sparkle; the ivory keys and the white bony beings are sparkling too, sparkling for them, sparkling beneath them.

The stars flare brighter for every second the mime wails, her eyes flare up for every moment she hears her song. You catch yourself gazing into her eyes. You faint.

Now the mime simply dances, the bones sleep scattered on the stone floor, and you are sleeping at the table in the place of the skeleton whose head had risen, only an instant ago, and sang to you.