Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

“What’s that thing in the trunk?” she asked. Joseph Mallory offered her a sad and terrible smile. “It’s me,” he said.

Blink and you’d miss it: a town, or, rather, the memory of a town, secreted away at the end of a nameless, unpaved roadway that, in the deepening half light of an Alaskan dusk, looks like it might arc straight off the surface of the planet and out into the far reaches of the cosmos. A town where the scant few roads twist like veins and the little black-roofed houses, distanced from one another as if fearful of some contagion, look as if they’d been excreted into existence, pushed up through the crust of the earth from someplace deep underground. There is snow the color of concrete in the rutted streets, dirty clumps of it packed against the sides of houses or snared in the needled boughs of steel-colored spruce.

Some of the roads in and out of those old mining towns are like that. They shut down all winter, too. No plows get out that way.” “What do people do out there in the winter?” “Pray,” said the attendant.