A House With Good Bones

by T. Kingfisher

As omens go, it doesn’t get much more obvious than that.

You are required by tradition to have the dilapidated trailer, which is generally owned by a grumpy survivalist who refuses to sell. Otherwise the residents will have nothing to complain about and will become fractious.

There aren’t many social advantages to being fat, but I’ll give it this, nobody ever thinks you’re a cat burglar.

you know you’ve got yard vultures?”

Anyway, give me a trash heap over a grave any day. A grave tells you how people act when they’re on their best behavior in front of Death. Trash heaps tell you how they actually lived.

God, there’s just so much Texas. I could handle all the other states, but Texas lengthwise really breaks you. I attempted to express this to my mother, which mostly

had no idea where I was. No, that’s not quite accurate—I had no idea when I was.

the finest Malbec cardboard can buy.

“Someday you’ll get to an age where you die a little whenever someone doesn’t get your movie references.”

My phone informed me that it was absolutely talking to the internet, it was happy to talk to the internet, it loved talking to the internet, then as soon as I tried to check my email, it told me it had never heard of the internet and wasn’t entirely sure it existed. I dropped the phone on the coffee table and

“That’s cool. A lot of people would freak out having vultures living in their backyard.” As a biologist, I disapprove of those people on principle. Scavengers are essential to a tidy planet. Do you really want all the deer that get hit by cars to lie around in the ditches for months on end? No, of course you don’t.

I’m not great at performative emotions.

Like many family dynamics, it didn’t have to be healthy, it just had to work.)

They say you can’t go home again, but of course you can. It’s just that when you get there, somebody may have repainted and changed the fixtures around. The clock ticked.

I’m going to be miserable, at least I’ll be productively miserable.”

because taxonomy is a harsh mistress.

There was nothing that immediately indicated why there wouldn’t be any insects in the garden. No conveniently leaking pesticide barrels.

“Blackmail Mom? What kind of secrets could she have?”

Maybe she’s got a stalker.”

It was the sort of beige with pink accents that makes you think the word gingham, even if, like me, you have no real idea what gingham is. (Some kind of fabric, I think? Something very country kitsch, anyway.)

so no dinosaur blood. And mosquitoes don’t last very long outside of amber. Lots of weevils, I’m afraid. On the bright side, I’m not going to be eaten by velociraptors at work, so that’s something, right?”

“Fuller rose beetles. They can be a real problem.” A master gardener? Interesting. But that brought me back to my grandmother’s roses and the strange lack of insects.

Let the roses taste you.

Roman emperor Heliogabalus, who once (apocryphally) dropped tons of rose petals on guests at a feast, smothering them.

The most logical explanation, of course, was that I was hallucinating. The world continued to be the ordinary world, and the strangeness was all happening in the pink meat behind my eyeballs.

Hundreds of them, crawling on top of one another, sliding down the slick surface of the sink, with still more flooding out. Some had already reached the countertop and were scurrying across it, blood splatter from the open wound.

The Sleep of Reason may well breed Monsters, but the Sleep of the Sorcerer breeds Monsters made of the Flesh of Men, and such a Thing made of Man’s Substance is made to

Vultures aren’t sexually dimorphic, according to Gail. She’d mentioned at some point that Hermes might actually be a Hermione, but you can’t tell without a DNA test. Regardless, Mailbox Vulture was now just part of the yard, like a particularly goth lawn sculpture.

“I’m an herb-witch who talks to vultures! I’ve never dealt with anything like this before!”

Perhaps it’s just a very small alternate universe,