Artistic Bones

I have artistic bones. I get some of them from my father’s side. The day I found out my bones were special, I was nine years old. I leaped high from a swing and tumbled to the ground, catching myself on both palms. As I cried, my mother wiped away the blood from my scrapes until the only red left was of my raw flesh. My scrapes began to heal, but the bones of my hands remained sore, and the purple on my skin had begun to morph into new colors. Greens, blues, and yellows crept over my body, and I became painted with the shadows of my fall. My mother, fearing I’d broken both hands, brought me to an orthopedic. He suspected my mother was right and ordered an X-ray. They’d both been wrong though, and the X-rays confirmed it. My bones weren’t broken; they were artistic.

My mother rejoiced when she heard the diagnosis. She’d always wished she’d had artistic bones herself, like my father had. His bones, she said, were made of colors and shapes and words so vivid that even the tiny bones in the inner parts of his ears were seen to be artistic. My mother claimed she hadn’t an artistic bone of her own in her body, though. She was no artist, after all. Not a musician, nor painter, nor writer. Her bones were quite ordinary.

Me, my special bones, my mother, and her ordinary bones left the doctor’s office that day and returned home. I felt like I had changed. I had learned something about myself that I hadn’t known before, something about myself I couldn’t even see. There were 206 bones beneath my skin, and each one was sprouting with the potential for invention? I had never been conscious of my bones before, not really. But now I had 206 new parts of me to consider.

My mother made me a quilt to commemorate my diagnosis. She used her ordinary hands to create the image of a bone out of collaged fabrics with the word “SPECIAL” stitched across it in her own swooping handwriting. This was my 207th special bone.

The next year, I received another quilt from my mother, again of a bone with the word “SPECIAL” printed across it—my 208th special bone. The year after, I received my 209th. Today, I have 245 artistic bones. I keep 206 of them inside my body and 39 outside it. My mother, though, has 206 ordinary bones in her body and not a single artistic one. Instead, she keeps all her artistic bones outside her body.