The Bone Wall by D. Wallace Peach Read Free Book Online Page B

and dead. It entices and stinks at the same time. I’ve heard the broken world through the wall, but muted as if buried in layers of wool. Out here it hisses, creaks, ripples, and caws, a thousand tiny sounds weaving together with no pulsing hum. Outside the wall, Heaven doesn’t exist.
    My sister is a statue, a block of stone with a water jar chiseled into her grip, licking her lips and blinking at the airborne dust. I grab her hand and drag her toward the mound of dirt and the cairn of stacked stones marking our father’s grave. The long, deep tomb bears the charred bones of hundreds, bodies so putrid with decay that the deacons had them doused in oil and burned.
    Kneeling by the stones, I dig a hole in the dirt with my fingers and lift the water jar from Angel’s rigid hand. Half of it sits in the hole, the other half, blue as the sky, rises above. She kneels beside me and we pat the dirt around it, holding it tight.
    In silence, surrounded by a broken world of endless sound, we pick tall golden flowers, weeds perhaps, but bursting with tiny, lacy petals in feathery tufts. Our fear mislaid, we pack the jar with stems, and then Angel adds white-petaled stars. “I wish we knew the names of these,” she says, our bouquet complete. “There’s so much we don’t know in Heaven.”
    “I suppose God didn’t think it important,” I offer.
    “Maybe God did,” Angel counters, her brow furrowed as she looks back toward the gate. “Maybe God thought lots of things important. Maybe the descendants were the ones that didn’t listen or care or remember.”
    “Maybe,” I concede, though with little enthusiasm since it changes nothing of our lives or our predicament.
    “I think we should go back.” Angel gestures toward the gate.
    “To the river first,” I insist. “Then we’re done.” I raise my eyebrows and smile. “For today.” Angel’s hand in mine, I creep toward the riverbed, towing her bodily behind me despite the shivers prickling my skin. I half expect a horde of Biters to leap over the bank and charge us. We inch toward the edge and peer over. An animal with a clay-colored coat, pointy ears, and bushy tail startles. We both shriek with fright, clutching each other as the creature darts up the other bank and scampers across the dry earth to the trees.
    “A dog!” Angel squeals. “We saw a dog.”
    “A dog? Are you sure?”
    “From the pictures,” she declares breathlessly.
    At the bottom of the riverbed a trickle of water gurgles over exposed stones. “It was drinking from the river, I suppose.” We smile at each other, delighted with our discovery. I jump down from the bank, collect my skirt in my fists, and squat at the river’s edge, brushing my fingers through the cold dribble.
    “We can refill our water jar here,” Angel says as she scrambles down beside me. She cups water in her hands and splashes her face, wiping the wet off on her skirt.
    “Let’s go back now.” I climb up the bank, knowing we’ll return, at least to tend our flowers. Angel struggles up after me. We run to the gate and slip through, pulling the door shut behind us. Together, we labor over the crank and brush flaking metal from our hands, satisfied when the bar slides into the brackets. Now from the height of the viewing platform, we can see our golden flowers and starry white petals, and our river, our world a little wider. I grab the scythe on the way down and we hurry back to the wheat.
     
     

     
     
     

 
     
    6
     
    ~Angel~
     
    A more thorough study of every picture book confirms that our dog creature may not be a dog. Other than one painting of a brown dog sitting on a pillow, most come in some variation of black and white or brown and white. Their ears droop and their tails aren’t bushy like the little…dog thing.
    Now that we venture beyond the gates of Heaven, I peruse the picture books more thoroughly, memorizing the animal pictures and their respective names. The more common animals appear to be