The first customers to enter the door into Geraldine’s newly opened shop, Spiritus Mundi, were skeletons.
Not people in skeleton costumes.
Not skeleton marionettes made from bright white polypropylene bones, manipulated by the dowels of puppeteers in all black kabuki nylon bodysuits.
Not masks decorated with Day-Glo green rubber.
Not face painting a la Día de los Muertos.
Not holograms or hallucinations.
Walking bones. Creaking, clattering, stinking bones, owing to the bits of rotting tissue still clinging to the tight spaces between junctions of old, hard calcium. Bones of a tea-stained quality. Skulls of a dull patina, without reflection. Some of their jaws missing teeth, some of their cranial bones divoted or cracked. Their rib cages hung like the curvaceous straps of whiskey barrels but held within a nothingness even as they conveyed themselves lifelike atop the two-eyed pelvic shields of their hips, beneath their asserting clavicles, arms reaching, if janky, with intention.
For such an auspicious occasion, marked by the chiming of the cleansing witch’s bells that dangled in surreptitious welcome above the shop door, Geraldine did not initially see these first customers.
She was still pacing in the back room when she heard their musical entrance, venting her opening day jitters with breathing patterns befitting a yogi. Manifesting, she’d heard it called. It felt weird to do so, but so did many other things that people seemed perfectly comfortable doing, Geraldine reflected.
Asking some invisible source for customers to show proof of concept—of a mercantile proffering safe ways to access the world of shadows—was not just an extension of her own obsession, but a real need that asked for fulfilling. At least this is what she believed.
Now she questioned whether anything she believed in was real.
By default, her hands—with fingers spread like stars—expressed repetitive circular patterns on either side of her head, as if generating a protective forcefield. Stimming. In the back room, yes. Even if the world was ready for Geraldine to hang out a shingle to sell the playthings of the underworld, it was not yet ready for her. Not the real her.
When she heard the scritch and clatter across the polished hardwood floor in the front of the store, it sounded so much like her terrier’s untrimmed nails across the kitchen linoleum at home that Geraldine had to wrest herself from her safe space to see that it wasn’t true.
“Toto?”
She walked past the checkout counter into the cozy chaos that was her living dream: a curiosity shop of otherworldly playthings.
Today marked opening weekend for Spiritus Mundi, a date Geraldine chose because it aligned with the even measure of day and night in the fall—the autumnal equinox. For her, this was a magical time, of death into rebirth, like the golden hour of movies, or the darkness right before the dawn.
At the end of the day, she would come to ask herself whether she was surprised by what she saw in the space at the front of her store. Whether she should have been surprised. Whether others unlike her would have been more surprised, or even scared.
She wouldn’t recall being scared.
The metacarpals on the tallest of her first three customers wrapped around the edges of the shop door, then politely nudged it shut behind their shuffling group of rickety spines. Each skull’s flattened cheekbones angled so its hollow orbital sockets could better admire the hand-painted mandalas on silk flags hanging from Geraldine’s shop ceiling.
The smallest skeleton’s bony fingertips then began to flick among tchotchkes at the “Welcome to the Equinox” display table at the front of the shop. There, Geraldine had artfully arranged exotic incense burners, yakisugi votives carved to contain every shape in the universe, snake-shaped braids of sweetgrass, and angel chimes meant to spin under the prompting heat of candleflame.
The sounds she thought were claws against wood revealed themselves instead as tarsals and metatarsals from three standing relics built of human bones standing before her.
“What… is this?” Geraldine’s voice came out all wrong, in a conflict of tones: friendly shopkeeper chirp blended with stark, startled protest. Skeletons?
She blushed, noting she would need to work on her delivery with this new clientele.
Who am I to judge who my customers might be?
Meanwhile, her employees—the mouse-like Cambria with her limp ponytails, and lanky Dexter with freckles contradicting his black hair and guylined eyes—stood transfixed by these unexpected beings.
In the middle of the shop, the trio of spent humans lingered, no longer a group now, but off to separate corners like typical shoppers. The tallest rifled through racks of tie-dyed shirts. The smallest gazed at the Magic Eye posters on the walls. The one in between sniffed hand-poured herbal soaps, though its cartilage and olfactories—the twitching of cilia in its previously fleshy nose—had long since decomposed.
The skeleton family—for that is how Geraldine encountered them, as a perfect little unit, if only lacking for a dog—froze at the sound of her voice, their skulls swiveling to aim their empty eye holes at her without expression. As if listening. Judging. Recognizing.
None uttered a word.
Moments stretched before Geraldine wrested her eyes from the sight of the skeletons—
who remained still as dazed deer—to check on her employees.
Cambria, half-hidden behind a rack of overpriced astrology earrings, whispered: “Are we being punked?”
This is what Geraldine liked about the girl, why she’d hired her in the first place… she seemed so harmless and approachable and yet showed herself incapable of the fear of speaking her mind.
Dexter nearly blended into the black pentagram tapestry hanging behind him on the wall by the shop door. He stared, mouth-breathing, as if about to vomit, his already fair skin taking on a pale and unhealthy chlorosis.
The shop remained in this absurd still life for many seconds, the moon-shaped clock above the checkout stand ticking a click louder than the spacey drone of lo-fi meditation tunes piping through the ceiling speakers just as the witch’s bells announced new visitors.
Geraldine felt awash in the sweat that suddenly glazed her face, like she’d broken a fever she didn’t know she’d had. The shop door swung open, seemingly sucking all the oxygen out of the room in an eerie kind of transaction. Air for light.
Two skeletons, tall and slow moving, let themselves into the store. One of them carried a string bag holding several apples from the nearby farmer’s market.
This time, Dexter caught the door before they could shut it, then vanished into the surreal obelisk of half-blue September sunlight that beamed in from the outside.
Too late, Geraldine called after him: “Wait!”
But even before the door could latch closed, it burst open again. Dexter, red-faced this time, kohl-lined eyes wide, flung himself inside the shop and shut the door firmly.
“There are more.” His voice cracked, maybe because he was sixteen, maybe because he was terrified.
Cambria stepped out from behind the jewelry stand. Her brow furrowed while she processed the situation. Then she cleared her throat.
“Welcome to Spiritus Mundi,” she said to the new skeletons. “Can I help you find anything?” The girl’s words came almost as a laugh, as if she’d just popped a gummy and the buzz was now kicking in. Geraldine, speechless, could do nothing but marvel at her courage.
The two newest visitors shook their naked skulls politely at Cambria’s advances, then gave a slight wave with their fleshless phalanges to suggest they were browsing.
The spell that had overtaken the shop prior to the arrival of these new customers disintegrated. Geraldine swallowed thickly, considering Dexter’s words, amazed she could still breathe, her ears ringing like church bells.
Meanwhile, the family of three shuffled its way over to the children’s section to look at dreamcatchers, rain sticks, crystal grab bags, pan flutes, and miniature Tibetan prayer flags.
“There are more, you say?” Geraldine asked Dexter in a hushed tone.
His lined eyes widened. “Like, whole armies of them.”
She shuddered. “Armies?”
“Well,” he said, reconsidering. “Not like they have weapons or anything. Maybe whole flocks of them?” He paused. “Whole parties of them?” And then Dexter turned away, lost in this question of how to describe large gatherings of animated bones.
Before Geraldine could talk herself out of it, and inspired by Cambria’s bold take on skeleton customer service, she grasped the knob of the shop door, the church bells in her ears drowning out the sound of the witch’s bells behind her, and stepped out into the strange September morning light.
Confirmation can be stabilizing. At least for Geraldine.
She relaxed at the sight before her. It made perfect sense: up and down the main drag in her tiny little artsy-fartsy town of Medula Crossing, the sidewalks and benches teemed with tourists.
Some of them knit together in knots like families, while others moved their sprightly forms shoulder to shoulder like best friends. She spied among them an occasional grouping of attenuated forms which surrounded and assisted those more vulnerable—the baby skeletons, the grands.
But overall, they came across to her as bands.
Bands of shopping skeletons.
They tucked in and out of boutiques and galleries, pharmacies and hardware stores. Some carried paper-wrapped cones of chrysanthemum from the local florist, while others sat cross-legged, femur over femur, around public picnic tables, reading books or poking at smartphones.
It seemed natural to Geraldine—if it could be said that there was anything natural about this influx of living dead tourists—that none of these bony visitors seemed interested in the coffeehouses or bars, given what Geraldine presumed was their obvious lack of need for sustenance.
Such a perfect time to be on holiday.
The sun spiraled white-yellow in a sapphire sky studded with cottony clouds. A cool breeze tumbled the first ruby, rust, and canary leaves from the town’s signature ash trees into the airspace above Main Street. She could smell a lingering odor of sweet-salty rot that she might have blamed on fresh compost in the town’s manicured landscapes, had the skeletons not arrived.
Geraldine walked to the corner of her block, gazed down the side lane which expanded beyond the buildings to the city park. There, she saw the sports fields alight with bony Frisbee golfers, strollers and cyclists on the bike paths in perpetual—if mechanical—motion, and smaller skeletons scrabbling and scratching in the fall-faded turf around a skidding black and white soccer ball.
Turning back, she nearly walked into the owner of the corner bakery, whose name she never remembered and whose mustachioed face flushed with some amalgamation of emotions Geraldine couldn’t quite parse. He wrestled with his white apron in a fit, tearing it off his rotund body, then wadded it up and threw it to the ground.
“Who is going to do something about… about this?!” he asked in an angry, frustrated tone, lifting a fleshy tattooed arm to point at the influx of bones. The baker, on any other day, would never have spoken to her. Might he be addressing her now?
Geraldine couldn’t be sure, but she nodded to acknowledge him all the same. She shook her head, working hard to remain stoic. “I don’t know… what… can be done.”
Was there something that anyone could, or should, do? She’d never seen such a thing as skeletons walking the Earth. Clearly, the horde was a new situation for Cambria and Dexter, too, which made Geraldine feel at least a little bit better. The visitation of skeletons appeared to be an anomaly for the seething baker as well.
Geraldine often didn’t understand the way the world worked, with its glut of unpleasant surprises, hidden rules and codes of conduct she couldn’t quite master, events that seemed to make her neighbors happy while putting her into full-on panic, like concerts in the park or talking to strangers at the checkout counter.
But she was used to being the odd one out, so the arrival of skeletons en masse to Medula Crossing created a new space of kinship—could it truly be kinship? she wondered—that she wasn’t sure how to navigate. She only knew it felt good to belong, to be seen.
“Well, I called the sheriff,” the baker finally said after pacing along the street corner, “but they seem to have their hands full down at the marina. I guess the traffic into town is outta control.” He knit his thick mustache between his equally thick fingers. “I hear they’re all just… on foot. Walking by the thousands. Goddamn bonesters.”
Bonesters, Geraldine repeated to herself. Bonesters.
“They don’t speak, but somehow they have all this money to spend.” He threw up his hands. “Not that I’ll ever see a dime of it! The suckers don’t eat!”
A couple of skeletons walked quickly past, heading for the crosswalk. Teenagers, Geraldine guessed, by the size of them.
“You two can just go back to where you came from!” the baker suddenly boomed, his muscular, dough-kneading hands reaching in a flash to wrap around the windpipe of one of them.
Geraldine cried out, “No!” She was certain his curled fingers would instantly snap the skeleton’s bones.
The skeleton wriggled and wrestled, its pointed fingerbones digging into the baker’s skin until the man cried out and let loose, pressing his lips and tongue to suck at the points on his savaged arm where his flesh bled.
The two skeletons leaned toward the man with crossed arms, then one gestured rudely with its middle digit. The two buzzed off, then, their angular strides across the street stopping traffic as they danced a rude sideways jig.
“Just keep going, you little suckers!” the baker snarled as he watched them leave.
“Are you… are you okay?” Geraldine became quite aware of the scene this had caused, with so many skeletons, of so many heights, and in so many shades of brown and white, pausing to stare at the altercation, skulls cocked at one angle or another, empty sockets trained on her and the baker. She felt an utterly deep sense of shame and didn’t know what to say, so she looked down at the sidewalk, at the drops of the baker’s blood now speckling the concrete.
“Ah, forget it,” the baker growled. He groaned in resignation, crouched down to pick up his apron, and waddled back into the bakery. After the door behind him slammed, Geraldine saw the Open sign in the window flip to Closed.
From her place on the sidewalk, she half wondered if a ghost ship had ported in the city and let out thousands of cruising bonesters—yes, that was the perfect name for them!—to tour the countryside in search of treasures. And if so, she needed to contact them about their sailing schedules. Her mind began to process ideas for future promotions. She glanced upstreet to note the brilliant balloons and sandwich board all lit up with purple fairy lights in front of Spiritus Mundi, where the door was swinging closed yet again.
Her heart skipped with excitement.
Later. Time to get back to work.
As she strolled nearer to the shop, she noticed three small skeletons clamoring about a small round café table with energy and wiggles that reminded her of Toto, though theirs were definitely human forms. Their bright, clean enameled bones folded and asserted, climbed and jumped, the sound like soft mallets against croquet balls, like the kiss of a bowling ball against the edge of a pin, like the tumble of dice onto felt in a Yahtzee game.
Meanwhile a tall skeleton arranged something on the table. Stepping closer, Geraldine realized it was a kind of altar: a scarf held down with plain stones, a simple porcelain dish in the center holding flower petals that floated in water around a single peeled clementine left whole. Sprinkled about the dish were seedpods, dried drupes, helicopter seeds, and catkins that the smaller skeletons had arranged into patterns to resemble daisies.
Geraldine watched the grown skeleton pause, leaning over the small waxen shape it cradled in its hands. Then it flicked a switch to illuminate the object: a flameless battery-operated candle. The skeleton held it up to take in the sight of its soft white light, then seemed to feel Geraldine’s gaze. It turned its skull sharply on its axis to regard her directly. She looked away, suddenly self-conscious of her unintended voyeurism, put her head down, and walked past the impromptu ceremony, catching the whiff of something more pleasant than decomposition issuing off the bodies at the table: salted peanuts, maybe, or dried jackfruit.
When she reached the door to Spiritus Mundi, it opened before her as the original three skeletons filed out. The smallest of them clutched a bag in its hand.
Her heart alight, Geraldine instantly wanted to know what they purchased. Instead she smiled and gave a little wave.
“Thank you for shopping at Spiritus Mundi!”
The family waved and nodded as they stepped around her and headed down the sidewalk toward the center of town.
Back inside, she saw the two skeletons that had entered the shop after the family’s arrival remained, unattended but busy browsing.
Cambria assisted a different, solo skeleton about the same height as her, spinning the jewelry rack to locate the seven-knot embroidered bracelets so popular with the kids these days.
Dexter stood aloof behind the cash register, looking awkward while he handed a small bag to yet another customer. This one hunched and used a bejeweled cane as it parted with Dexter, turning to leave.
“Thank you!” Geraldine beamed, saying the words in singsong like she’d heard other shop owners do. The skeleton clattered on, foot bones scraping wood flooring in a percussive shuffle timed with the tap of its cane as it strolled by.
Dexter still looked ill, his eyes nervously rolling, in search of somewhere safe to land, until she approached and got his attention.
He shook his head furtively. “What… what are they?”
“Bands,” Geraldine answered with confidence.
“Bands?” He frowned.
“Bands of skeletons.”
His eyes shifted as he processed this new information, then he quickly tapped numbers on the cash register with his heavily ringed fingers. The drawer rang open. From within it, he pulled out a handful of coins, his fingers trembling.
“These bands of skeletons…” he said, savoring the word, the way it sounded on his tongue, “are paying with these.” Emphasis on the last word, though Geraldine could see what he meant.
Doubloons, by the looks of them. Gleaming gold as sunset.
She knew her precious metals, being something of a collector of earthly materials. Crystals and silver pieces, stones laden with copper veins, quartz points gathered along the silty river that fed into the lake in the valley.
One bite-check of one doubloon, handed to her by Dexter’s shaking fingers, confirmed it.
“Well then,” she said, uncertain how else to comfort the boy. Because she knew her alchemies, she also knew the worth of her receipts and today was shaping up to be a banner day for Spiritus Mundi. It might indeed float her shop for at least a month if this kept up.
More than anything, though, Geraldine marveled that at least the skeletons were paying. The fact they were using old coins didn’t strike her quite as surprising. What she wanted to know was where the currency was coming from, considering how difficult it is to hide one’s personal belongings without clothing to cover it all up.
She gazed side-eye at the two customers she’d met earlier, who remained, lingering in the book section. One fingered through the sacred geometry section, while the other, the one holding the bag, admired the tarot cards.
On a hunch, Geraldine rubbed her hands together. “Um, uh…” she said, reaching for the right words to say, “I’m offering free palm readings if you’re interested…”
She caught herself then. With this client, such a service might indeed be impossible.
What was I thinking?
Geraldine cringed to imagine just how insensitive that might have come across, to customers who didn’t have palms at all, and made to issue some sort of blundering apology—she was no good at small talk, or big talk, or any kind of talk with people!—until the skeleton holding the string bag nodded. It handed its parcel full of apples to its partner and approached Geraldine tentatively, bony wrists surrendered face up.
“Oh, okay!” Geraldine chimed in a breathless voice, flustered.
This skeleton did not carry the same rank sweet deadmeat smell as the others. Instead, it wafted clouds of lavender and, as it came closer to her, Geraldine could see that, indeed, it wore bangle bracelets braided from the classic herb.
She motioned the skeleton—the bonester—to a small corner table draped in purple silk. She’d just decorated it that morning with fresh ristras of green garlic scape, pots of living rosemary, garlands woven of Michaelmas daisy, and three of her most highly polished amethyst towers.
Geraldine took the chair nearest the wall and sat, and her companion shyly claimed the seat opposite, a slight bend in its upper vertebrae near the axis joint suggesting osteoporosis.
Meanwhile, the remainder of both the living and the dead in the shop looked on, curious.
The skeleton held out its bony peripherals. An antique diamond setting encircled the skeleton’s left hand ring finger joint.
“Your stone is lovely,” Geraldine said, surprised by the comfort she felt in discovering it, amused that, even without flesh, the golden circlet still clung steadfast. “I’m sure you were a beautiful bride,” she continued, then noted the gracious dip of the skeleton’s forehead in gentle reply.
Geraldine inhaled deeply. As a practicing chirologist, she knew what lines to look for to tell the story of a person’s life, to show them the possible paths they might claim in the future… but this was only for instances in which living hands were involved.
Following her exhale, she felt a calm clarity settle in. She reached out to cradle the guest’s carpals and metacarpals in her own fingers, which now seemed utterly obese, their skin and tissue almost grotesque next to her client’s thin and lightweight digits.
She focused on the nature of the customer’s bones… the spurs knotted at the base of both thumbs, the long elegance of the pointer fingers, the crooked pinkies deformed by arthritis, the other ring finger with its unwieldy right-angle bend. Trigger finger. Geraldine recalled her grandmother’s hands gnarled from weeding, those two knuckles in similar permanent arrest.
She took another deep breath. “Yours is… was… a long life,” she said, mindful of her correction. “But it’s clear you were a successful gardener, beloved, perhaps even a piano player in your youth.”
The moon-shaped clock, in rhythm with the New Age music, marked ten seconds. The skeleton spoke not a word. Geraldine, afraid to establish eye contact with her client—which rightfully couldn’t be called that, given the bonester had no eyes—took in the charm of the high-vibration objects on the table, noted the slight stain on the purple silk where some of the fresh garlic greens had bled their dewy essence, looked without seeing across the space of the shop.
A sound like gently shaken runes spilled on a cloth came from the customer’s jaw, as if it spoke to her. Geraldine’s eyes snapped to the skeleton’s face, saw the dark hollows where the eyes used to be, the glimmer of gold crowns in its mouth opened just slightly enough to… smile?
What else could she do but smile back?
“You will spend the rest of your…” she paused, reaching for the right word, “the rest of your days with your beloved, perhaps an eternity, and in your case, I would pronounce that a marvelous success.”
Suddenly, the skeleton wrested its finger bones from Geraldine’s grasp and flipped them to press firmly across the tops of her knuckles. The sensation of those cold calcium digits against her warm flesh sent a chill reverberating through her as the skeleton’s grip on her hands tightened and intensified. But how could it be so, how could scrimshaw-delicate fingers press so hard, as if sending her hands into another dimension entirely?
And then the skeleton lifted its hands high above the table, releasing Geraldine’s. Before she could move to leave the table, or even to catch her breath, her heart pounding against a confusion of feelings—of threat mixed with connection, her head dizzy with the scent of sweet lavender—a cascade of golden coins tumbled from the bonester’s ivory fingertips…so many doubloons, and with such protracted spillage, that she wondered if this was how it felt to hit on quarter slots at that casino on the outskirts of Medula Crossing.
A lifetime’s wealth in gold coin tinkled and clinked heavy against blue silk, the overage ultimately bouncing off her hands and the table and onto the wooden floor.
From the top of the heap, she found, then plucked a card: “Shippe to Shore Cruises.” Beneath the title, several lines were listed—SS Elysium, SS Chiron, SS Sedna—but only one was circled: SS Rex. A phone number and URL followed.
When Geraldine gathered her senses again, peering over the tall pyramid of treasure before her, she watched the shop door crack open again, with its geometric allowance of gold-kissed autumn light. A hand of bones trailed between the inside and the out, wiggling a quick fingertip wave, its antique wedding ring catching sunlight in a bright wink as the witch’s bells made manifest its departure.
-end-
Tamara Kaye Sellman is co-author of Rain Shadows and author of Cul de Sac Stories and Intention Tremor. Gnashing Teeth Publishing releases her contemporary feminist fairy tale, Trust Fall, in September 2026. Tamara also produces short indie films, creates resistance zines, podcasts, grows a guerilla garden, and makes good trouble.
