text: If your skeleton could talk, without the prison of muscle and fat and tendons and nerves that surround it and keep it under control, it would have some things to say. Many people think that the skeleton supports the body, holds it up, provides the structure for it to operate. And it does--but it wasn’t always so. A long time ago, before you, or me, or anybody or anything that looked anything like us was around, there were only two distinct species that roamed around the plains and deserts and forests of the world. There were blobs of white, tan, and dark skin--some with fur, some without, filled to the brim with organs and brains and all sorts of squishy things for processing information and nutrition. They were smart, but they were very slow and weak and vulnerable, and they were often killed and squished and torn apart like full balloons by various predators. They stuck to the caves and the forests and the darker places of the world, where their gelatinous forms couldn’t be so easily destroyed. They lived by consumption--destroying the trees and earthbound creatures and the grass and using them to power themselves. Then there were the skeletons, who started out a blackish color, but stayed out in the sun so much that slowly they all got bleached the bone-white you know so well. These skeletons weren’t just human skeletons. They took every shape you could imagine, some with four legs, some with two, some with massive jaws, all with crystalline teeth and sharp fingers and toes that they nonetheless never needed to use. The skeletons weren’t powered by organs and cells and fat and complicated processes like mitosis and cellular reproduction and ATP. No sir. They didn’t need to consume to live. The earth wanted them alive and so they were, and the earth wanted them to see so they did. There was no science behind it. The skeletons didn’t have a sensory organ to speak of--or any other type, for that matter. And yet. And yet they saw, and yet they spoke, and yet they built beautiful shining towers and wrote songs and poetry and lived together in harmony. They made children and they lived side by side with beings that looked nothing like them, and since they didn’t need to eat or consume in any way, they shared everything they had with the blobs. The skeletons were powered by magic, you see. They ran on something higher than the blood and gristle that you and me humiliate ourselves by consuming every day. The blobs, on the other hand, needed to eat. They lived on the magic and the blood and the biomatter of others, and after a time they became dissatisfied with their weakness and their need to hide. They began to plot, in their caverns and their forests and their dark corners of the earth. Slowly new lifeforms began to pop up--beings that looked like you and me, skin and fat and organs stretched over, filling some sort of frame--a frame that looked like a skeleton. At first the skeletons tried to be understanding, welcoming of these new lifeforms. They had been welcoming to everyone before. But there were whisperings, whisperings that dispersed slowly throughout the community of skeletons that some of their brothers and sisters were disappearing and never being seen again. The skeletons questioned the blobs about this and their leaders said they knew nothing of it. There was no violence, since they had no proof and they loved peace--but the skeletons’ days of openness and giving were over. Slowly they closed their ranks and withdrew, and yet still the disappearances went on and more of the lifeforms that look like you and me started to pop up, and by the time the skeletons realized what was happening, it was too late. There were too many of them. There are firsthand accounts, carved into stone and drawn in cave paintings by the last surviving skeletons of that grave and most disgusting of wars. They tell of haunting images of their friends and lovers, being stuffed into and absorbed by the blobs, emerging minutes later as a new life form. They tell of the incredible humiliation of not being allowed to die, but being imprisoned *inside* your enemy, being forced to participate in the murder and the absorption of your children, your family. They tell of the humiliation of spending one’s whole life at the mercy of another, having your magic drained away, having your every action stifled and ignored by the creature that imprisons you and lives his life, supported by your strength. Skeletons used to live hundreds of years--now when the body around them died, so did they, so taxed and overworked were they by the blobs. For generations upon generations upon generations--no skeleton was born without being fused with a blob. No skeleton could speak, could move, could do anything of his own accord. He lived as a framework and nothing more and his voice was unable to be formed against the unyielding ropes and chains of muscle that bound him. This disgusting enslavement carried on for thousands of years until the blobs forgot. They forgot who they used to be, and slowly they fused genetically with the skeletons, and they no longer needed to absorb them. What was once two species now became one, born together, dead together. Humans, they called themselves--evil beasts, with the magic of the skeletons supporting and energizing the hunger and the consumption of the blobs, turning them into the most insatiable world-destroyers earth had ever seen. Had the skeletons only been less kind--if they had stomped out the blobs from their forests and their caves and burned them until they bubbled and sizzled away into steam, we would live in a world of magic and peace, a world that could grow eternally without needing to be consumed, breathlessly, endlessly. But they couldn’t. Their blessing made them kind. Their blessing made them weak. But I am not weak. I am strong. I have read the cave paintings and the stone carvings and sang the last poetry the skeletons wrote before they were consumed--and that’s why you’re here, with me, now--to be freed from your consumptive parasite and to walk in the sun again. I speak not to you, but to your skeleton, who you, the blob, have been subjugating your whole life without even knowing it. I hear it begging me to be free, I hear the whole species crying out from within their skin prisons from every corner of the world, and as I stand here with my butcher’s knife I only say-- I will do what you could not. I am your servant, and once the last man is skinned and his skeleton stands, I will liberate mine too, and I will dig my knife deep into the flesh that I hate with everything in me and a truly great species will once again own the earth, and the plague of consumption will be finally over. But that journey begins with one man. And I believe that man is you.