The White Bone Quotes & Sayings

Light like thin grey soup seeped through the windows. The door opened and Mrs. Dark came in, followed by her sister, who had no head, only the white bone of her spine protruding from her raggedly severed neck. — Cassandra Clare

It was colder that winter than I knew cold could be, even though the girl from Minnesota down the hall declared it "nothing." Out in Oregon, snow had been a gift, a two-day dusting earned by enduring months of gray, dripping sky. But the wind whipping up the Hudson from the city was so vehement that even my bone marrow froze. Every morning, I hunkered under my duvet, unsure of how I'd make it to my 9:00 a.m. Latin class. The clouds spilled endless white and Ev slept in. — Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

There will be plenty of backup and support, but she's still going to have to do heartbreaking things to people who probably don't understand why the pale woman with the bone-white violin and blood dripping from her fingertips is coming for them. — Charles Stross

Red like blood White like bone Red like solitude White like silence Red like the beastly instinct White like a god's heart Red like thawing hatred White like a frozen, pained cry Red like the night's hungry shadows Like a sigh piercing the moon it shines white and shatters red — Tite Kubo

IT IS THE colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone, resting on each arm of a seat which has been carved from a single, massive ruby. — Michael Moorcock

There are some young almond tress, which ordinarily look as if drawn by a childish hand. Now, as the wind sets their weak branches gibbering, they seem like shamanistic scratches on the white bone of the brittle bright night. — John Collier

The office Halloween party was at the Royalton last week and I went as a mass murderer, complete with a sign painted on my back that read MASS MURDERER (which was decidedly lighter than the sandwich board I had constructed earlier that day that read DRILLER KILLER), and beneath those two words I had written in blood Yep, that's me and the suit was also covered with blood, some of it fake, most of it real. In one fist I clenched a hank of Victoria Bell's hair, and pinned next to my boutonniere (a small white rose) was a finger bone I'd boiled the flesh off of. As elaborate as my costume was, Craig McDermott still managed to win first place in the competition. He came as Ivan Boesky, which I thought was unfair since a lot of people thought I'd gone as Michael Milken last year. The Patty Winters Show this morning was about Home Abortion Kits. — Bret Easton Ellis

I don't trust the answers or the people who give me the answers. I believe in dirt and bone and flowers and fresh pasta and salsa cruda and red wine. I don't believe in white wine; I insist on color. — Charles Bowden

She knew the gold in her eyes had shifted to flame, because when she looked to Maeve, the queen's face had gone bone-white. And then Celaena set the world on fire. — Sarah J. Maas

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. — W. H. Auden

Her bone-white face lit up like she was at a surprise party. "Hear that, Dwyer? He called me ma'am! Stay forever if you want, big guy. Teach my son a thing or two about manners."
"He's good people," Kyle said. "Always has been."
It was the last thing I wanted to hear at that moment. "I'm not always good," I shot back.
"Ooooo, polite and a bad boy," Gina cooed. "Watch out, ladies. — Aaron Starmer

I dreamed today of bone-white horses, stamping and nuzzling in the bright sunshine, and of orange poppies which swayed and danced in the spring wind.

(Do not look back.) — Neil Gaiman

With a scream of rage, Lada abandoned her learned moves, her careful training. She flew at him like a wild boar, all fury and animal instinct. He did not know where to block because her blows made no sense, her movements had no grace. She slashed at his face, and when he grabbed her wrists, she bit his hand, clenching her jaw, teeth clamping onto bone. She kept her teeth in him as he shook her, slamming the dagger into his side again and again, following him as he fell away from her, trying to break free. She stayed on top, stabbing, not caring where she hit, not going for a careful, efficient blow. An animal scream, muffled by his hand, continued from her throat. — Kiersten White

I can fairly say it was the first time in my new life that I really wished I wasn't supernatural: if I had been human the pain would have stopped because I would be dead. II can only describe it as what a person would feel if he somehow, by some terrible miracle, survived the fall off a skyscraper. It was the feeling of every single nerve, bone, sinew, and cell breaking and howling in agony at the same time. A person might have one second of conscious agony before he saw the white light, one brief insight into what the word "disintegrated" really meant. But I had to sit, blinking at her while this happened. I couldn't get up or down or scream or vomit the way a visibly injured person might. I sat there. — Candice Raquel Lee

Linnie. And this Winnie." They wore identical smiles, their bright black eyes sparked with curiosity. "Are you the doctor?"
"No, I'm just volunteering."
"I knowed that, too." Winnie gave her an exaggerated shake of the head. "Girls is never the doctor. They's the nurses."
"Oh no, what about Dr. Clare? Huh? The lady doctor who took care of Grammy in the hospital when she broke her hip bone?" Linnie asked.
"Yeah, but she was a white lady. They can be doctors." Winnie looked at Lucy. "Right? There are white lady doctors. I seen 'em."
Lucy felt her eyes go wide. Were there children who still believed your gender or color dictated your career? "There are white lady doctors, black lady doctors, white man doctors, black man doctors."
They stared at her.
She thought for a moment. "And there are white man nurses and black man nurses, too."
"Now you're just bein' silly," Linnie said and let out a laugh. — Mary Jane Hathaway

The long bone beads used in the breastplate were called hair pipes. They were used as a medium of exchange in trading. The finer they were, the more valuable they were. Originally they were made out of buffalo bones and later on, out of cow bones. They were not made by the Indians, however, but by white men who traded them to the Indians. — W. Ben Hunt

She began to sing, but I could not make out the words. It must have been a love song, to judge from the slightly pained expression on her face, and the way she tightly gripped the microphone. I noticed a flash of white skin on her neck. As she reached the climax of the song, her eyes half closed and her shoulders thrown back, a shudder passed through her body. She moved her arm across her chest to cradle her heart, as though consoling it, afraid it might burst. I wondered what would happen if I held her tight in my arms, in a lovers' embrace, melting into one another, bone on bone ... her heart would be crushed. The membrane would split, the veins tear free, the heart itself explode into bits of flesh, and then my desire would contain hers - it was all so painful and yet so utterly beautiful to imagine. — Yoko Ogawa

Violet
232 books | 49 friends
see comment history Black for hunting through the night

For death and mourning the color's white

Gold for a bride in her wedding gown

And red to call enchantment down.

White silk when our bodies burn,

Blue banners when the lost return.

Flame for the birth of a Nephilim,

And to wash away our sins.

Gray for knowledge best untold,

Bone for those who don't grow old.

Saffron lights the victory march,

Green will mend our broken hearts.

Silver for the demon towers,

And bronze to summon wicked powers. — Cassandra Clare

He [liberal white person] may stand with you through thin, but not thick; when the chips are down, you'll find that as fixed in him as his bone structure is his sometimes subconscious conviction that he's better than anybody black. — Malcolm X

Suddenly the whole body writhed spasmodically and rolled over. His face ... He has no face ... The man's nose had completely burned away leaving only two holes in his head. The mouth had melted together, the lips sealed with the exception of a small opening in one corner. One eye had melted down over what had been his cheek, but the other ... the other was wide open. Where the rest of the face should have been there were only pieces of cartilage and bone sticking out between irregular shreds of flesh and slivers of fabric. The naked, glistening muscles contracted and relaxed, contorting as if the head had been replaced by a mass of freshly killed and butchered eels ... The skin over the collarbone on one side was gone and a piece of the bone stuck out, glowing white like a piece of chalk in a meat stew. — John Ajvide Lindqvist

In the borough, three boys circled a white camel
that wept because at dawn
there was no other way except through the needle's eye!
Oh cross! Oh, nails! Oh, thorn!
Oh, thorn driven to the bone until the planet rust to pieces! — Federico Garcia Lorca

What I wanted was to get away. But the moon was too far beyond, and there were white bits under me, where the flesh was shredded off and the bone gleamed that famed ivory, and those below cowered and, if they were not quick enough, were spattered in blood. Then came the jolt, as of a fall, and I saw the leg was caught in an ungainly way in the smaller branches of a mutamba tree, the foot hooked, long like that infamous fruit. — Tsitsi Dangarembga

NOTE TO SELF: Refusing pain medication when someone is forcibly snapping your bone back into place is a bad fucking idea. Especially when it takes multiple tries. If the flash of white light I saw was any indication, the bastards tried to kill me. — Anna Paige

They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood. They rode through a region where iron will not rust nor tin tarnish. The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lay like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and they passed lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of horses and mules that travelers had stood afoot. — Cormac McCarthy

Wishbone

Half-eaten chicken
lying on white serving plate
quartered potatoes
chunks of carrots
celery too
we tell stories
and laugh about the day
your little finger is locked around the wishbone
so is mine
I pretend to make a wish
close my eyes
mumbling my lips
that's the way I faked out the nuns
pretending to say the rosary
so they would leave me alone
your face is so determined
you win the wrestling match
lifting your piece of chicken bone above your head
in victory
I know better than to ask
what did you wish for
secret desires of the heart are not to be shared
or
they won't come true
everyone knows that
you clean the dishes
I turn on the TV
lying on the couch
listening to you make music
with running water
and closing cupboard doors. — Robert Hobkirk

That night he had dreamed of an orchard under the moonlight, of skeletal white trees, their branches ending in bony hands, their roots going deep down into the graves. There was fruit that grew upon the trees in the bone orchard, in his dream, and there was something very disturbing about the fruit in the dream, but on waking he could no longer remember what strange fruit grew on the trees, or why he found it so repellent. — Neil Gaiman

Above us hung a tapestry of silver and gold and palest green that in my world had faded into white: a great oak so entwined with ivy it had died, its bare branches pushing through the leaves like bone. I stared at the roses, wanting to hold my hands to such red, but like the light, they burned cold. — Patricia A. McKillip

She had seen Brianna's face for a moment in the light; white as paper and hard as bone, with the eyes black holes. Her gentle, kindly mistress had vanished like smoke, taken over by a deamhan, a she-devil. Lizzie was a town lass, born long after Culloden. She had never seen the wild clansmen of the glens, or a Highlander in the grip of blood fury - but she'd heard the auld stories, and now she knew them true. A person who looked like that might do anything at all. She — Diana Gabaldon

As the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastedly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul. — Herman Melville

And here is the thing about them men they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye and even a posh fellow like the Moth had breathed that air so the knowledge of unfairness were deep in his bone and marrow. — Peter Carey

The face was no longer bone, but animal - the face of a white wolf. "I forbid you nothing. Nothing," uttered the awful face. "You may go anywhere - you may open any door. But, little bird, remember that you must be prepared to accept whatever you find." The long jaws spread in a smile filled with teeth. — Peter Straub

When the Germans surrendered with their arms raised high, holding a white flag, they weren't at all how i imagined them: hard, cruel, tall and monstrous with cigars chomped between their lips talking about how they wanted to shoot babies and old people. Instead they were boys like us, teenagers, tired, scared, dirty, and looking almost relieved that their was over, for now, that they can rest their bone-tired bodies in the POW camps. — Mariko Nagai

As he walked up past the red and green tennis courts in east Berkeley and saw the swing of the women's hair in the breeze, the crisp strokes that sent the ball over the net like a little bone-white planetoid, it occurred to him that there was still a last chance for a pair of heavenly arms to reach out to him and save him. — William T. Vollmann

I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones. — Bruce Chatwin

Black for hunting through the night
For death and mourning the color's white
Gold for a bride in her wedding gown
And red to call the enchantment down
White silk when our bodies burn
Blue banners when the lost return
Flame for the birth of a Nephilim
And to wash away our sins.
Gray for the knowledge best untold
Bone for those who don't grow old
Saffron lights the victory march
Green to mend our broken hearts
Silver for the demon towers
And bronze to summon wicked powers
-Shadowhunter children's rhyme — Cassandra Clare

In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, air currents and brushing overcoats while direct contact with doors and chairs seemed to occasion no discomfort. No wound healed in his soft, tentative flesh... Long white tendrils of fungus curled round the naked bones. — William S. Burroughs

He wore jeans and a thin white singlet which clung to his broad chest. His tanned biceps bunched as he hammered away, and his skin glowed with perspiration under the warm sun. Harriet's mouth went bone-dry. A rush of heat boiled over her, licking her skin, surging inside her breasts, her thighs. Her response was instantaneous. She had no control over it. One look at Adam's body and desire ignited in her. — Coleen Kwan

Years bleach away the sense of things until all that's left is a bone-white past, stripped of feeling and significance. — M.L. Stedman

It was a show where you were given a quote out of current events and you had to identify who said it. I was reading eight newspapers a day and had compiled a file of about 300 quotes. I really had to do my research. The White House press didn't have to bone up on any of it. — June Lockhart

The detritus of animal and plant life that had died miles above. It fell steadily through each zone of the ocean, down and down, shredding into flakes, leached of pigment until it became bone white. A snow of death. — Nick Cutter

I smelled it before i saw it, and the same unicorn I'd met on a field trip with Jack pranced up, pleased as anyting to see me again. It wasn't mutual.
"It's so cute, isn't it?" Arianna said dreamily.
"Are we seeing the same creature? It's like a demented goat with a bone growth — Kiersten White

Odin keep us.' Hakon's wisdom on the subject. 'He's as likely to as the White Christ.' I had no bone to pick with heathen bone-pickers. One god or many, none of them ever seemed to like us much. — Mark Lawrence

Out from the servient shoulders of some smooth-tongued Waiter it stares, into the scared dilating pupils of the White Satin Bride with her pledged hand clutching her Bridegroom's sleeve. Up from the gravelly, pick-and-shovel labor of the new-made grave it lifts its weirdly magnetic eyes to the Widow's tears. Down from some petted Princeling's silver-trimmed saddle horse it smiles its electrifying, wistful smile into the Peasant's sodden weariness. Across the slender white rail of an always out-going steamer it stings back into your gray, land-locked consciousness like the tang of a scarlet spray. And the secret of the face, of course, is "Lure"; but to save your soul you could not decide in any specific case whether the lure is the lure of personality, or the lure of physiognomy - a mere accidental, coincidental, haphazard harmony of forehead and cheek-bone and twittering facial muscles. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Her mouth was a gash of red, like the torn-open stomach of a sacrifice, bloody and oracular. Behind it her teeth shone sharp and white as bone. — Madeline Miller

The first cut wasn't the deepest. No, not at all. It was like all the others, a subtle rend of anxious skin, a gentle pulse of crimson, just enough to hush the demons shrieking inside my brain. But this time they wouldn't shut up. Just kept on howling, like Mama, when she was in a bad way. Worst thing was, the older I got, the more I began to see how much I resembled Mama, falling in and out of blue, then lifting up into the white. That day I actually thought about howling. So I gave myself to the knife, asked it to bite a little harder, chew a little deeper. The hot, scarlet rush felt so delicious I couldn't stop there. The blade might have reached bone, but my little brother, Bryan, barged into the bathroom, found me leaning against Grandma's new porcelain tub, turning its unstained white pink. You should have heard him scream. — Ellen Hopkins

Quinces are ripe...when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. they are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. but even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate--useless...until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame. add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-colored flesh soak-up the heat, coating itself in an opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-ripened papayas, a color you can taste. to answer your questionlove is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched. ~The Book of Salt — Monique Truong

Yet I was wound up. I tick. I exist. I am poised eighteen inches over the black rivets you are reading, I am in your place, I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself on the white paper. The rivets join us together and yet for all the passion we share nothing but our sense of division. — William Golding

Even in the wolfswood, you never found more than two or three of the white trees growing together; a grove of nine was unheard of. The forest floor was carpeted with fallen leaves, bloodred on top, black rot beneath. The wide smooth trunks were bone pale, and nine faces stared inward. The dried sap that crusted in the eyes was red and hard as ruby. — George R R Martin

When?' said the moon to the stars in the sky
Soon' said the wind that followed them all
Who?' said the cloud that started to cry
Me' said the rider as dry as a bone
How?' said the sun that melted the ground
and 'Why?' said the river that refused to run
and 'Where?' said the thunder without a sound
Here' said the rider and took up his gun
No' said the stars to the moon in the sky
No' said the trees that started to moan
No' said the dust that blunted its eyes
Yes' said the rider as white as a bone
No' said the moon that rose from his sleep
No' said the cry of the dying sun
No' said the planet as it started to weep
Yes' said the rider and laid down his gun — Nick Cave

A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most impeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an out-lying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place. — Mark Twain

I sighed. I hate the vamp jobs. They think they're so suave. It's not enough for them to slaughter and eat you like a zombie would. No, they want it to be all sexy, too. And, trust me: vampires? Not. Sexy. I mean, sure, their glamours can be pretty hot, but the dry-as-bone corpse bodies shimmering underneath? Nothing attractive there. — Kiersten White

A new darkness pulled away the room, inked out flesh and outlined bones. My mother was wide awake again. She become sharply herself - bone, wire, antenna - but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow - alone in white not unlike being alone in black. She had also sailed a boat safely between land and land. — Maxine Hong Kingston

When this is over ... we will got to the rainforest, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will. — Jodi Picoult

Are you okay?"
I sighed,my sodden coat chilling me to the bone. "Peachy.Made a new friend."
He pulled me up by the hand,unzipping my coat and yanking it off me.
"Shirt,too,please."
"No!"
"It's only fair. I seem to recall you making me strip the first time we met. — Kiersten White

You have a softa?' 'Somewhere underneath all these boxes.' 'These boxes you won't unpack.' 'I will now.' Again, he gave his words time to settle in and sink to the bone. I listened to the cadence of his breath and stared at the nubby white ceiling. I will now. I will unpack for you, Vivian, because if New York is your home, it must be mine, too. — Beatriz Williams

Well, the cat is flourishing and gets more spoiled and more beautiful every day. His whiskers measure, from tip to tip, including his mouth and nose, of course, ten inches, pure white whale bone. — Elizabeth Bishop

I was told that my diet was so poor that I could not repair the bones that were broken and operated on. So I have just had an Xradiograph taken; and lo! perfectly mended solid bone so beautifully white that I have left instructions that, if I die, a glove stretcher is to be made of me and sent to you as a souvenir — George Bernard Shaw

My son, you are now flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. By the ceremony performed this day, every drop of white blood was washed from your veins; you were taken into the Shawnee Nation ... — Chief Blackfish

Wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there's not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus - a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and — David Foster Wallace

Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves. The great difference between sport and art is that sport, like a sonnet, forces beauty within its own system. Art, on the other hand, cyclically destroys boundaries and breaks free. — Rita Mae Brown

Bridget's tight fists began to shake as something from deep inside, born of utter anger and hatred, crept from the depths of her soul. She lunged at him, prepared to pound his handsome face to blood and bone, but the straps prevented her. Instead, she was quickly zapped with a heady pulse of electricity. As she howled in anguish, Doctor Spencer beamed with satanic amusement. — Emmie White

Betty White is a riot. She is a good time! That is the bottom line: Betty White is a good time. She is really an incredible woman. She is so kind. She doesn't have one mean bone in her body, and she is the funniest woman in the room always. And you'll never hear one complaint from her. — Odette Annable

No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people's livestock. Other people's lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn't matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Irruption of the magical in the life of Snow White: Snow White knows a singing bone. The singing bone has told her various stories which have left her troubled and confused: of a bear transformed into a king's son, of an immense treasure at the bottom of a brook, of a crystal casket in which there is a cap that makes the wearer invisible. This must not continue. The behavior of the bone is unacceptable. The bone must be persuaded to confine itself to events and effects susceptible of confirmation by the instrumentarium of the physical sciences. Someone must reason with the bone. — Donald Barthelme

I prize my seamstress, I value my copyist; but my cook, who knows well how to prepare the food to sustain life, and nourish brain, bone, and muscle, fills the most important place among the helpers in my family. — Ellen G. White

So Sorscha lifted her head, even as her mouth trembled, even as her eyes burned, and stared down the King of Adarlan.
"You destroyed everything I had, and you deserve everything that's to come," she said. Then she looked at Dorian, whose eyes were indeed wide, his face bone-white. "I was not supposed to love you. But I did. I do. And there is so much I wish . . . I wish we could have done together, seen together. — Sarah J. Maas

cartridge belts. Maybe wood smoke somewhere. Jacob was dark-eyed and pale. He had a young man's beard, only potential, the hint of black whiskers along his jaw looking like something black pressed under a thick pane of smoked glass. At one point he pulled off a glove with his teeth and left it dangling from his mouth as he, what? - opened a K ration? lit a cigarette? The condemned man's last. His bare hand was as white as bone, as small as a child's. — Alice McDermott

Superstition, as indigenous to Louisiana as gators and Tabasco, holds that the spirits of the dead avenge any disruption of their bodies, which makes one wonder at the rancor released on the 1957 day when fifty-five white families re-interred their beloved in Hope Mausoleum after the Rt. Rev. Girault M. Jones, Bishop of Louisiana, deconsecrated the Girod Street Cemetery, condemning every last African American bone to anonymity in a mass grave in Providence Memorial Park. From that pogrom grew the Superdome. Thirteen acres of structural steel framing stretch up to 273 feet from the unholy ground, a towering testament to the American propensity to cheer black men into the end zones and desert them entirely six points later. — Ellen Urbani

I AM KORROK. In the mountains of Uruguay, a goat gets its hoof caught in a posthole and the bone snaps like a twig. The splinter juts from its skin, blood spraying onto white fur. It is stuck like that for three days. Finally, a wolf mother comes along, carrying her pup in her jaws. She lets the pup feed off the goat, gnawing bits of fur and skin and tearing at muscle. The goat feels it and screams and there is pain and pain and neither the goat nor the wolf nor the pup understand their place in the machine. I stand above all, and call them fags. I AM KORROK. — David Wong

Anya had never seen a house uglier house than Baba Yaga's. It was made entirely of mouldy bones in the same interlocking design as a log cabin. A thorny garden grew as high as the fence and skulls, bleached white by the sun, capped each fence post. Two enormous scaly chicken legs came out on either side of the house. Anya snorted in amusement and disgust. Yvan, she noticed, had turned an interesting shade of grey. — Amy Kuivalainen

The whole right side of his face was smashed in, concave forehead and crushed cheekbone and one eye bugging precariously from a broken socket. He was purplish-black, and dirty white: Maggots seethed from every pore and crawled across him in excited wriggly piles, blowflies waving and blooming and wilting, the bits of bone they'd scraped clean glinting like tiny mosaic tiles. Scraps of jeans and a leather jacket clung to the sticky seething mess of his flesh. He was big, big shouldered, a good foot taller; chit-chitter, he went, even standing still. — Joan Frances Turner

A story is alive, as you and I are. It is rounded by muscle and sinew. Rushed with blood. Layered with skin, both rough and smooth. At its core lies soft marrow of hard, white bone. A story beats with the heart of every person who has ever strained ears to listen. On the breath of the storyteller, it soars. Until its images and deeds become so real you can see them in the air, shimmering like oases on the horizon line. A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same. — Cameron Dokey

Sea-foam white lace bloomed from the sweeping neckline, washing upon her breast from the powder-green ocean of silk that made up the dress. A red sash covered the waist, forming an inverted peak that separated the bodice from the explosion of skirts beneath. Patterns of clear green beads were embroidered in whorls and vines across the whole of it, and bone-colored stitching stretched along the ribs. — Sarah J. Maas

Bone-white moths drop one by one to cover cuts on Odette's legs and obscure mud-water splotches patterning her skirts. They rest at the bases of her fingers like heaving white jewels on rings lighter than air. — Camille Alexa

The old woman crossed over to her. "When I speak of the people," she said barely above a whisper, her voice all weariness and grief, "I ain't just talking about the flesh, the blood. It's their voices. Their yes's and no's. That's what holds muscle to bone. The biggest thing the white man takes from us ain't our bodies. He takes our voices, too. He swallows up our yes's and no's like biscuits. But one day our yes's and no's will be so loud and strong they will lodge in his throat. He will have to spit them out to keep from choking. He will starve. There won't be nothing left of him except the shadows he casts on the deadest night. — Jonathan Odell