Page 22 of Bones and Ashes

You learn to measure your life in the spaces between visits, and the spaces get wider, and the visits get shorter, and you keep standin' there anyway.

Laz had everything I didn't.

Everything I ever wanted.

He had brothers.

Colors.

A seat at a table where somebody carved his name.

I had shadows and I called them enough.

He doesn't slide into the booth where June just was. He stands there, waitin' for an invitation. It's a small gesture of respect, but I accept it with a wave of a finger.

He sits.

He folds his hands on the table. Slow. Deliberate. Like a man settin' down cards he already knows are winners.

And I look at those hands because I can't not.

The ink crawls across every knuckle, every joint, every stretch of skin between bone and tendon. Skin peeled back from skeleton. Not ripped—rotted. Layers of flesh curlin' away like old paint off a barn door, exposin' what's underneath. Metacarpals drawn in white and gray, precise as anatomy plates, runnin' from wrist to fingertip.

The shadowing is sick—and I mean that both ways. Whoever did this work understood decay the way I understand scripture. Intimately. From the fuckin' inside out.

And there, right over the knuckle of his middle finger on the left hand—a maggot. Fat. Detailed. Burrowed into the split where ink-flesh separates from ink-bone.

I look at the right hand. Same finger. Same knuckle. Another one. Twin maggots, feedin' on the dead thing he's chosen to wear like a second skin.

I stare at them longer than I should.

He smiles at me while I study him. Not a nervous smile. Not a polite one. The kind of smile a man wears when he knows exactly what you're lookin' at and he put it there for you to find.

My eyes move up from his hands to his neck and the ink keeps goin'. Doesn't stop. No. It climbs. Skin peelin' back in long, sick strips, exposin' the layered meat underneath. Rendered in blue-black and bruise-purple, striated muscle fibers drawn so precise they almost fuckin' pulse when he swallows.

The shadowing shifts from gray to green in places. Somethin' that used to be alive and ain't anymore. Patches of flesh hang like wet paper, curlin' at the edges, and beneath them the tendons pull taut across ink-bone like guitar strings wound too tight.

More rot. More decay. More of whatever story he's wearin' like scripture on his body the same way I wear mine.

And suddenly I get it.

Biblical.

Every fuckin' inch of him. Biblical.

Lazarus.

I know the story. Lazarus of Bethany. The man Jesus wept for. The man who was dead—not mostly dead, not almost dead, not metaphorically fuckin' dead—dead dead. Wrapped in linen. Sealed in a tomb. Gone for four days before anyone came callin' him back.

Four days.

That's four days of rot. Four days of bacteria, and gas, and the body doin' what the body does when the soul is no longer home.

Four days of decay settin' into muscle and membrane, turnin' a man into somethin' the people who loved him couldn't stand to look at.

And then he comes back.

Walks out of that tomb still wrapped in his own burial cloth, stinkin' of death, alive anyway.