Bag of Bones

by Brett Rutherford

When they arrested him
in his Brighton Beach hovel,
amid the dust and termites,
the untold generations
of roach egg-cases
and rodent droppings,

when they surveyed,
for evidence his vast,
uncatalogued library —
mostly Judaica and thus
unreadable to detectives

they knew they were beyond
their depth, despite all
the hidden cameras
that more than proved
he frequented the morgue,

and entering with a stolen key,
had had his way, some way,
with lady's corpses, but left
no sign except those deft
incisions in their backs,
cracked spines
the only sign
of his intrusion.

And more confounding
yet, were the tracks
he left, matched to
his shoes, into and out
of Mt. Sinai Cemetery,
the freshly-dug graves
disturbed, coffins
most assuredly opened,
the female occupants
disrobed and turned
face down -- again,
spines cut and cracked
like walnuts.

And what they found
was this bag of bones,
like knuckles or parts
of vertebrae. The DNA
from in the marrow said
"Human," but no one knew
just how these malformed
pieces had ever been
inside a human form.

Only a week in jail
and the threat
of what befell
such a frail young man
when the lights went out --
ah, he confessed.

He was the last
in a long line of thieves,
his uncle the last one
to pass the secret
of how to steal the "luz,"

the bone unknown
to anatomists because
it was invisible in place,
the indestructible bone
at the heart
of resurrection.
No luz, no afterlife.

How could this ghoul
have hoped to profit
from the kernels of souls?
Did he make soup from them
in hope of longevity?

At last he confessed it all:
that he was known
to a circle of unhappy men
who were schooled in Kabala,
how they paid him well ...

"For the bones?" the detectives asked.
"Did they seek to make magic
with these impossible bones?"

"Not so," the luz-ghoul answered.
"They gave me the key to the morgue,
the names and dates, the map
to the gravesites I was to visit."

"To what end?" the detective demanded.

"So when they rise," the thief smiled.
"Their dead first wives will not
be there awaiting them."