I watch a lot of construction work. I like watching giant machines break through the earth, leaving gaping wounds only to have metal beams reach for sky. I like seeing the walls and the glass go up and cover the skeleton. Yet I like houses with open-beamed ceilings. I like seeing the bolts in the wood that keep the house together, help it stand strong against California earthquakes or Illinois snowfall. I think that's beautiful. I like to think the beams and roof are actually just two hands holding onto each other, fingers side by side. The skeletal system exposed and turning into a piece of artwork that speaks to everything under the paint. I look at my own hands, wondering if my skin, pale and often bruised, is merely my paint.

I’ll then look back to the ceiling. “Yes,” I will think. “This is beautiful.”

Often I find myself in situations in which I must draw collarbones. In figure drawing, there’s always that one terrible day where everyone is forced to draw a skeleton. I’d always go clavicle up. I like the slight but taught bend of the bone, the rounded inner point that sits on the sternum almost precariously, the dip it creates in the skin covering it. I’d barely look at my page, moving my hand as I move my eyes. If I was lucky, it would take me about two hours to get to the jaw, more often I would get lost in the vertebrae, if I was feeling particularly adventurous I'd try to map out the ribs. That never went very well, so often I’d try to ride the waves of charcoal-dusted collar bones.

When my friend was in seventh grade, he broke his clavicle. B was the first person I knew to break a bone that wasn’t an arm. He broke it by grabbing a swing by the chain. I wasn’t there, but I was told that there was an audible crack, no blood, but a definite scream. I asked him if it hurt.

“Of course it did, stupid.” Asking if something that hurts, hurts is a dumb question. I didn’t ask him that ever again. Even when he scraped his finger on a bass string, where it bled, or when he slammed his knee against a desk and showed me that it already started bruising.

When I’m bored I often tap my collar until it sounds. Or rub my fingers into its dip. It was deeper once; that made me afraid that my bones would break like B’s under the pressure of simply pulling a sweater over my body. Maybe his broke in a river-shaped crack. It cracked straight in half. I was worried mine would shatter into shards like toothpicks, that could clear the teeth of the monsters under my bed.

My best friend E’s clavicle is petite like a pixie’s. It sits, prettily, not even two fingers thick, and leaves a handsome dip in her throat between the right and left bone. It makes me wonder how such a little thing can have muscles that tense and pick me up, a good fifteen pounds heavier than she. Her collar bones wouldn’t break even if I took a hammer to them.

N’s clavicle is always covered by flannel. It is the only part of his upper body that hasn't been destroyed by baseball, which he still watches religiously, and plays with his friends in open fields with no bases. We spend many hours on his bed, where I press my palms into his back like bread dough and navigate his matted muscles with my fingers like a Ouija board. I worry about him at work where he tells me he lifts cat trees more than half his size onto top shelves. I ask him, if a cat tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?

I can see it falling and hitting him right in the chest like a sledgehammer, breaking both his clavicles into even pieces so that they have to sew and weld and bolt them back together. I fear a throw of a baseball will cause one of his scapula to finally shatter, leaving muscles to fall and let go of his arm and let it fall so far forward that it pulls the clavicle out of his body with it. But I encourage him to work. I ens him to play. Because I want him to keep running in open fields and not run & of exact bases.

When my mom had cancer, her clavicle always peaked out of her shirts. Our of her skin. Her body got so very small, while her hands and face swelled. I don't remember those days too well. I just remember locking myself in my room to cry when I realized she lost her eyelashes. And when I hugged her, my cheek rested on her collarbone like a bat to my head. Her bones had strings and strings of medications swirl in the veins around them, yet they refused to be strangled. With every pulse they kept shape. They said every day, sometimes so quietly I had to strain to hear, that they will not bend in order to break. And my mother’s did not break. They no longer want to fall out of her body. They hold her even head on her even shoulders without fear, without question, no longer threats when we encompass her.

Deer don’t have collar bones. Which makes sense. The creatures are so delicate that I can’t imagine them having such things as bones. Bones are so chiseled and they don’t bend, they break, so how can such thin-framed creatures have rounded haunches and backs with such things under their fur? If you've ever seen a deer go under a fence, their bodies are like liquid, curving and sliding under the barbed wire, moving softly like pastels and quickly like a flash flood. And when they bound over that same fence their body arcs like a chapel entrance. Of course they don't have collarbones, their bodies can't afford it.

And vertebrae? Vertebrae are all the promises your body makes to your nerve endings. They are the body’s wedding band, they keep the tissues that speak to the brain wrapped up so tight that they will not fall when saying, “I do,” and, “It hurts too much to bear.” In humans there are thirty-five parts of the backbone that say, “It is okay, you are not dead, I will hold you up.” And they will repeat that for as long as it takes for the wounds to heal.

I know a girl who makes necklaces out of the vertebrae of whales. Leather wrapped around and around the spike of the bone, and then gas wearers. They are beautiful. They beat against the chest in step like a third foot. Easy, easy, easy, heading down Midwestern streets that can’t even und of ocean. But every beat is almost like saying, water is out there, ir is deep, and you will swim.

But I also know a woman who had to help get rid of a beached whale’s corpse. She said it smelled like a toxic waste dump. It smelled like pollution and broken heart of a soldier and the skin under the fingernails of a murder victim. That’s what it smelled like. She had to throw all the clothing she wore around the beast away. She couldn't get the stench out, even after multiple washes. The cat wouldn't even go near it. I imagine the decaying flesh pulled away by truck after truck, and the bones being picked like dandelions in a cemetery. It may not bleed, but it still is an open wound.

To me, the word vertebrae sounds like blades. Each cylinder with its own dorsal shard to piece itself with the next. It reminds me of the blades in a blender. It reminds me of the knife an old classmate keeps in her pocket after she was mugged. It reminds me of the way that when people rubbed my back in winter they would say my spine was sharp enough to cut, almost reptilian in its curve. It reminds me of how I wished that was true when C hugged me for the last time so that his palm would bleed and scar, and I could finally say I hurt him more.

I like cats and snakes because their spines are like a line of music. Though they curve and twist through emotions and needs, they stay in the same key of the animals' movements. I like to think that is why snakes have “scales,” because they are music. And cats going into what I call kitty butter. When you hold them their spine leads their body into a dripping shape, and they curve gracefully to touch the ground. And if you hold out your hand they’ll reach up with their head to touch it, then each single vertebra will do the same until they sink to the ground and turn to do it again. With the slightest pressure their bodies will drop the same way under your hand. Maybe vertebrae aren’t blades, maybe they are waterbeds.

I used to have a friend who had a waterbed. She only talks when I talk first now. She was sweet. I miss her. Someone, I’m afraid, might take away her backbone, set it in a jar, and never let it out again. But she will grow a new one, because she is resilient, like a dandelion on a cliff. Or a forget-me-not in a bed of clover.

Somewhere there must be a vertebra with a big enough center hole to be a flower pot for a mint plant. I wonder if that plant tastes different. I wonder if it would grow by my window. I wonder if I could ever bring myself to eat it.

I never had good knees. Even as a kid they’d give out on me, making me unable to walk without a limp. “Growing pains,” the doctors said as I was told to run up and down the hallways. They said that my bones were growing too fast for my body, and I guess some things were too slow to keep up. In high school a friend had to carry me to and from class because he hated seeing how broken my knees were. On hikes my knees would tremble like a newborn foal's and strangers would ask if I needed to hold their hands. I always did. It’s subsided mostly. I can go jogging, I can chase pigeons, and kneel, and take the stairs, but every so often I can't. I’ve made peace with that.

My dad’s knees were my measuring stick as a kid. He stood so tall that most of the time his knees were the only thing I could relate to my own body. I couldn't rell where one part of him began and the other ended. But at least I had the angles of his knees, and that would have to do. I like the angle they make when they take two steps at a time, sometimes when I was small, bounding over three, just to show me what my own could do. I liked that. And he still manages to make a perfect ninety degrees on a stepladder with branch cutters in hand.

I remember in Black Beauty the gelding's knees were scraped and destroyed after an accident. The horse’s knees bled raw, leaving dun skin behind after healing, breaking his perfect black coat. In many different scenes Black Beauty fell to his knees, and each time I wanted to cry. I remember watching a new human character walk on screen and examine his joints, lifting the horse’s leg and moving it back and forth. Many years later I rode a horse who took a misstep and fell to its knees with me on its back. Both of us cried out in terror, and I jumped from the animal's back, triggering pain in my legs, to look at him. I helped him stand and brushed my fingers over his legs; he made a sighing sound like he thought he was such a klutz and was frustrated with himself. I cooed and caught my breath and wiped away the dirt to find still perfect skin. I walked beside him up the hill anyways. I tripped three times, and it would have been comedic if I wasn’t still so terrified, turning to check on my companion every few steps for something I missed.

S always has her hand on my knee. I find comfort in it, and so I put mine on hers, during late night TV, speed Scrabble, and meals. When I am sick, she sets my legs on top of her lap and settles her hands over them. She does this when I'm not sick too. It’s comforting. Her boyfriend Z and our friend R sneak their way under my legs also, and we become a tangled mess of electrical joints with bones scraping against each other in fits of giggles. Those are the nights that make me smile the widest.

As people, we have bodies. As people, with bodies, we have skin, muscle, cartilage, blood vessels, marrow, nerves, and bones. Most of those things disappear at one point or another, but bones last the longest. Bones are what the forensics squad examine after a murder. Bones are what’s going to tell them who that was, depending on your view. They’re going to check each little tooth and count every filling and give it a name. Because that disfigured heap of flesh requires them to complete the story.

Whether you like it or not, your story is in your bones. It's in the C used to reframe my cousin's scapula after they made him take out all the other jewelry of stainless steel in his body. It’s in the crack of my finger from a bad volleyball set. It’s in A, who now makes art that rubs against her hands and polishes her calluses to the point where I wonder if they are actually sanding her bones down to the marrow. It was in the peaked shoulders of my dad’s old cat when it sat on his chest just to steal his breath as he slept. It was in the sternum that marked how low-cut our shirts could be in middle school. It’s in all of that.

So when I’m dug up from my grave because there isn't enough room for the rest of the coffins, and I must share with someone else, they will see every chapter, every scene, every verse, every line, every goddamn word of my life and they will find the new and perfect body to bury with mine. My bones will be laid in satin encompassed by oak panels and entangled with that of a girl who came from the earth and body of an ancestor I used to shoot the shit with on nights I didn’t know which way was up. Maybe our clavicles will touch. Maybe our tarsi and metatarsus will mix like lottery numbers, maybe our rib cages will finally open and all the birds trapped inside will find a new nest in our jaws or maybe leave altogether. Maybe we will create new chapters, and scenes, and verses, and lines, and words, just by letting our vertebrae play with each other. Maybe the story will not be over. Maybe.