Make No Bone

Because practically every other bastard starts the same way, Bone bursts out of the University of East Anglia's Creationist Writing Programme in a fit of workerist pique, and not giving a toss about language (fucking Anglo-Saxon) or his entrée (French, where does the bastard acute go?) into the world (upper-middle class, tiny) of publishing, or over-long opening sentences that put the casual reader off, click!, Bone gives the swing door an almighty thwack!! so that it smashes against the walls beyond Jericho into a social disease more toxic than Agent Orange, depleted uranium and the Pacific Ocean combined - i. fucking e., CLASS... 

Not as in room. Nor as in style. Nor even as a lower second from a third-rate Polytechnic so that s/he can still charge £50 an hour regardless of gender/talent/being arsed or not, as we live in a state of perpetual competition. Pontification not necessary. It is after all only 9.25am.  

Yet Bone has already been up more than five hours. Bone is a cleaner. Not the-I-only-work-to-make-money-type of cleaner, but the-I-leave-everthing-really-really-clean-don't-I?-So-where's-my-fucking-money-type.

Bone feels like killing  sometimes, and he knows Thou Shalt Not Kill and all that jazz - which is fine, as far as it goes. But it lacks context. 

THOU SHALT NOT KILL. Bang! There. Out of the blue. On an enormous tablet. Capitals no less.

Thou shalt not kill whom? Thou shalt not kill what? And thou shalt not think why! That would be sacrilegious. Hell to sanctity, maybe there's been a whole lotta killing going on before we got to your conveniently placed Year Zero circa 2000 anno dominis. Maybe that's how we got into our present state of affairs: there already having been a whole lot of shalt notting and killing to establish the pecking order, set up the food chain, the patriarchal structures of power and social control, the whole God damn shooting match!  

AND LO... Supernatural geezer turns up and gets the Jewish guy with the big bushy eyebrows and the extended family to take dictation in stone. Then fucks off again.

On reflection, Bone does not hold with Thou Shalt Nots. As a fictive soul, he knows it means nothing. In the war on error, we need to cherish Thou Shalts and other positives. He tends towards the view that somebody might have made this shit up in the name of  freeing people from enslavement but what kind of liberation is imprisonment of the mind.  

In any event, Bone would no more think of murdering someone than he would of sticking a metaphorical limb in the primordial potage just to see if it was hot. Cat. Skin. Removal Of. More than one way to, thinks Bone.  

But why? ...More thinking. 

Bone, as clean as a mirror when it comes to reflection, gets it in the neck for the choices he's been obliged to make. Not his idea of funny. Apparently, it's just like shopping. There are these lifestyle options, see. Available in medium/extra large/regular/small. Take one off the rack. Your personality disorder is ready to be diagnosed, madam. Your meningitis is over here, sir. 

Bone meditates on the lack of an inciting incident. He's been hoping for an insurrection. Nothing fancy. Local. Restrained. Tasteful. 

Smash the barbarian over the head and charge him double for the clean-up operation. Neo-psychopathy. Bone prefers honest old-fashioned elbow grease. He leaves everywhere really clean. Make no bones, it is all or nothing. There is no half-clean. Only dirty or clean. He likes the clarity.  

Outside of work, he obsesses not about cleanliness, or cleaning. He thinks of cleansing, social, economic, ethnic, manic: the class warfare that rages in the name of property; the law of rent that dictates that, even though we pay, we will always owe. 

So Bone has spent the morning cleaning. He notices his hands. Still spotted with oil and dirt. He has had no time to clean his own hands.  

It is not dirt. They are liver spots.

He realises. He feels his age. His own skin reminds him of Mr Burns, one of several (Grandpa, Moe and Santa's Little Helper) missing from his Simpson nuclear-family bath robe. Having just compared himself to a loathesome yellow louse of a man, he feels dirty. Fear and self-loathing hardly, but certainly a little bit unclean. Strange, for Bone. Clean Bone. Fragile Bone. Brittle. Alone.

He contemplates the want of dialogue in an age weary of loneliness and isolation, yet wary of solitude and intimacy. A requiem starts in his head. He pictures his own demise. He touches the sleek black teak. The coffin opens and the corpse ascends to the sounds of silence and clicking selfies.  

Meanwhile, the Creative Accounting dept. socialises the loss. Works of fiction are exempt from grief. 

All is as it shalt be. Amen.