The Bone Parade

Ever since I started working at the county morgue, I’ve had this peculiar brand of insomnia. It’s not the kind where you lie awake staring at the ceiling; it’s the kind where you fall asleep and wake up feeling like you’ve been walking for miles through wet concrete. The dreams started a few months after I took the job, and they always feature the ones who pass through my table. Not in any horrific way, mind you. Just… there. A face in a crowd at a farmer’s market, a voice calling my name in a hallway, a shadow that lingers at the edge of my vision. Once, I dreamed I was at a baseball game, and the old man from bay 4 was sitting three rows behind me, eating a hot dog with mustard on his chin. He didn’t acknowledge me, but I knew he was dead. It felt normal. As if death were just a minor inconvenience, a detour we all take. But then came the family dreams.

My mother’s mother, Nana Elsie, passed away four winters ago. My father’s brother, Uncle Frank, had been gone for over two decades, a victim of a construction site accident that left his body broken but his face intact. Mostly. These two were the patrons of my dream visits. Usually, it’s benign—we’re sitting on a porch swing, or strolling through a pumpkin patch, or just huddled around a kitchen table. I know they’re dead; there’s an unspoken acknowledgment in the air. Sometimes they ask about the weather, sometimes they tell me they’re proud of me. Uncle Frank always wanted to know if I’d fixed the leaky faucet in the basement—a running joke from when he was alive. These dreams are warm, almost comforting. But once in a while, the veil lifts, and they show themselves as they truly are. It’s never sudden. It’s a slow decay that creeps in through the edges of the dream. The porch swing gets splinters, the pumpkin patch turns to rot, the kitchen table becomes a slab of cold metal.

In the worst of these, my grandmother touches my arm, and her fingers are dry and papery, peeling like bark. Her eyes, normally warm, are filmed over with a milky haze. She smiles, but her lips crack, revealing gray gums and a mouthful of loose teeth. She doesn’t speak; she just points to the floor, and I look down to see a trail of bloody footprints leading to a closed door that wasn’t there before. Uncle Frank stands behind her, his neck at an odd angle, his skin waxy and mottled. He opens his mouth to speak, but all that comes out is a low rasping, like leaves skittering across pavement. He points to the door too. I turn to look, and the dream ends.

But last week, the dream changed. I was in an abandoned train station, the kind with marble floors and a grand clock whose hands had melted. The air was thick with the smell of decay, but also of iron and ozone. My grandmother and uncle were waiting for me on a bench, looking almost normal, except for the faint green tinge under their skin. They stood as I approached. ‘We have to hurry,’ my grandmother said, her voice dry as dust. ‘They’re bringing in the cart.’ I didn’t know what she meant, but I followed as they led me into a side tunnel. The tunnel opened into a vast chamber, filled with rows upon rows of steel drawers. It was a morgue, but vast and endless, like something out of a fever dream. On every drawer, a nameplate glowed faintly. I saw names I recognized, people I had processed in the real world. The drawers began to slide open on their own, and the occupants, in various stages of decomposition, sat up and turned their hollow gazes toward me. My grandmother pointed to the far end, where a single drawer was closed.

‘Open it,’ she said, her voice now a gurgle. ‘It’s your turn to be on this side.’ I took a step toward the drawer, my heart hammering, but then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Uncle Frank. His face was half-gone, the skull gleaming through rotted flesh. He leaned close, and his breath was the smell of damp earth. ‘Don’t,’ he whispered. ‘You haven’t kept your promise.’ I woke up with a scream, sheets soaked in sweat. The promise—I hadn’t thought about it in years. When I was seven, I had sworn to my grandmother that I would never leave her side. But I had moved across the country for this job, and I had missed her funeral.

I went back to work the next day, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Every time I opened a drawer, I half-expected to see my own face staring back. At night, I started leaving the lights on. But the dreams only got worse. The station, the morgue, the endless rows. Grandma and Uncle Frank growing more rotten each time. Until two nights ago, when I walked into the dream and found the station empty. The bench was empty. The tunnel was sealed. I stood alone in the vast chamber, and every drawer was open, revealing not bodies, but mannequins. They all wore the same face. Mine. A voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. It was my grandmother’s, but layered, like it came through water. ‘You forgot the way home.’ I turned and saw a mirror where there had been none. In it, my reflection was standing in a hospital room, a familiar one. I was older, gray, hooked to machines. My grandmother and uncle stood behind my reflection, their hands on its shoulders. They were smiling. And then the mirror shattered.

I woke up in my own apartment, but I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed. The ceiling was coated in a fine, gray dust, and I could hear a faint scraping, like something dragging itself across the floor above. Then the ceiling cracked, and a hand broke through. It was my grandmother’s hand—bone and sinew, missing skin. A voice, dry and ancient, seeped into the room: ‘You’re coming with us now.’ I forced my eyes shut, and when I opened them, it was morning. The ceiling was clean. There was no dust. But there was a photograph on my nightstand that hadn’t been there before. It was me, in the hospital room, with the machines, and my grandparents were standing behind me, their faces untouched by decay. On the back, written in my grandmother’s shaky script: ‘We miss you. Try the fruit cake.’

I called in sick, and I haven’t returned to work since. I don’t sleep anymore, not really. But last night, I finally broke down and went to the graveyard. I stood at my grandmother’s grave, and I saw that the earth was freshly turned. Not like someone had dug, but like something had pushed from inside. I knelt down and pressed my ear to the grass. I could hear a faint, rhythmic pulse. And then a voice, indistinct but unmistakable, humming a lullaby I had forgotten. I ran. I’m writing this from a motel room on the other side of town. But I know it won’t help. They’ve found me before. And they’ll find me again. Because in that other place, I left a piece of myself. And they guard it. They guard it, and they wait for me to come back to take my place in the parade. The Bone Parade. Where the dead don’t want an audience. They want a participant.