Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

The desert is full of bones. Sometimes, if you listen, the bones will speak.

From a distance, the Bone-Gatherer may look like he is wandering, with his basket made of dried hyssop on his back and his arms and legs and head all covered in black-blue feathers that flicker like tongues of lightless fire. He may look as if he is merely roving—a nomadic traveler stretching his lanky legs, with no singular destination in mind.

If you were, however, as near to him as one of the carrion-seekers who circle above his head, screaming their mocking songs, you would see his obsidian eyes, fixed upon a spot along the horizon. You’d see the way he shifts the weight of his burden. You’d see the heaviness of each foot’s fall. You’d see the tilt of his head, the twitch of his ears as he listens.

He listens for the bones, and the bones, in turn, speak.

• • • •

The desert is full of bones. How could it not be? For so many things live there, and so many things die in its heat.

Beside a rock lie tiny jackrabbit rib-bones, picked clean by larger creatures and left to dry in the unrelenting sun. They’re so small, they nearly disappear in the blinding glimmer of the day. They’re so small, they could be mistaken for anything. They could be mistaken for nothing at all.

They speak to the Bone-Gatherer, and he hears them from afar. They tell of the hunger that crawled inside of them, that drove them from the safety of their den. Of the way the mesquite leaves whispered in the wind as they slipped from the grasp of their branches. Of the caution—oh, the caution!—that came with each step they planned and executed.

But the bones knew, as bones do, just how many of the jackrabbit’s seasons had already turned. They knew their reflexes were no longer what they’d once been. And so the end was not so much a surprise for them as the exhalation of a long-held breath.

When the Bone-Gatherer reaches them, he kneels over the bones. He whispers words that no living soul has ever heard and sets the bones gently in his basket.

• • • •

The desert is full of bones. Each day in this place is a race with hunger and thirst, and each day, there are those who will lose.

Sometimes it feels to the Bone-Gatherer as if his basket is too heavy. The bones that call to him carry within their hollow insides heavy hopes and dreams and plans and sorrows that only grow lighter as the bone around them crumbles. As time flows past with the shifting of the sun.

The basket presses into the Bone-Gatherer’s shoulder, until his feathers bend and crumple beneath it. Until he has no choice but to stop, set the basket in the dust, sit down upon it, and rest.

• • • •

The desert is full of bones. As is the Bone-Gatherer’s basket.

His burden is so heavy and the sun is so hot and the carrion-seekers’ shrieks so loud that he almost doesn’t hear the cry of an unfamiliar set of bones.

They are not the bones of a jackrabbit, nor a zebra-tailed lizard, nor a striped whipsnake. They are not the bones of a woodrat or titmouse or lesser finch. Not a desert creature. Something migratory. Passing through.

Lost.

The bones speak to him of a home with water aplenty, where creatures rarely perish of thirst. They speak, in their dreamy way, of cool-blue streams and pathways shaded with green. They are frightened, for they don’t belong in a place like this, and how will their others know what became of them? Who would look for them here?

The Bone-Gatherer does not speak as he walks. But he thinks. He thinks of green-shaded paths and blue running water and the fate of a small, lost creature. He thinks how heavy it will be in his basket if he cannot offer it some small peace. But how?

In his distraction, he doesn’t see a stone protruding from the ground. He trips and falls, and his basket lands heavily upon him.

It takes him a moment to gather his strength and push himself to his feet. To remember why he must go on.

He grasps the offending stone in his hand. It is heavy, but no weightier than his burdens, and seeing the flatness of its face, an idea begins to form.

“Speak,” he says, placing the stone beside the bleached-out bones. “Speak, and I will write.”

So the bones speak, and bit by bit, with a makeshift chisel, the Bone-Gatherer carves line by line, letter by letter, word by word upon the stone, until a message remains for those who’ll come looking.

“But how will they see it?” ask the bones. “It will blend in with all the others.”

The Bone-Gatherer thinks. He thinks of the things the bones have told him about their home, about the hues that he has only seen in small bursts across the desert. And then he sets about gathering those small bursts of color: the columbine, the prince’s plume, the scorpionweed, and milkvetch. He transplants them, one by one, beside the rough-carved stone, so that any who are looking would see it.

“Will that do?” the Bone-Gatherer asks the still, small bones as he kneels again at their side.

The bones quiver with gratefulness. And this time, when the Bone-Gatherer gathers the bones and whispers the words that no living soul has heard, he adds another line to his recitation. He whispers, “We will not forget you.”

As he speaks, he feels the bones grow lighter as the fear slips from their dried-up marrow.

• • • •

The desert is full of bones. And with rough-carved rocks and desert flowers, the Bone-Gatherer remembers them all.