Bona Fides
When I entered the country, I told the immigration authorities I was a gatherer of bones, a polisher of stones, adding that I didn’t mind if the activities were reversed. They were sceptical at first, doubting that these were legitimate occupations, but a search confirmed it so they let me in, muttering that there were cemeteries for the first, rivers for the second, that if I didn’t find a job within three months I would be deported.
When I applied at the employment office their records revealed that it had been years since they’d last had a vacancy for the lines of work I laid claim to. In the meantime however, there were part time jobs available in either an ossuary or a quarry that might help keep my hand in while I waited.
Which is how I wound up cataloguing storage bins of bones. A set of threes — three floors of a building in the old part of town, a common repository for the relics of three orthodox religions, & which encompassed at least three centuries of active accumulation. It was an eclectic collection, incorporating anything that had the slightest connection with the religions without concern as to the provenance of the items. In the first few days I recorded five femurs supposed to have come from the one saint, discovered that polydactylism seemed to be a prerequisite for beatitude, that to become a patriarch in the fifteenth & sixteenth centuries demanded a bone in the penis. I was especially intrigued by the relics of someone identified only by a sigil, whom I nicknamed Saint Fibonacci because of the way the number of his metacarpals seemed to increase, & who, it was rumored, wasn’t even dead yet.
Despite all this I started out with good intentions, sought diligently for the correctly labelled specimens to complete skeletons which were then interred in perspex coffins in a reliquary that had been specifically built for this purpose several years before. Then expediency — & the fact that there were so many unidentified bones lying around — took over. I began to fill in missing parts, but still maintained the integrity of my own records, staying clear of scientific fraud in my determination to become the Bertillon of bones. But the fact that the papers I wrote appeared in non-paying journals whilst the reliquary drew an ever-increasing number of customers finally changed my attitude.
I began selling to traditional Chinese medicine outlets bone fragments guaranteed to extend life expectancy. I crossed over from The Journal of the Proceedings of The International Conference of Osteopaths to The Southern Enquiring Truth with articles such as "Widespread syndactylism a generation removed disproves the myths surrounding Saint Epimenides the Celibate." & then the activity which caused my dismissal, bringing out a calendar in which each page featured the bones of a saint whose day fell within the month, probably because of the context in which I placed them: "Miss July seeks solace with the ulna of St. Theophrastus."
I have been working at the quarry for three months now. Very soon, a burial plot for a previously unknown schismatic seventeenth century sect will be discovered, complete with contemporary artifacts, their age able to be confirmed by carbon dating. I have learnt well.