As long as she looked at it, she could see it for what it was: a misshapen form covered in loose fabric. But as soon as she tried to turn away, it solidified again. A man with stooped, sloping shoulders, his hands folded ahead of himself, his cold eye fixed hard on Margot.

If this was in my living room, I’d give up on watching TV too.

Margot’s palms had become sweaty. She flexed her hands, feeling the chilled joints click, then reached for the pooling edges of the cloth.

The room had been swept often enough that the rest of the floor was clean, but whatever brooms had moved through the space had avoided disturbing the fabric, and clumps of dust clung around its edges, peeling up in fang-like strands as Margot dipped her head to look underneath.

Her heart missed a beat.

Trapped inside of a tangle of wires and string, the empty eye socket of a bird’s skull met her gaze.

6

Thick dread coated the back of Margot’s tongue as she met the skull’s dried, fissured eye socket. Holes had been bored into the bone to allow tarnished gold and bronze wires to be threaded through, lashing the skull to something much larger underneath.

She lifted more of the cloth. Tendrils of dust floated outward as they were disturbed for the first time in years. As the fabric moved still higher, the shapes beneath shifted. They set up a discordant rattle: bone against metal. Stone grinding across wood. The noise ached in Margot’s ears.

Still higher. Margot stretched her arms overhead, gripping fistfuls of the gritty embroidered material. As the center of balance shifted, the fabric’s own weight dragged it over and down. Margot let go of the cloth with a gasp and let it pool on the floor behind the shape.

It’s a person after all.

At least…it’s an effigy of one.

The figure was monstrously distorted, but the inspiration was clear. It was a body. Wider at the base, perhaps to imply some kind of robe or maybe simply because it needed the support, then tapering upward to narrow shoulders and an elongated head.

Is it supposed to be art? It has to be, doesn’t it? Something postmodern, made entirely out of…

Her mind blanked. Part of her wanted to call it trash. Or perhaps nature. But it wasn’t entirely either of those things.

Bones were incorporated, mostly small ones: bird skulls, hip bones from what might have been a possum or a fox, and, most uncomfortably, teeth. Pieces of wood were woven between them. There were signs that the wood had been chosen carefully. Willow branches, longer than Margot was tall, had been braided into a cord used to lash other elements together. Shards of long-dried driftwood held elaborate carvings along their length.