Colin Burch

Issue 16

Flash Fiction

He never listened to the Grateful Dead, but the dead-head sticker passing him on I-75 reminded him why he liked skulls. They had the mystery of an unearthed object with both material and spiritual meaning. Each year, during his spring visit to Traverse City, Michigan, he stopped at a shop on the basement floor of the renovated Northern Michigan Asylum, now full of curious retailers and niche restaurants, to purchase a golf-ball sized skull carved from quartz by Peruvians and imported to this purveyor of gifts for men. He never read the Hardy Boys mysteries while growing up, but remembered their covers with shadowy towers, bridges, and caves, with titles about melted coins, mysterious yellow feathers, shattered helmets, sinister signposts. His mind held the residue of TV adventure shows and movies along with the occasional comic books he procured for free from the pediatric dentist office. He maintained this ideal of an object that could be mysterious and valuable, longing for an archeological find that brimmed with supernatural power while also coveted for its rarity and precious metal or stone. But questions nagged. What would that thing be? What would give it supernatural power? On what basis could it carry a blessing or a curse or both? When he was a kid, those questions never mattered because whatever oddly shaped stone he pulled from the drab creek bed arose with its own story already attached, as apparent as its heft in his hand, a story of pirates or Native tribes or dying cowboys. Sometimes, the storied object held power, giving its possessor triumph over threats and challenges like schoolyard bullies. Other times, it attracted status and fame—and grade school crushes—for its possessor. 

On his dusty home bookshelf, the carved stones collected: quartz of yellows, oranges, grays, purples and blues. Each one was once a piece of a larger chunk of quartz. It was carved well, but probably carved quickly, and then shipped to retailers in the States and other Western countries in the Northern Hemisphere. No mystery. Just a market for well-carved rock, and that’s not all bad, because maybe the carvers were artists, and maybe they loved skulls, and maybe selling these carved skulls helped them help their families. 

After seventeen skulls had collected on now dustier bookshelves, they no longer seemed like creek stones with their own stories. He suspected an ancient human skull unearthed today would feel to him less than mysterious and more like empty, its brain once full of imagination now decayed, its eyes shriveled to dust too fine to see. 

Even so, he made the trip for his eighteenth quartz skull. On what would be his final visit there, he walked through the well-lit hallways of the basement shops wondering how many asylum patients had passed through these low-level passages. The founding medical superintendent, Dr. James Decker Munson, had believed “beauty is therapy,” so he ordered flowers, plants, fine china, and artwork to be placed throughout the asylum. Munson had intentionally aimed beauty at the tentatively constructed, fragile, dented models of the world inside hundreds of separate skulls floating above these hard cement floors. All those lives now unknown. Had their surroundings nursed their imaginations toward hope, discovery, mystery, desire? Maybe the asylum had brought new light into their dark, wounded thoughts.

Against the hallway wall, he saw a copier paper box on the floor, empty. He picked it up, walked into the shop of gifts for men, and set it on the counter. “I want them all,” he said. “Give me all the skulls.”