A vulture did a few slow turns high over the graves of my father and my uncle.  The big bird had a bored, slightly smug look on his featherless face.

“Well, you always did like that high shot,” said the skeleton of my father. “You know, you’re always trying to get an overview on all these slippery, murky, hidden things down below.   There’s a certain hubris in speaking as though you grasp the overview, don’t you think?”  

It’s the only way I can understand anything, looking for connections, fitting pieces together to form the larger puzzle.  

“OK, but it’s also, of necessity, something of an illusion.  I get that you want to be the omniscient narrator, doesn’t everybody?  But maybe you’re as unreliable a narrator as I was a moral actor.   That surely has occurred to you, that the so-called objective view of me you’re trying to give is actually a very un-objective view, a tendentious, casually ax-grinding view.  I know you have considered this, that you’re an unreliable narrator,” said the skeleton of my father.    

You know, do you?  

“Obviously,” said the skeleton.  “Another problem you have, outside of having no idea how to construct and sell this book, no matter how well-wrought certain sections of it may already be, is this precious ventriloquist act you’re doing with your poor father’s long-dead skeleton.  Leaving aside the macabre aspect, it borders on the adorable sometimes, don’t you think?”   The skeleton put a finger to what used to be his cheek, bit down in a grotesque, but also almost cute, imitation of an adorable teenaged girl mugging for the camera.    

All problems, yes, yes.  An unreliable ventriloquist narrator with an itermittently adorable though unreliable puppet.  

“Unreliable?! I think I’ve been quite compliant here, for the most part,” said the skeleton.

I know you do.  

“So today you cut and pasted, harvested, so to speak, the pages you have written here since last time you collected them, back in late May, the day before your kidney biopsy, actually,” said the skeleton.  “What’s the actual page count now?”    

Somewhere around 930, I think.  

“Nice, now you can drown in this insanely long first draft the way you are splashing among your ten thousand papers in your hovel,” said the skeleton, by way of encouragement.  

I’m planning to read those 60 or 70 pages most recently written, cut them down to 15 or so, send them to some agents.  

“Sure you are,” said the skeleton cheerfully.  

Look here, I can only do what I can do on any given day.  

“You had that little rock song back in the day with a pertinent lyric:  My daddy tried to warn me, my father said ‘son, it ain’t no fun being a poor boy.’  You spend more time fighting the health insurance company’s bullshit, trying to get health care and dodging creditors who may or may not have legitimate health care-related claims against you, then you do focusing on your current career as an unpaid writer.  What the fuck, man?”

My daddy tried to warn me, my father said ‘son, it ain’t no fun being a poor boy.’  

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” sang the skeleton.   The vulture continued to circle, looking down with hooded, Sonny Boy Williamson eyes.

“And the kicker is, you’re not even a poor boy…” said the skeleton of my father, “thanks to the hard work your mother and I did, while you brooded and day-dreamed about not being a sell-out.  I’ll give you this, Elie, you never did sell out.  That and your paid up metrocard will get you on the platform to wait thirty minutes for the A train.  Yo, you know what I’m talking about.”  

Fuck, if I do.  

“You remember the old one about the beggar telling the rich lady he hasn’t eaten in three days,” said the skeleton.  

‘Force yourself,’ she said, flashing a concerned expression.  Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.  On the other hand … I’m outta here, dad.  

“As you wish,” said the skeleton of my father, as the vulture swooped and added a note, some kind of low groan.