Bones Symbol Analysis

All the way round the house it had been the same. Just see it in your mind’s eye. Just imagine what could be done. All the way round I kept thinking of the old man, Ernie Myers, that had lived here on his own for years. He’d been dead nearly a week before they found him under the table in the kitchen.

I slipped my hand under the covers and touched her. I could feel her heart beating fast. I could feel the thin rattle of her breath, and her chest rising and falling. I felt how hot it was in there, how soft her bones were, how tiny she was. There was a dribble of spit and milk on her neck. I wondered if she was going to die.

I reached across his back and felt something beneath his other shoulder as well. Like thin arms, folded up. Springy and flexible.

[…]

“Who are you?” I said.

The blackbird sang and sang.

“They say that shoulder blades are where your wings were, when you were an angel,” she said. “They say they’re where your wings will grow again one day.”

“It’s just a story, though,” I said. “A fairy tale for little kids. Isn’t it?”

“Who knows? But maybe one day we all had wings and one day we’ll all have wings again.”

“D’you think the baby had wings?”

“Oh I’m sure that she had wings. Just take one look at her. Sometimes I think she’s never quite left Heaven and never quite made it all the way here to Earth.”

“This is from a pigeon, we believe,” she said. She snapped the bone and it splintered. She showed me that it wasn’t solid inside, but was a mesh of needle-thin, bony struts.

“The presence of air cavities within the bone is known as pneumatization,” she said. “Feel it.”

I rested the bone on my palm. I looked at the spaces inside, felt the splinters.

“This too is the result of evolution,” she said. “The bone is light but strong. It is adapted so that the bird can fly. Over millions of years, the bird has developed an anatomy that enables it to fly. As you know from the skeleton drawings you did the other day, we have not.”

She unfastened the buttons on his jacket. She began to pull his jacket down over his shoulders.

“No,” he squeaked.

“Trust me,” she whispered.

He didn’t move. She slid the sleeves down over his arms, took the jacket right off him. We saw what both of us had dreamed we might see. Beneath his jacket were wings that grew out through rips in his shirt. When they were released, the wings began to unfurl from his shoulder blades.

I felt Skellig and Mina’s hearts beating along with my own. […] All I knew were the hands in mine, the faces turning through the light and the dark, and for a moment I saw ghostly wings at Mina’s back, I felt the feathers and delicate bones rising from my own shoulders, and I was lifted from the floor with Skellig and Mina.