Skeleton Man by Joseph Bruchac EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Joseph Bruchac
- Language: English
- Genre: Children’s Scary Stories
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Footsteps on the Stair
I’M NOT SURE how TO begin this story. For one thing, it’s still going on. For
another, you should never tell a story unless you’re sure how it’s going to
end. At least that’s what my sixth-grade teacher, Ms. Shabbas, says. And
I’m not sure at all. I’m not sure that I even know the beginning. I’m not
sure if I’m a minor character or the heroine. Heck, I’m not even sure I’ll be
around to tell the end of it. But I don’t think anyone else is going to tell this
story.
Wait! What was that noise?
I listen for the footsteps on the stairs, footsteps much heavier than those
an elderly man should make. But it’s quiet, just the usual spooky nighttime
creaking of this old house. I don’t hear anyone coming now. If I don’t
survive, maybe they’ll all realize I should have been taken seriously and
then warn the world!
Warn the world. That’s pretty melodramatic, isn’t it? But that is one of
the things I do well, melodrama. At least that is what Ms. Shabbas says. Her
name is Maureen Shabbas. But Ms. Showbiz is what we all call her,
because her main motive for living seems to be torturing our class with old
Broadway show tunes. She starts every day by singing a few bars of one
and then making it the theme for the day. It is so disgustingly awful that we
all sort of like it. Imagine someone who loves to imitate Yul Brynner in The
King and I, a woman with an Afro, no less, getting up and singing “Shall
We Dance?” in front of a classroom of appalled adolescents. Ms. Showbiz.
And she has the nerve to call me melodramatic!
But I guess I am. Maybe this whole thing is a product of my overactive
imagination. If that turns out to be so, all I can say is who wouldn’t have an
overactive imagination if they’d heard the kind of stories I used to hear
from Mom and Dad?
Dad had the best stories. They were ones his aunties told him when he
was growing up on the Mohawk Reserve of Akwesasne on the Canadian
side. One of my favorites was the one about the skeleton monster. He was
just a human being at first, a lazy, greedy uncle who hung around the
longhouse and let everyone else hunt for him. One day, alone in the lodge,
waiting for the others to come home with food, Lazy Uncle burned his
finger really badly in the fire and stuck it into his mouth to cool it. “Oooh,”
he said as he sucked the cooked flesh, “this tastes good!” (Isn’t that gross? I
love it. At least, I used to love it.)
It tasted so good, in fact, that he ate all the flesh off his finger. “Ah,” he
said, “this is an easy way to get food, but I am still hungry.”
So he cooked another finger, and another, until he had eaten all his
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