My skull collection made up for the loss of my grandmother.
I am Josiah Bright. I am a collector of human skulls. I don’t sell them or examine them like some people do, they’re just there for my own enjoyment. We all have hobbies, right?
My fascination with bones started as a kid.
I used to love the skeletons in my science classes and asked if they were real. They never were. Most public schools aren’t willing to pay for a real human skeleton.
I loved the shape of the skull more than anything. How it was reminiscent of a human head, but with so much missing.
My fascination faded and died fast, though, as I never got my hands on a real skeleton. It burst within me again in college, when finally, what I was seeing was real.
It’s not that fake skeletons aren’t interesting. But they all look the same. They have that generic skeleton look. The ones in my college biology lab looked different.
There were two skeletons there: a full skeleton and a skull. The skulls were so different. One was small, but it had a wide jaw. The space below the missing nose was far larger than the forehead.
The other skull was large, mostly even, with a protruding brow bone and some missing teeth. It was the shape that got me; the shape that revealed that the faces the skulls once wore were different.
I loved the thought that I was handling a real person, stroking bones like the ones hidden within my head. When I knocked on my forehead, I was knocking on my skull. There was so little separating my knuckles from the bone.
There was one of these inside everyone. Although, I’m not sure everyone’s had these flaps that opened up, revealing the inside of the bone and how everything fused together.
I wasn’t interested in what the bones were like deeper in, or how they formed the skull. I was only interested in the shape. The people. And how one of these lurked inside every head in the room.
My professor had a weak chin and protruding cheekbones. I wondered what his skull looked like.
The girl in front of me had a flat head compared to most people. How flat would her skull be once you stripped away the distraction of the hair and scalp? I moaned in the middle of the lecture just thinking about it.
Throw in her unborn child and … well, okay, that didn’t make much of a difference. Did babies even have skulls?
Intrusive thoughts followed me wherever I went.
Okay, here’s the part where I will sound crazy.
Visions of me scraping away the flesh of the scalp came into my mind. I couldn’t feel my hands doing it, but I could hear the sound of the knife against bone. A light scraping sound. If if I wasn’t careful, I’d shave away some bone too.
My hand cradled the skill as I removed the skin like a potato peel. I scrubbed the skull with soap and water and placed it on a little platform. I didn’t care much for the rest of the body. It was in a garbage bag at my feet.
Once I took care of the remains, I returned to my prize, cradling the jaw in my hand. Stroking the cheekbone with my thumb. It was so smooth, enough to easily caress. But there was a roughness to the bone nobody will ever be able replicate.
I soon wished I hadn’t discarded the rest of the body. What did bone feel like between your teeth? I wanted a femur or an ulna. It couldn’t be as fragile as a chicken bone, could it?
I’d never know. I pulled myself out of the fantasy and went for KFC afterwards. Chicken bones were nothing compared to my fantasy.
I spent the money I was saving for a car on procuring a human skull.
There were no hinges or flaps. It was nothing but pure, human skull. Roughly smooth, smoother on top than in the facial area.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t pointy around the missing nose. The rounded edges were a joy to run my fingers along.
Incidentally, the skull was flat-headed, resembling the girl who sat in front of me in biology. I considered telling her about my new skull, but before I could, I dropped out of college. I needed more skulls. So I had to get a job — a full-time job.
Before I went looking for one, I would enjoy my new skull some more. I ran a blunt knife along the flat head, listening to the light dragging sound. Then I had to play with the femur I’d purchased. I bit into it — it barley fit in my mouth — and I found it was as fragile as a chicken bone.
Upon sawing it in half, I discovered our bones are hollow. Interesting.
And later, when I got myself a fetal skull, I found babies did have skulls. It was small enough to dangle from my car’s mirror. If anyone asked, I’d tell them it was a Halloween prop.
I found a job as a trainee carer in a residential home.
I didn’t need a college degree — I had experience looking after my elderly grandmother. I excelled at the job, and money built up.
Living below your means is a fantastic way to build income. I lived in a box room advertised as a studio apartment and shared a top floor bathroom with the rest of the building.
I filled half that box room with skulls only months after starting my job.
I was able to build up money for a car fast, which made acquiring skulls so much easier. I could pick them up myself. It cut the cost of shipping. And something else that cut the cost was my new and less desirable skull obsession: geriatric skulls.
I first became aware of how old skulls are different through a lady I was looking after. She had no teeth, and she could close her jaw well above what an average person can. Her bottom lip touched her nose.
On my first acquisition of a geriatric skull, I was fascinated.
No … I was enamored.
The jaw bone was so small. It receded with time.
In some the jaw bone becomes so thin it’s nothing but a strip. When you open and close it, you can close the jaw well above the top lip area, close to the nose. It’s so mesmerizing.
I prefer the ones with the pointed chins. Somehow, it makes the skulls look like they’re smiling more.
Geriatric skulls are just so goofy and happy to look at! It’s a stark contrast between the old, sad or somber people they used to be.
I started sleeping with my favorite geriatric skull on my pillow.
She was such a lovely old lady, and her jaw bone was almost non-existent. She was my first acquisition, and the most inexpensive.
But of course this was all too good to last.
I woke up early, my pupils expanding to drink in the blackness. I had the strangest feeling something was wrong . But as my eyes adjusted and my collection came into view, I was faced with the severed heads and livid faces of a dozen old women. As one appeared in my bed next to me, I screamed.
I saw them as the faces of the sweet old people in the residential home. The girl from biology was there, too.
“You should be ashamed of yourself, sleeping with dear old Agnes,” one of their taunting, clanking jaws spat at me. “You know her husband only died last month. How dare you share her bed.”
“Leave him be, Dorothy,” hushed one of the smaller skulls, with enormous cheekbones that her chin just about reached every time she closed her mouth. “You know he’s no good. Dropped out of college to play with old bones. Spends most of his time online. No friends. Doesn’t even see his family anymore!”
At this point, I wasn’t sure if I screamed SHUT UP! out loud or in my head. But once the words formed, chattering jaws began to shiver while old lady cackles drowned me.
The skull on my pillow had wide eyes, a slack jaw, and the loudest guffaw as all as it floated above my head, spitting blood on me.
I spent as much time out as I could the next day, and left Agnes the skull back on its stand. But the same thing happened again as I tried to sleep. It became a nightly thing. I thought there could be nothing worse, until the next time I took to acquiring a skull. Then they screamed brutally throughout the process. Even the fetal skull that hung from my car mirror howled like an adult.
The baby skull I didn’t mind so much. They weren’t as mesmerizing, and simultaneous petrifying, as the geriatrics.
You would think when the skulls started screaming that I’d stop collecting them.
But I couldn’t. My collection was incomplete.
I had a final prize: the most geriatric of all the skulls.
She’d lived to 109 and had lost all of her teeth in an accident in childhood. She quit wearing dentures when she turned 80. And I could tell from her big gummy smile to her stubborn scowl her skull would be the silliest, most desirable, but deeply fascinating yet.
Unfortunately, I had a monetary setback. When the skulls started keeping me up at night, I started falling asleep at work.
Granted, we had fewer residents than ever. There was a bug going around and it was killing them off like ants in a tented house. But apparently my sleeping was unprofessional despite the lack of care required, and therefore it wasn’t allowed. So I got fired.
On the plus side, I’d become more efficient at procuring skulls, so it was costing less to deal with the process each time.
But if I wanted to get that final skull, and keep the ones I had a secret, I’d need to keep paying my rent. At least until I got the last skull and called my collection complete. So to save as much cash as I could, I moved back home, rent free, all expenses paid.
I paid only for rent at my old place where the skulls were, gas, and snacks. I had savings to cover it all for a few months.
Even so, it would be a long wait until my ultimate skull.
I could play the waiting game, though. My days weren’t so bad, I was able to occupy myself and take my mind off it. The skull wasn’t going anywhere, was it?
Thanks to my parents’ generosity, I could spend all day at home, not working, as long as I looked after my ailing grandmother full-time. They could get rid of her nurse visits to pay my expenses instead, and that’s how I could move back home with so little to pay for.
I even chatted to grandma about skulls a little, but the topic made her flinch. She feared death, which was weird for an old person. I’d met a guy who was in his early 80s lamenting about how he’d lived enough and was ready to go. Grandma was over 100, and she hadn’t lived enough.
But her health was failing her, and maybe that’s why the topic made her skin crawl. In the few weeks I’d been living back home, her needs turned from a twice-daily nurse visit to full-time care. She became bedridden.
She deteriorated rapidly. In less than a week I went from noticing blood in her commode, to blood in a bedpan, to blood in a diaper because she lost the strength to get out of bed, then control her muscles, in no time at all.
Then she stopped eating, and drinking, and talking. She died in my arms, her jaw so slack I could hardly imagine what I could fit through it. I wondered how small her toothless jawbone would be.
While my family mourned the loss of my grandmother, I distracted myself with my new toy.
The day she passed, I procured the skull I’d been eyeing up for the past few weeks. And the skull was enough to take away the sting of the loss.
I sat in the dark, surrounded by my other skulls. I hadn’t been paying my electricity bill. It didn’t matter as long as I could hold this incredible old chunk of bone.
The skulls’ jaw came up over its nose hole, the jawbone less than an inch thick at its most worn point. When slack, I could push an entire watermelon through it.
Then it started happening again. My possible madness came back — but again, to clarify, I’m not insane because this actually happened.
My skulls started moaning as I shoved the watermelon through a slack jaw. Then just as suddenly they started wailing, sounding like sirens blaring.
I was oddly calm this time, though, as their withered old faces starting spinning around my head. I was so focused on the beauty in my hands. I removed the watermelon, just content to stroke the tiny jawbone as it hung open in a perpetual goofy smile.
She’d smiled like that only months ago, when she was still relatively healthy, alive and well.
I remembered this, as the skull formed into the face of my grandmother. The change from bone to flesh ought to have scared me, but I was no longer paranoid I’d get caught. I had what I wanted now, a varied collection, ending in my most prized possession.
“Grandmother,” I whispered to her, down at the new love of my life. “Beautiful, grandma. Beautiful.”
She kept smiling while the other skulls blared like sirens that couldn’t touch me. I was too deep in serenity, even as the sirens turned to footsteps and screaming voices.
My panic finally set in as I clung to her for dear life, but they prized her out of my hands.
The skull I’d given up so much to get. Still warm and wet after removing it from the flesh, with bits of scalp and facial muscle still clinging to the bone.
The goofy grin turned to a scowl as my mother closed the jaw. I couldn’t tell whether it was mom or grandma who hissed, “I hope you get the chair,” as I was dragged from my skull-filled haven, screaming, the bones clanking and cackling in my wake.
