The Starting Place

One night at three a.m. an old man, having grown bored with his old voice, decided to construct a new voice out of bone. He knew he could do it, if he had the right materials. But where could he find good bone at this time of night? He couldn’t use just any bone, could he? Chicken bone, rat bone—they wouldn’t do, too pulpy, for one thing. Graveyards? Ditto. No, the only place he could find the bone he needed would be in the starting place of which his mother had often spoken. But he couldn’t just walk or train to his mother’s starting place, any more than he could knock on his neighbor’s door and ask to borrow her starting place, assuming hers still functioned. For another hour the old man tossed and turned, fretting about how he might get to a starting place to find the right bone to construct a new voice, until finally he gave up, went back to sleep, and never woke again.