Ethel's Bones

By Shantell Powell

Shortlisted for the 2026 "London" Literary Prizes in the Canadian Prose category

I was ten minutes and half a joint into a Hammer Horror film when Gracie plopped a human skull onto my lap.
 
“What the fuck?” I said as I picked it up in both hands. It was heavy, rough, and dark, and nothing at all like Halloween decorations or even the bright demonstration skelly in a high school biology lab. No, this was the real thing.

She grinned as she sat beside me on the floral chesterfield, a relic from the early 70s with its round cushions mummified in crocheted acrylic. Her lipstick was a perfect match for the red text on her Slayer t-shirt.

“Seriously. Who is this?”

“Meet Ethel,” said Gracie. She gestured to the joint still hanging out of my mouth, and I passed it to her. She took a drag, offered it back to me, but I shook my head no.

“Who the fuck is Ethel?” 

Gracie shrugged again. “Dunno. An ex gave her to me last year.” She took a long, hard drag on the joint. “That’s what he told me her name was.”

I rubbed my hands across Ethel’s forehead. I wondered what she’d been like. When and how she had died. If her name was even Ethel. If she was even a she. “Was your ex a murderer?”

She held up a finger to pause me while she coughed. “Naa. At least, I don’t think so. Probably just a graverobber.”

I tipped the skull back and gazed into its empty eye sockets. “Jesus crispy Christ. That’s fucked up. You report him?”

She laughed. “Oh hell no. The last thing I need is a bunch of cops poking around my place.”

“Yeah, that’s fair.” I looked back down at the gritty brown skull with its white, shining teeth. Ethel had better dental than I did. 

Gracie stood back up. “I suppose he could’ve been a necrophiliac.”

“Holy fuck, Gracie. You think?” 

“Maybe.” 

“Were you dating Paul Bernardo or something?”

“Ew, no. I don’t date dudes from Scarborough. Richard Ramirez is more my type. He’s a Satanist with killer cheekbones and evil eyebrows.” She held her hands out to me, and I half-reluctantly passed her the skull. It smelled of earth.

“Where’s the rest of her?”

“No idea,” she said, “but he told me he’d bring me more if I wanted.”

“Jesus. More skulls or more Ethel?”

She shrugged and I went back to staring at the tv. It was an old wooden floor model, also from the 70s. It didn’t handle colour well. Onscreen, Christopher Lee was holding a necklace with a cross. Before he did these movies, he’d been a WWII spy and special forces officer. He’d touched, and made, plenty of dead people. I looked down at my hands. They’d just been holding part of a human corpse. I’d never done that before. I wiped them off on my black jeans and went to the bathroom to wash. “Out damned spot,” I whispered as I scrubbed myself with pumpkin spice soap. I looked in the mirror while I dried my hands. That was the face of someone who’d just touched someone’s defleshed cranium. Me. I’d done that. I reapplied some gunmetal grey lipstick, blotted with a square of toilet paper, then flicked off the light.

When I returned to the living room, Gracie paced the room like a caged panther while finishing up the joint, and Christopher Lee stared at plumes of smoke rising up from the mosaic of a goat with glowing red eyes. Ethel was nowhere to be seen. It was as though none of this had ever happened. Except I could still feel the grit of bone, a ghost sensation on my skin. Could still smell grave dirt. I shuddered.

Gracie came to a stop by the open window with its velvet curtains. “What?” 

“Alas poor Ethel,” I said.

She flicked the lipstick-stained roach outside. “Oh, you and your Shakespeare.”

“Oh, you and your psycho ex-boyfriends.” I rolled my eyes. “Where is he these days, anyway?”

“No idea. Haven’t heard from him in ages.”

“Betcha he’s in jail.”

Gracie laughed. “He’d look shit in orange.”

“Was he a good fuck?”

“The worst,” she said. “He never wanted me to move or make a sound. I had to lay there and starfish.”

“Christ, Gracie.”

She flipped her long black hair away from her face. “Yeah, I know.”

“And you dated him, why?”

“He made good arm candy.”

“So do you, Hotty McHotterson.”

“Meow,” she said, swaying her hips as she walked closer. “You hitting on me?”

“Depends on whether or not you porked a corpse.”

She waggled her tattooed eyebrows at me. “Maybe I put the bone in boner.”

I snorted. “I can’t picture you making like the chick from that Kissed movie. What’s her name again?”

“Molly Parker.”

“Naa, that’s the actor, not the character. But you know what I mean. You’re not like that.”

“Course I’m not. I like ‘em young and hot, not cold and dead. You know me.”

Did I, though? I was into The Sisters of Mercy, but Gracie was into Burzum ever since they got caught burning all those churches in Norway. We were the bad girls of academe. Instead of writing capital-L literary stories about bad sex in Toronto, we wrote about human sacrifice, devil worship, and witch hunters—gruesome, sexy tales of blood and dark rituals. Genre fiction. The bane of the English department. There were no Governor General awards in our futures. We’d joined forces against the condescending wannabe-intellectuals right away. She’d been trying to get me to join her coven for years, but I wasn’t a witch. I was witch-adjacent, a historian of the European witch trials. And she was no New Ager or Wiccan. She was a self-professed Satanic witch who practised black magic and joked about arson. At least, I hoped it was joking. 

Horror was our bread and butter. I’d even taken anthropology classes just so I could look at human bones. Shivered a little when my prof told me how he could tell the difference between pieces of bone and ceramic at a dig. Bone is porous and will stick to the tongue. Synthetic is smooth and will not. 

I could still feel the rough texture of Ethel’s skull. Could see bone fading to grey-brown like the weather-beaten door of an old barn. The empty eye sockets staring accusations at me. Was it anthropomorphization to imbue human emotions to a human skull?

“Yoo-hoo. Still with me?” Gracie was waving a hand in front of me.

“Yeah. Sorry. Just blazed out for a bit, there. That shit is strong.”

“Want more? I’ll grab my pipe.”

“Sure. Whatever.” On the tv, white-robed figures cavorted around an altar, praising Satan and drinking sacramental wine from metal goblets. All the while, Christopher Lee spied on them from behind a well-lit fern. It reminded me of Gracie’s parties, except we never wore white and our voyeurs weren’t thespian war vets, just metalheads, punks, and goths with their hands down their bondage pants.

Gracie opened a cupboard covered with half-melted black and red candles and pulled out a silver box. She rummaged through and pulled out some flower and a grinder and set them on a rolling tray. “Mm, look at that, will you?”

The bud was white with crystals and reeked of skunk.

“That’s dank. Where’d you score it?”

“Stole it from my ex.”

“Not the same one who gave you the skull.”

“Naa, different one.”

“He didn’t give you body parts, did he?”

“Only one.” She rubbed her crotch through her leather pants. “Gave it to me real good.”

I threw a cushion at her.

She batted it away. “Watch it! Don’t make me drop the weed!”

I stuck out my tongue. “Hey! The devil himself just showed up.” A horned figure arose from behind the altar on the tv.

“Hail Satan!” said Gracie. She threw the horns and then got back to manicuring the weed. She pinched bits off with her black lacquered nails and put them in the grinder. Was there grave dirt under those nails? I hadn’t heard the water running. She couldn’t have washed her hands.

The music picked up as Christopher Lee’s companion hurled a Molotov cocktail at the devil. “Whoa! Where’d that come from?” I said. Satan vanished in a puff of smoke, and the cultists broke out in a brawl. 

Gracie laughed. “Old-school mosh pit.” She finished grinding the pot and packed a bowl.

Utter mayhem on the screen. Good guys versus devil worshippers in strangely bloodless hurly-burly. No one hurt except for the poor goat on the sacrificial altar. I heard the flick of a lighter and reached for the pipe.

I put the stem in my mouth and took a toke. It was rough against my lips and rougher on my lungs. The smoke was thick and harsh. I held the pipe out to Gracie as I coughed and spluttered. I’d hit it too hard. 

“Not bad, eh?” said Gracie. 

“Give me a minute,” I said. I was coughing so hard stars bloomed in my peripheral vision. Then I melted into the chesterfield with all its tacky cushions.

“Like my pipe?”

“What? Sure, I guess.” I hadn’t paid much attention. I’d been watching the movie. I looked over at her. 

Gracie was studying the pipe. “Got this from my ex, too.”

“Which one? The good lay or the bad one?”

“The bad one.” She put the stem in her mouth and took a drag. The cherry glowed red. She held the pipe out to me. Now that I looked at it more closely, the bowl and stem didn’t look like resin or ceramic. It was dark like old bone.

I hesitated for a moment before taking it in my hand. I held the pipe to my lips. On the screen, the good guys made off in a roadster with the damsel in distress, and I touched my tongue to pipe stem.

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​Shantell Powell is an elder goth and swamp hag raised in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid. A Brave New Weird winner and an Aurora award finalist, she’s a graduate of the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, the LGBTQ+ novel immersive at GrubStreet, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s horror residency. Her writing is in Augur, The Deadlands, Nightmare, and dozens more. When she’s not writing or making things, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods.