About the Author Vince Darkangelo, is an author of dark fiction from Boulder, Colorado. Skin and Bones is an existentialist piece and his first story in Nuvein. Darkangelo currenty writes for the Boulder Weekly alternative newspaper, and has been published in various anthologies, magazines and journals, including the Birch Brook Press anthology, The Suspense of Loneliness, and the literary journals Happy, The Threshold, Eyes, The Sunflower Press, Shadow Voices, Nocturne Horizons, and The Harrow, among others. Dakangelo welcomes any comments readers care to make, and hopes they enjoy reading Skin and Bones as much as he enjoyed writing it! You may email him at sisyphus19@attbi.com and visit his homepage at homepage at: www.humantorpedoes.com.

She sculpted my likeness from three multi-colored lumps of hard clay. I was a complete being in miniature, though I complained about the pastels. Responding to my cosmetic grievance, Maizy abruptly ripped the right arm off of the statuette. “There, now I’ve made you an optimist,” she snickered. “Any other beefs?”

“You’ve got the soul of an artist,” Biz laughed.

“No, I’m too responsible,” she mocked. “I haven’t suffered enough, and great art can only come from great pain.” And we all three chuckled ironically.

“That’s just an old cliché. Besides, what does that make me?” I asked as I carved two sunken eyesockets on Biz with a dirty sculpting knife.

“Mediocre.”

Maizy manipulated the clay about my severed arm to give the appearance of frayed muscles and tendons that had been ripped from the absent bone. She dabbed the tip of her paintbrush in the well of red ink, and highlighted the edges. “How am I coming?” she asked Biz, who was feverishly molding his significant other in shades of blue and red.

“Like a doll, baby.” He paid care that her cheekbone was rounded just right, and perfectly mimicked the slight hitch of her jaw below her left ear. Her eyes were big and curious and penetrating, and forever seeking answers. Her head rested on a stumpy neck supported by a slender, concave torso. Like his muse, the clay hair was black and stringy, and hung intentionally sloppy over her eyes. Biz captured almost every detail down to the two skull clips holding the back of her hair from her shoulders. Everything was as in life, except for the wheelchair. The likeness of his beloved walked upright.

Biz turned to me. “And what about my guy, Les?”

“A million bucks. They won’t be able to tell you apart.” The gallery opening was in a week, and these clay miniatures were part of the coup de grâce. Collectively, we called ourselves the Skin and Bonez Beggar’s Circus, and rarely did we exhibit our artwork solo. We were an ensemble, and our creations were best understood as a gestalt. See, I was the traditionalist of the bunch, using oil and canvas to create vast, forested landscapes of possibility. I also orchestrated the music for our performance piece finale. Biz was a genius with mixed media, prosthetics in particular, fashioning haunting displays of atrocity with plastic and paint and busted CD cases. And Maizy, she did revolutionary things with rusted steel collected from local junkyards; she hammered and shaped the discarded iron works into something superb. Her creations were her revenge on the automobile that left her paralyzed below the waist.

We were three tragic souls, bound by adversity, friendship and art. Never mind that I had tried to kill them once.

As I finished Biz’s double, I squared off his right foot into an exaggerated block. “There, I even put your club foot on the correct side.” Biz laughed at the caricature, then chucked a lump of wet, green clay at my head.

“You gonna let him do that to me, honey?” he appealed to his girlfriend.
“Just for that I’m taking back the Rogaine,” Maizy laughed. She removed the red, clay hair I used to have before the chemo and radiation treatments. Then, producing a pair of scissors, she snipped some cloth from the blue bandana about my head and fashioned it over the skull of my miniature. “There. I made you sick again.”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “But I’m still not an optimist.”



It was odd watching Maizy and Biz fuck. It was kind of admirable, actually, considering the struggle and the physics involved. First, Biz would strip her below the waist, and disrobe himself, then carefully lift her limp, lower appendages and slide into the wheelchair beneath her. Maizy would lower herself onto him, and with her muscular arms lift her numb bottom half up and down in a discordant rhythm until one or the other climaxed. They at once looked passionate and uncomfortable, clumsy yet magnificent in their overcoming of nature’s irreparable challenge, and I was envious of their accomplishment. “Your legs are cold, but your pussy’s still hot,” Biz would tease his crippled lover.

The sex was even weirder when I participated. I would stand over the chair so Maizy could please me with her mouth while doing her cowgirl pushups on Biz. She was like an erotic athlete in a marathon of depravity, surprising me with her dogged agility. But once, while tripping on two tabs of microdot, I took a turn in the chair. I was troubled by the discomfort of the mobile seat to which Maizy was confined every passing moment. For the first time I truly appreciated the zeal behind every swing of her hammer against steel, forging something affirmative from the metal that took away.

And I freaked well before either of us could finish. My mind drawn in a bath of psychedelic conclusions, I felt an icy numbness below my knees. The tingling spread from my toes to my shins like the grip of a corpse, and I desperately rubbed my hands over Maizy’s lithe body like some big top, revivalist preacher. I was troubled by the way she responded hungrily to my touch above the waist yet was vacant when I massaged below. How much like inanimate sponges her thighs felt, the skin and tissue and shape familiar to me, but her lack of physiological response so foreign. It was the first I had noticed how we take for granted the subtle physical reactions we are accustomed to. How arousing, yet consciously imperceptible, the twitches and jerks and slight adjustments of our lover’s body can be. I cried for her to stop. I wanted everything in the world to cease, and to change all that had happened before. I gripped Maizy by the waist to halt her bouncing rhythm, pressed my cheek to her back and sobbed for what felt like hours before Biz lifted his girlfriend from my lap. “I’m a freak, a lousy, ugly freak,” she balled into his shoulder.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Les?” Biz hollered at me. “You bald motherfucker. Why are you doing this?” I was unable to voice my apology, limp and shattered and tripping my ass off in his girlfriend’s wheelchair.

When Maizy had calmed down, Biz apologized. “I care for you both so much,” I wept against his collarbone. He kissed me until we all felt better.



“You’re so inspiring, all of you,” the fat lady doted over me as the opening reception began. I flashed a modest, put-on smile to cover my conceit, then took a deep swig of black cherry wine. “You’re so kind.” I answered humbly.

“And this, I love the texture, and the perspective,” I overheard a distinguished gentleman explain to his wife as they perused a wall of my oil paintings. “You know, the artist is a cancer survivor.”

“I love the motion of this one,” she responded, trying to outwit her husband in pretension. “The fluidity of the trees and shrubs along the border of the canvas really direct the eye toward the barren center, don’t you think? It’s so symbolic.”

I chuckled, then went about the mandatory business of shaking hands and greeting folks as they entered the gallery. Though our work was entwined, our individual pieces were separated by the three rooms that make up the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. The gallery usually featured painting in the front room, so I received the prominent placement. Being as the upstairs gallery was inaccessible to the handicapped—except by a rusted old freight elevator that only served as an installation piece—Maizy and her steel contraptions were showcased behind mine on the ground floor of the cozy museum. That forced Biz upstairs. Taking advantage of the necessary ascent to his display, Biz adorned the antique stairwell with prosthetic body parts all twisted and mangled and leading the patrons up to his loft of degeneracy on the second floor. Most prominent among the fiberglass limbs were healthy, fully developed right feet.

“I wanna buy some of your work, young man,” a forty-something drunkard accosted me. He wobbled as he spoke, white waves of wine sloshing over the rim of his glass and glazing his pudgy fingers.

“I’m sorry, it’s not for sale. But thank you.”

“You’re wonderful, kid. Everything’s for sale. How much?”

“I’m sorry, but it’s not.” My head was beginning to throb, just imagining how sick this man was going to feel in the morning. Although, I gathered he was one of those alcoholics who rarely get hangovers, but who would be better served to wake up to ragers every gut-wrenching morning.

“Wait till you’re older, kid, then you’ll understand how everything works. Damn gutterpunks, think they’re so smart,” he muttered as he walked away.

“This is Lester, an artist with the Skin and Bonez Beggar’s Circus. He does the painting and music,” a gallery worker interrupted the inebriated man to introduce her friends. The girls, Carla and Viki, were certainly no more than undergrads at the university. “Are you art students?” I asked ingenuously, as if I cared.

“Actually, we’re in the creative writing program,” Viki laughed nervously. My mouth watered, as it always does in the presence of undergrads. “But I’m really into art.”

“Me too,” Carla chirped.

“You know, our mediums are a lot alike.” I spoke with the confidence or arrogance that comes with having your art hanging on the wall behind you and three glasses of wine warming your belly. I wasn’t a trained artist, and I was certainly no philosopher on the subject. So, I just rambled off the type of stuff that gets young, intellectual girls hot. “We’re both creating images and meaning—hell, life itself—from nothing space. Different mediums are just different languages, you know, we are still saying the same thing.”

“You know, that’s so true,” Viki sighed with head tilted to the right, as if confronting some kindred soul. She was as good as tagged. Then I felt a poke in my shoulder blade and turned to find Maizy had wheeled up beside me. “We’re going to start the performance part soon, so put that third pinky you call a prick back in your pants and follow me.”

“Just for that, I’m making you out of clay the next time.” I turned back to the young girls, “Sorry ladies, but the show must go on.”

They laughed the stupid laugh of smitten young girls, and I walked away.



I’m a pessimist. Always have been. A cynic. A skeptic. A detractor. A misanthrope. That’s why I’m so inspired by people like Maizy, whose boundless sanguinity defies every construct of reality I’ve come to know. She was always the optimist, though, even before her legs were taken from her. I could tell, even though I knew her only briefly before the accident.

The story is told on her skin, through a mural tattoo beginning on her left ankle and progressing chronologically up her thigh, over her crotch and down the other leg. She uses the body art for our performance piece.

At the opening, the three of us stood before a crowd of about forty, the Claymation diorama on a table before us. Biz and I flanked Maizy while my dark, orchestrated accompaniment piped through eight twelve-inch speakers. Maizy held a mirror above her head, and wore no pants so the telltale ink was prominent on her atrophied legs like an extra layer of skin.

“Ready?” she whispered to me and Biz as the crowd stirred. We both nodded and lifted her thin, broken body out of the chair. The small audience recoiled with nervous inhalations of breath, followed by murmured shock and awed silence. We held her suspended above the crowd as the lights retraced her story.

I remember that day, and how I nearly killed my two best friends.



“Hey, we should stop,” Biz argued as my old sedan rumbled down a mountainous section of the Boulder highway. He unrolled his window and tossed a cigarette butt at a passing rock formation.

“No, we ain’t got time,” I tersely replied as we approached the hitchhiker, knowing full well my intentions. I took another swig of beer to calm the butterflies in my stomach. I understood that we were flesh and bone, nothing more, and a fragile sack of organs at best.

“Come on, man. Where’s your sense of adventure?” he goaded. “Besides, she looks cute.”

I pulled over against the will of my conscience, and the scant, ragamuffin girl skipped toward my car like a ballerina. Those were her final steps. Now I was going to be a double murderer, I considered with a guilty panic.

Once inside, Maizy pulled a joint from her purse and took a deep puff. We each took a turn as the cabin quickly filled with the marshy scent of marijuana. “I was headed to California, from Greenville, Pennsylvania,” the slight, attractive hitchhiker coughed between hits of the dope. “To be a writer.”

“What happened?” Biz asked with the low, thoughtful voice he puts on when he is infatuated with a girl. “You look like you’re coming from Estes Park.”

“Yeah, I was in rehab up there, but I escaped. Sobriety is like religion. We all go through a phase, you know, where we experiment. I explored the concept, but in the end, I of little faith just couldn’t believe. God is dead, you know.” Maizy took a deep hit and was overcome with the giggles, so infectious that soon this strange girl with shaggy, black hair and ragged split ends even had sour old me laughing and reaching for another hit.

“So how’d you get from the road to Cali to rehab?”

“I decided that instead of being a writer in California I wanted to have fun and be happy. So, I got off the bus in Boulder. Everything was going to plan until my sister came out to visit,” she brushed at a stray bang that was tickling her eyebrow. “You know that story. Family intervention, therapy, breakdowns. Sooo middle class, it disgusts me.”

I raced my sedan through the city, the numbing rush of THC coating the inner wall of my brain with a thick lacquer of dissociation. I was committed to my end, regardless of the unwitting innocents who were unknowingly cast for my curtain call.

See, I had been to the doctor the week before, and learned that I was malignant. I was taking care of the tumor my own way.

I’m not a coward, though; I’m a poet. It wasn’t that I couldn’t face the challenge put before me, but that as an artist I had an obligation to carefully orchestrate my life and death in biography format. Sometimes a fiery, well-executed death is a fair trade for a longer, less dynamic life. Certainly better than an existence of mediocrity. And an untimely death would leave so much potential unrealized, people would say, that they could never know that I was tapped as an artist. I felt I had nothing left to offer besides a graceful exit. I couldn’t have known the things Maizy would bring out of me.

I turned onto Baseline Road, and continued up Flagstaff Mountain. “We’ll get a better view up here,” I reasoned with my questioning passengers. “We’ll get really high. It’ll blow your mind.” Biz and Maizy laughed, and I noticed for the first time that they were holding hands.

I’m not sure what went through their minds as the right front tire slipped off the road near the summit. Perhaps they were calm, waiting for me to correct our course. Dirt kicked up over the hood and side windows, and my passengers twitched with panic. The second wheel left the pavement, and I steered hard in the direction of empty space, accelerating and guiding us over the edge. “The fuck?” Biz screamed as his new girlfriend shrieked. The third and fourth wheels followed, spinning aimlessly with no track to tread. I never took my hands from the wheel; I wanted to be in control throughout the descent.

Maizy’s head smacked off the roof as the car jolted, and I think she understood what was happening. Her body twisted and hovered over the seat. Biz clung to the dash like the safety bar of a roller coaster. To that fucked up brain of his that’s probably just how he interpreted it. We think alike, me and Biz.

There was a moment of weightless silence before the breath-taking plummet, suspended over the rocky gorge like we would go on forever, then a jarring collision, twisting steel and a sudden darkness.



What I remember is that there were tubes everywhere: in her nose, her mouth, her arms, and a few snaking beneath the covers of the hospital bed. She was surrounded by stainless steel and the heady smell of disinfectant. An expensive looking machine beeped in time with her body like a torturous metronome measuring the nervous moments of her existence, the assembly of intimidation-machines giving off a grating hum.

“Take a look?” Maizy cracked a pale smile and set aside the pencil.

She held the drawing up for my inspection. Her pink, bottom lip lay slack with fatigue. (Maizy hadn’t slept for days, and refused dinner the past three nights, the nurse had informed me earlier). The sketchbook trembled in her weak hands, and her fingers were soiled with charcoal. I considered every yearning scratch she had made, and felt as though she had sketched an empty void between my ribs.

“Dreams are just like this, you know,” she sighed.


In the painting she was stretched across a field of light grey air, with nothing but empty space holding her aloft. Me and Biz hovered over her, black wings of grace protruding from our shoulder blades. “You mean unreal? Fantastic?”

“No, you sentimental weirdo,” Maizy laughed with her scratchy bark. “I mean cruel. Cruel because you wake up, and cruel because it is real.”

The fatalistic chord in my brain struck like a tightly wound piano string. She must have understood me. “Of course. So why bother waking up?”

“Lester, you’re not paying attention. Look, you asshole. Don’t you see?”

I shrugged my shoulders sheepishly. “See what?”
“Ugh,” she let the drawing fall onto her numb lap. “Biz told me you were a really good artist. But I don’t understand how. What do you see in this picture?”

“I dunno. Me and Biz and you during the wreck.” What the hell was she on about? I wondered, if not fatalism and gloom.

“What you see is grace, triumph, absolution, overcoming, acceptance. Dreams are cruel, but they challenge. And you have the nerve to walk in here, yeah, walk in here with your two good legs, and ask me why bother waking up?”

“But if everything is struggle, th-”

“Yes, everything is struggle. Every day. Every waking minute. We should realize that all along, but it takes something big to get into our fucked up heads.”

“Look, you’re the one in the wheelchair, Maizy. Shouldn’t you be the cynic?”
“That’s precisely why I’m not,” she shot back fiercely. “Maybe someday you’ll be challenged yourself, Les, and you’ll understand.”

“Actually,” I spoke quickly, then paused. Until then, I hadn’t told anyone—not even Biz. I couldn’t find the words. Some poet, huh? Maizy stared quizzically at my nervous silence. I cleared my throat, fidgeted my hands and stammered, “Actually, I have. But before I tell you about that could I see that picture again?”

Maizy brushed back her bangs and smiled, then hoisted the charcoal drawing up onto her knees. “So, do you like?”

I swallowed hard before answering, realizing that from this point on every day would be truth and struggle. Then again, I thought, hasn’t it been all along?