Fiction

November 2nd, 2025

Sarah Blumert
Bones Sense

During Mona’s first driving lesson on that twisted mountain road, her mother told her she should never drive alone at night, especially through the woods. At the time, her uncertain hands clutching the worn leather wheel at precisely ten and two, she was inclined to believe.

“Woods are for animals and people with bad intentions,” her mother had said then, but also many times before and after. That was her mother’s greatest skill, dispensing ominous wisdom.

She never turned to look at Mona from the passenger seat. Always, she stared either ahead or behind: ahead to spot the dangers Mona might miss through the crack arching across the windshield; behind to keep an eye on little Lizzie in the back seat. Lizzie always cowered in the woods.

Years later, while careening along that same mountain road, Mona pondered Lizzie’s terror. Strange, she thought, for a child of the Redwood Curtain. But fair, considering their father’s fate.

Fog as thick as smoke blurred the serpentine highway. Mona tried to watch the meandering strand of white that ran along the asphalt’s right-hand side, but her eyelids drooped. The hour was late; she didn’t know how late and didn’t want to. Fortunately, her car’s clock hadn’t worked in years.

She didn’t fear the woods. Still, around each curve, she half expected to see some giant, hulking figure, something inhuman, blocking her way. Things hid in the fog. They always did.

That was her mother’s wisdom—“Things hide in the fog.” She’d repeat it whenever young Mona scrambled onto the couch in her footed pajamas, pulling back the curtains in search of stars only to marvel at blurry, mile-high darkness instead.

“What things?” Mona would prod. “Have you seen them?”

Her mother would nod. “Bones sense what eyes can’t see.”

She had been what Mona’s Uncle Todd called a “control freak,” but doctors had nicer words for such things now. Diagnoses. Lizzie, Mona knew, memorized all these words her first year of med school—words to describe their mother, Mona herself—but she didn’t name them, not on her good days. But in the likely event Mona did something foolish, like spend an entire paycheck on old vinyls or try to coax a raccoon with her half-eaten sandwich, Lizzie would just tilt her head and ask something like, “What would Mom say?” or “What would she do if she was in your shoes?” Mona was almost—almost—convinced this was worse.

Earlier that evening, long before Mona’s car pierced the treeline, Lizzie recited those same questions through the phone.

“We don’t have to wonder what she did,” Mona said. “She died.”

This was the wrong answer. Lizzie heaved a sigh, the kind that tempted Mona to remind her which of them was older. She didn’t, though; she didn’t speak much anymore, even to Lizzie.

“You can’t just leave a breast lump unchecked. I’ll come pick you up tomorrow morning. This girl from my cohort works at Lady Mary’s now, she’ll get you in same-day.”

“It’s just a cyst.” Mona, sprawled upside down on her old stained sofa, picked at the many hangnails on her left hand, as she always did when spinning a lie.

“You won’t know that until we get it looked at.”

Mona reached up to her coffee table (also old, also stained) and let an index finger hover over the red button on her phone screen. Lizzie would hate her if she pressed it now. She’d punish Mona somehow, with silence or scolding. But—Lizzie always insisted—she only did so because she wanted to help, despite Mona’s nasty habit of hanging up on difficult conversations. Despite the red-hot temper that often escaped when she didn’t.

“I’ll be there at nine.”

“But—”

Too late. The line, finally, was dead. It was different when Lizzie chose.

But Lizzie, Mona thought, couldn’t take her to the doctor at nine if she wasn’t home.

Mona checked the rearview for the third time in the span of a minute. Nothing in the back seat, of course. Just headrests where heads should be. Where heads would be, if she wasn’t driving all alone.

Through the woods.

At night.

To visit her parents in the old cemetery where she’d never seen another living soul (which was the whole point). They all got along better there, her mother whispering through the wind in the crowded, sky-high branches; her father muttering in rhythm to scampering footfalls in the woods.

Still, Mona wished she’d slept first, wished she’d waited until dawn to start the drive. Alertness might lend her journey a hopeful slant—make it feel like a decision, not an escape.

Sweat glued her palms to the wheel. Ten and two. Her right hand itched to reach over to her left side and press, to prod and scratch and then press harder, as she imagined her mother had done after that first awful visit to the doctor—the first of many. Instead, Mona squeezed the wheel harder. Her eyes, for the few short seconds she could keep them open, burned against the forceful dark, burned like fire.

Like horrid, crackling fire.

“How did you know?” Mona asked, fingers clutching her mother’s arm to still their shaking bodies.

“The smoke. He was late, so I was watching. I saw the smoke from the kitchen window.”

The car was cold by the time they arrived, nothing more than a scorched husk settled in a ditch just off the highway, nearly hidden by trees. Melted rubber still clung to four upturned wheels. One firetruck remained, its crew muttering amongst themselves somewhere Mona couldn’t see. The ambulance was gone.

“I didn’t see any smoke,” Mona said, but then she turned to look her mother in the eye, and there it was. Smoldering embers, licking flames, thick black plumes curling into the irises.

Her mother swallowed hard, but her voice warbled anyway. “Bones sense what eyes”— 

Mona jolted awake, then slammed on the brakes just as the road began slipping beneath her balding tires.

Instinctively, her eyes darted to the rearview mirror. The back seat, empty a moment before, was teeming with sickly, writhing shadows. She forced her eyes back to the road, or where the road should have been, but by then, only trees lay ahead.

Her journey past the airbag, over the steering wheel, and through the shattered windshield was hazy and over in an instant. Once upright, she swallowed one deep breath, then another as her limbs, cold and pumping with adrenaline, began to tremble.

The car’s front end, barely visible beneath billows of smoke, was wrapped around the trunk of a massive redwood. The air wreaked of oil and damp earth. Bits of shattered glass, many of them blood-coated, clung to her palms and the knees of her pants. Many more sat tangled in her thick, black curls and jutted out of a dozen cuts on her face. But—yes, the stinging persisted, then grew—her hands and knees had caught the worst of it.

Soon the fog settled, then coagulated, as if dispatching white blood cells to a wound. Anyone, Mona thought between gasps, would look like a ghost out here, standing motionless, alone, in the woods.

And all those shadows in the back seat—

Bones sense

—were they still there?

She approached her car with cautious steps, as though afraid it might leap back to life and lunge at her with a grill of broken teeth. She pushed her face up to the back window—nothing. Except the remnants of her phone scattered across the front seat.

Panic nearly choked her, and she licked fear from her mouth’s corners. It was salty and sharp, the flavor of blood. She searched the fog for a sign, a sound, even one of those old-fashioned telephones she sometimes saw along the highway. There were none, but something about the woods—the tilt of the trees, the curve of the road—was familiar. Homey.

She turned her back to the car and squinted, then let out a sob.

The cemetery.

Crumbling headstones dotted the steep hillside that rose up on the opposite side of the road. At the top, barely visible against the trees lining the hill’s crest, sat two headstones, each lit by a small lamp. At last.

She clasped her hands together and squeezed, squeezed so tight that it hurt—anything to stop the shaking. They called to her, those lights. She knew they’d do her no good; she was injured, maybe concussed, and freezing cold. She needed help.

But her eyes refused to look away, the lights burned so.

By the time she was halfway up the slope, she’d read three dozen headstones and hadn’t read a hundred others. More importantly, she ignored the prickle running along her neck, the one telling her that something else was there, creeping.

Something from the back seat.

The lights atop the hill still burned, but with each step they seemed to stretch away from her, the trek endless. She knew better than to pause halfway up a steep, foggy slope littered with underground dead. Things hid in the fog—they always did. But even on her best days, Mona was no hiker, and the pain had grown worse. Much worse. Flames licked her hands and knees, and her whole body pulsed with a dull ache. Her heart pounded, a prisoner against bars.

She couldn’t bring herself to reach her right hand up, to feel the beating in her chest. The lump she didn’t have was there.

Then a breath, or something like one, passed across Mona’s neck, and the air just over her shoulder shifted. As if something impossibly large had filled it. She didn’t dare turn—wouldn’t dare. But her bones…

More moss-covered headstones scrolled past as she ascended higher, higher. She raised her eyes, locked them onto her beacons. She didn’t let herself consider what would happen once she reached the top. The shape behind her—it was a shape now, she could sense it—was larger, closer. She nearly saw it. Its dark, crackling edges were reaching around her, tickling her peripheral vision.

Deep inside her, an invisible lump throbbed.

At last, her aching legs dropped her just feet away from the lights. Mona rolled onto her side and listened to her desperate lungs inflating against the hard, pebble-strewn ground. At last, rest.

She might have laid there shivering forever, ears perked for passing cars, but the image of her skeletal parents just six feet below pushed her upright.

That something behind her, had split into tendrils. She could see it reaching around her now, even in the pitch-black. Stringy and sick, spreading.

A few tears fell, but they made no difference. She knew that in a few hours’ time, Lizzie would pull up to Mona’s studio apartment in her white Mercedes and knock. Mona saw her as if through gauze, through the dreamy blur of fog and darkness now swallowing her whole: chestnut hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, purple scrubs freshly pressed. Eager for the day, for Mona’s diagnosis. She would knock, then knock again and again. But no use—Mona already wasn’t there.

Wind whispered, and somewhere deep in the trees—the trees she still sensed but could no longer see—something small and quick skittered through the forest brush. Another gust, another cracking twig. One by one, the sounds wove themselves together, snapping consonants and wispy vowels mingling into words.

Bones sense what eyes can’t see.

Then, deeper and clearer, If you let them.

Perhaps the shock was catching up to her. Maybe with nothing to see, nothing to hear but rustling consonants and vowels on the breeze, she could at last grasp onto the awful, lonesome truth: Lizzie wasn’t just pushy—she was right.

Mona calmed then, despite her aching body and the sting of glass still burning her palms. Eyes peeled wide, she looked up into the midnight sky and saw only dark. Her right hand reached across her body, fingers weak but sure, and pressed.

– END –

Sarah Blumert is a writer and editor based in Humboldt County, California. Inspired by such authors as Shirley Jackson and Edgar Allan Poe, she feels most at home writing short stories in the mystery, horror, and thriller genres. She currently writes for Mashed, a food publication, and is pursuing her M.F.A. in Writing through Lindenwood University.