Kate Folk's short story "The Bone Ward" ends thusly: "Coyotes wail in the distance. Soon they will find me and sink their teeth into my boneless flesh. I pray that my bones will reconstitute inside them at sunrise, piercing their organs, killing them. My eyes sparkle with their own starlight and I know I'm about to pass out from the pressure on my brain. I comfort myself with unlikely scenarios." The narrator suffers from Total Nocturnal Bone Loss (TNBL), a disorder that liquifies the victim's skeleton overnight, dissolving the minerals into the blood, until morning when each bone grows back, an excruciating process.
"The Bone Ward" is part of Folk's debut collection Out There, a book that's been called "weird," "otherworldly," "unsettling," all words that skirt the encroaching wine spill of "genre." Like so many recent works of fiction, Folk's stories begin with the absurd, the exaggerated, and go from there. Like so many recent works of fiction, Folk's stories can often be narrated by wan, disaffected white women.
