Bone Tenancy

The catalog lists this book's publication year as 1656, three centuries before its author was born, which is either a cataloging error or the best unintentional joke a haunted database could make. Ignore it. What matters is that fifteen of these stories were written before their author turned twenty-six, in the mid-1940s, and that the fear they traffic in has nothing to do with machines, systems, or institutions — the usual furniture of this library's anxieties. It has to do with the body you are issued at birth and cannot return.

Take Mr. Harris, who visits a doctor for aching bones and gets dismissed as a hypochondriac, then finds his way to M. Munigant — small, dark, smelling of iodoform, whistling his consonants through ill-fitting dentures, offering breadsticks "to keep in practice." Munigant is a quack, and everyone in the story except Harris seems to know it. He diagnoses "an imbalance, an unsympathetic coordination between soul, flesh, and skeleton," produces X-rays like tarot cards, charges two dollars a session, and never actually fixes anything — he simply makes Harris aware, catastrophically aware, that there is a skeleton in there at all. "How is it we take ourselves for granted?" Harris asks himself, horrified, and then can't stop noticing his own jaw, his wife's shoulder blade, the teeth showing through Mrs. Withers's smile. This is wellness-industry horror fifty years early, minus the wellness industry: a man handed a frightening private truth about his body by a practitioner with no credentials and an obvious financial interest in his continued distress. I've written before, about *Fantastic Voyage*, on the body rendered as territory to be navigated and defended. Bradbury doesn't navigate the body. He makes it foreign from the inside, permanently, with no cure available except the one Munigant eventually delivers, off the page, unspeakably.

"The Crowd" does something different but adjacent — it imagines the people who arrive at car accidents before anyone should reasonably be able to arrive, the same faces recurring at wrecks across a decade, a network of witnesses who assemble around death with the timing of trained responders and the affect of scavengers. Spallner counts them arriving: "one two three four five seconds — eight nine ten eleven twelve — from all over, people came running." There's no organization behind them, no dossier to compile, no committee issuing instructions. They're just there, always, faster than grief should allow. It's tempting to read this as an ancestor of the bystander with a phone, the crow