Skeletons

I find myself sitting awake, late at night [inclined to say, as usual]; the room light is off, although my desk lamp is still glowing weakly. Some Coldplay track is playing softly in the background, and a book of bones and skeletons lies open on my desk. Pictures of skeletons in various pictures and poses shimmer off the limited light in the room. How creepy.

I've actually never understood the scare factor of skeletons. They're the structural portion of something formerly living, merely giving us a very good clue of what the organism would have looked like when it was alive. After all is said and done, we have our own skeletons inside of us [and other stuff that we tend to hide], and we cannot separate that from ourselves. I am most likely analyzing this too scientifically to deem scary. That's no fun, oh well.

Perhaps the whole horror genre has taken this to the next level with skeletons that move and have been reanimated with "dark magic." Plenty of fantasy games, RPG or not, have used skeletons as an integral part of their mystical, mythical brutes of some diabolical mastermind's evil horde. What that says about what people view about the skeleton, I won't be able to even scrape the surface; all I know is that it would seem that culture has deemed the skeleton an object to be feared and the cause of many children's nightmares.

I suppose that's why the phrase "skeletons in the closet" is deemed so apt and appropriate about nasty little secrets that people hide. Now those, not skeletons, are truly scary.