Skeleton Song by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com, 26th October 2022) is one of her “Wayward Children” series (Every Heart a Doorway, etc.)1 and opens with sunset on Mariposa, with the abuelas singing the summoning song that reanimates the dead skeletons of this world:
In the palace, in the curtained bower reserved for the Princess, a scattering of bones dusted with diamond and amber began to stir, tempted into motion by the song rising from below. On the other side of the room, a terrible creature raised its head and watched.
It was strange and fleshy, shaped as a skeleton was shaped, but with a covering of fat and skin stretched across it, concealing it from proper view. It hid most of its body under rags it called “clothing,” which had grown tattered and worn, developing holes where none had been before. Some among the palace staff had hoped, for a time, that the same might happen to the terrible creature’s “skin,” leaving proper, honest bone to shine through. It had not. When the creature broke its skin, as happened from time to time, it bled and wept and hurt, and took to the pile of rags it had claimed as a “bed.”
They would never have allowed it to remain in the palace were it not for one strange truth: hideous as the creature was, impossible as it seemed, the Princess loved it.
We learn that the fleshy creature is Christopher, a human who arrived in this world of living skeletons via a portal. The Princess saw that this new arrival was ill and drew all the sickness into a bone, later extracting it from Christopher’s body. Christopher now uses the bone as a flute.
The rest of the story sees the Princess paint her bones (a skeleton’s equivalent of dressing, I guess) before they go to see her parents in the depths of the catacombs (Christopher loves the Princess and does not want to go back to his world, so she says he must meet her parents). When the pair eventually arrive at the bottom of the catacombs, they learn from the Princess’s father that he also came to Mariposa as a human—but he kept his fleshly memories by having his mother plunge a gilded bone into his heart on their wedding night and then cut away his flesh (this resolves a memory problem mentioned by Christopher during an earlier discussion with the Princess about him becoming a skeleton).
The story concludes with the couple returning to the surface. The Princess wants “to sleep in the flowers” with him one last time (her bones are inanimate during the daytime) and then, when she rises that sunset, they will follow the ritual outlined by her father. When the Princess wakes that evening, however (spoiler), she finds that Christopher has had second thoughts and vanished.
This isn’t badly done (there are some nice touches, e.g. the journey down into the catacombs) but the idea of a man falling in love with a skeleton requires a little too much suspension of disbelief. I suspect this story will appeal more to those already invested in the series and who are interested in interstitial material.
** (Average). 5,000 words. Story link.
1. “The Wayward Children” series at ISFDB.