The Bone’s Prayer

"The Bone's Prayer" is a short story by Caitlin R. Kiernan about a Providence writer whose life is upended by the discovery of a small carved stone on a Rhode Island beach. It first appeared in the February 2009 issue of Kiernan's ezine Sirenia Digest (#39).
The stone that drives the plot is shaped like a teardrop and is the color of pea soup. The stone glistens wetly in the dim afternoon light, and...there are markings etched deeply into its smooth surface. One of them looks a bit like a left-facing swastika, and another reminds her of a Greek ichthus.
==Characters ==
*Edith: A writer who often suffers from writer's block; Edith is not the name that appears on the covers of her novels. She "is not an outgoing person.... She hates the thought of being seen." Her hair is "an unremarkable dishwater blonde," and her eyes are "a dull brown.... Edith’s hands are thick, her fingers stubby. She keeps her nails chewed down to the quick."
*Sammie: Edith's closest friend and sometimes lover. She is "two or three inches taller" than Edith, "and has striking jet-black hair just beginning to show strands of grey." Her "eyes are a bright hazel green," and she "has delicate hands and the long, tapered fingers of a pianist."
==Setting==
The stone is found at Moonstone Beach, a real beach in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Edith remembers, as a child, seeing a weird aquatic creature she identified as a "mermaid" near Beavertail Lighthouse--a real lighthouse on Conanicut Island.Wikipedia, "Beavertail Lighthouse." 
==Connections==
Sammie recalls reading a book called Mysteries of the Sea that included an account of "a ship finding an uncharted island somewhere in the South Pacific, back in the twenties.... They found an island, complete with the ruins of a gigantic city, but then the whole thing sank in an earthquake."
== Publication History==
"The Bone's Prayer" was reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2010 (Prime Books, 2010). It subsequently appeared in Kiernan's collections Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (Subterranean Press, 2012) and Houses Under the Sea (Centipede Press, 2018). 
==References==
Category:Caitlin R. Kiernan works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works