LeVar Burton Reads · LeVar Burton and Stitcher

"Folk Hero Motifs in Tales Told by the Dead" by KT Bryski

February 27, 2024·46 min·3 clips

Simon confesses he invented the story about Skullbone, and Haydn replies 'that doesn't mean it's not true.'

LeVar opens with folk heroes. He names Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, Paul Bunyan, David and Goliath, Kivuuk, and John the Conqueror as figures people use to imagine a little more courage than they have. Hope has old bones here. The story he chooses gives the dead their own folk hero in Skullbone, but nothing in this place feels settled. Corpse after corpse turns back toward the snow, while a child keeps insisting that Skullbone keeps his promises. Oblivion calls softly. Near its mouth, even the narrator feels the pull: bare toes in crushed ice, cold filling the scene. Simon will not give in. His faith in Skullbone is small, stubborn, and almost too tender against that line of beaten bodies. Then the tale folds back. Before Skullbone braved the living lands, he wanted to bring darkness into an after-death stuck beneath a midnight sun that never quits. Light becomes punishment. Snow, glare, and sepulchral cold make endless day feel cruel. Skullbone asks the ocean. He pleads with the wind, crosses emptiness from horizon to horizon, and finds neither shadow nor gleam, nor plume, nor pall. The mountains give him a plain answer: they bring nothing into the living world and carry nothing out. So Skullbone uses his hands. He digs under frozen earth, with wet dirt at his nostrils and stones under his fingernails, tunneling beneath the mountain roots until darkness is there waiting.

As heard by us

A solemn myth of darkness and hope, carried by ritual language and stark image.

The episode gives K.T. Brisky's story a grave, legend-bent shape, following Skullbone through snow, wind, and frozen dark in search of something the dead can keep.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play for a mythic short story about a folk hero in the land of the dead.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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