"And who are you two?"
          "Skeletons," The skeletons stated bluntly and in bored unison. "What do we look like to you?"
          "Well... Skeletons," The young boy repeated back bluntly as he was given.
          "Well, then. Mystery solved. As you like it. Move along now."
          Hands deep in the pockets of his bright blue windbreaker, with a steady breeze tousling the top of his short brown hair, the young boy looked up and down the path, unsure of where to move along to. Concerned with betraying his own disorientation, the boy stared on a bit longer at the two skeletons, examining the curious practice they were currently engaged in.
          "And what are you eating?"
          "Food."
          "Well, it doesn't look like food."
          The sunken bores of where eyes would've been stared up at the boy with a blank expression that may have been annoyance, but couldn't exactly be placed without the aid of wrinkled flesh and perhaps even some eyebrows.
          The skeleton closest to the path leaned forward, placing his forearm against his knee, and offered with his other hand out, "Didn't we say to move along?"
          "Yes. But that doesn't look like food."
          With a condescending chatter of teeth, the skeleton asked, "Have you ever heard of the fruit of knowledge?"
          "But that doesn't look like fruits."
          "Yes, well. We wouldn't expect one as naive as you to understand something so complex and layered. These, little one, are symbols. See this?" Putting out his arm, the skeleton revealed in his bony fingers a small pyramid, made of some substance the boy couldn't identify or place. The surface looked soft enough, almost as if it were made of felt, or perhaps even velvet. And judging by how the reddish edges creased beneath the skeleton's grip--not unlike the skin of a belly would beneath a person's clothes--it looked as though there was some weight and substance beneath the fabric-like surface. Most intriguing though, was what had been inlaid into the outward-facing side of the pyramid. An eye, at least twice the size of the boy's own, and more than large enough to fit inside either of the two gaping hollows in the skeleton's face, sat within, looking to and fro and past the boy with a calm reservation.
          Alarmed by how lifelike the eye seemed to be, the boy glanced back at the skeleton past the one directly before him. This one had picked up a wooden cross out of the dirt that had a tiny bearded-man strapped to it, and was inserting the cross and man headfirst down past his teeth towards the back of his skull.
          "Elahi elahi lama sabaqtani," the tiny man's voice rang out in labored breath, muffled and echoed against the slate surface of the skeleton's enveloping jaw.
          "I... don't think those are for eating," The boy advised, becoming wary of the two men made of bone.
          "No? Fruits of knowledge? Made for something other than eating?"
          With a harsh chattering of their teeth, the skeletons began to ring out in a laughter that slithered up the spine and seized the shoulders. The leaves of the forest began to echo with the chatter, and the boy turned his head about in alarm.
          "I just--I just don't understand what it is you're learning," the boy explained, feeling his cheeks begin to flush.
          "The ways of the world," the skeleton further back called out, pulling the tiny man and cross out from his enclosing mouth and flourishing him about as a baton to illustrate his point, "there is no better way to learn knowledge than to consume it in its most calcified state."
          "Concentrated," the skeleton closer to the boy corrected, before biting into the pyramid of eye and velvet, which upon contact with his teeth burst into a wet mist of silk that splayed itself against the osseous surface of the skeleton's face and fingers. Unbothered by the mess, the heap of bones continued with his meal, a stringy mass of strange tissue hanging now from the darkened spaces of where his gums would've been.
          "Ah yes, concentrated. Simply put, a concise summation of a philosophy's principles and dictations are most easily digestible when given shape in the form of some bite-sized symbol that can be taken in for all its worth and value in one fell munch."
          "Or even a few," the closer skeleton added, still struggling to finish his meal.
          "Well of course. Some knowledge is heftier than others after all," the skeleton further back finished contentedly, finally throwing the man and cross whole towards the back of his throat and closing his teeth shut with a cracking snap.
The boy stood blank before the munching skeletons for only a little while longer before giving up on finding any information of worth from the pair, his feet now moving forward along the forest path.