Free A Woman Clothed in Words by Anne Szumigalski Page B

told them, is where the souls belonging to the bodies buried in the churchyard live until the Awakening. He takes out two stubs of candles and lights them. There is a smell of laundry bleach and wet feathers.
    No-one speaks. Nancy’s head aches in the silence. Bryll is sure she can find something better to do. Only Boy is really enjoying the whole thing, lolling against the dank wall and sucking away at the taste of his own blood.
    ~~~

    Laurence announces that he will think a story. The rest of them are to stare at the candle flames and open their minds to his unspoken words. The story is about heads. They know that much. How can it be about anything else? There was once a cruel king who cut off the heads of all his subjects. He did it with his sword of state, a hundred heads a day until everyone was decapitated. He arranged all the heads in rows on the terraces of his palace. He found he liked doing this, and eventually he became obsessed with the interesting patterns he could make by moving the heads around. It took up all his time and he never got tired of it. But the heads did, and he knew it for he could hear them whispering to each other at night when he was trying to sleep.
    What could they be plotting? Were they out to have their revenge? Time went by and the heads rotted and became skulls. The birds picked them clean and left them white as ivory. All the countryside was empty and there were no telephones anywhere, but somehow people from neighbouring countries heard about the strange palace of ivory skulls. Songs were written about it, and maps were drawn of the best way to get there. The foreigners just couldn’t wait to visit and see for themselves. They brought floodlights and music with them and set up stalls and sold little white skulls made of sugar. And if in all that hubbub they happened to notice a feeble old man muttering to himself and wandering about on the terraces they were kind enough to slip him a coin to shut his gob and get his bony butt out of the way of the traffic.
    ~~~
    Bryll tired of this story when it was less than halfway through. Her mind wandered from Laurence’s and her eyes from the candle flames. She began to tell her own story and brought Boy under her influence in a matter of seconds, though he wasn’t at all pleased with her romantic little tale and liked the skull one much better, there was no way of ducking her power. Nancy was faithful to her big brother and stayed with him till the end, even laughing at the end joke though she wasn’t quite sure why it was funny.
    ~~~

    After the supposed walk Bryll brought home weed flowers from the churchyard and shoved them into an old green-glass vigil lamp she had found among the graves. That they may burn as bright as candles, she whispered very low, but still her mother heard the words and wanted to know what they meant. Bryll didn’t answer. For how can one thing mean another? Each thing must have its meaning just as each wildflower must grow on one certain stem and not another.
    A couple of windy days and the graveyard is full of garbage, mostly old paper. Old because yellow at the edges and scrunched and written on, so no good for drawing. Bills for uninteresting things. Milk cartons smelling like foreign cheese. Messy paper plates bent in the middle. Letters to and from strangers whose words appear often in Bryll’s sacred songs: “love to good old aunt Bessie” and “rest assured my dear sir” and “I kiss you goodnight with all my heart.” It always takes at least an hour to clean everything up because every piece must be looked at and decided upon. It could be, Boy always says, some message from afar. This is a favourite saying of his and he uses it so much that they are sick and tired of it, and shout him down, or try to. This only makes him laugh. He rolls about on the grass and gurgles and his face is horrible when he laughs. His wide gums show pink and shining and he dribbles between his teeth and his tongue sticks