Free Tales of Wonder by Jane Yolen

other children sensed it. But the elders who came and watched us at our play—they knew for sure. I heard one say (overheard, really), “She has a gift for grief, that one. Mark her well.”
    But even before that, I had known. As a child I had started crafting my own grief poems. The first aped the dirges and threnodies I had been taught, but always with a little twist of my own. One in particular I remember, for my parents shared it with the elders as a sign of my gift. It began:
    I sail out on my dark ship
    Toward the unmarked shore
    With only the grievings
    Of my family to guide me.
    The ship breasts the waves …
    The dark ship, the unmarked shore, they were but copies of the unusual metaphors of grief. But the wording of the fifth line, the penta —which foreshadowed the central image, that of a carved figurehead of a nude woman, something of which I should have had no knowledge, for we were a people of the Middle Lands—convinced them all. I was a prodigy. I basked in their praises for weeks and tried hard to repeat my success. But that time I could not. It was years before I realized that, truly, I grieved best when trying for no effect at all, though the critics and the public did not always know the difference. But the craftswoman knows.
    And then the day came when I was old enough to enter the Hall of Grief. I rose early and spent many minutes in front of the glass, the only one in the house not covered with the gray mourning cloth. I drew dark circles under my eyes and deep shades on my lids. Of course I overdid it. What new griever does not? I had yet to learn that true grief makes its own hollows in the face, a better sculptor of the body’s contours than all our pencils and paints. Artifice should only heighten. But I was young, as I have said. And even Great-grandmother in her dusky room was not enough to teach me then.
    That first day I tried something daring. Even that first day my gift for invention showed. I painted my nails the color of my eyelids and I took a penknife and scraped the paint on the thumbnail of my left hand into a cross, to signify the bisecting of life and death. Yes, I see you understand. It was the beginning of the carvings I would later do on all my nails, the carvings that would become such a passion among young grievers and given my name. I never do it myself anymore. It seemed such a little thing then: some extra paint, an extra dab of darkness onto light. An instinctual gesture that others took—mistook—for genius. That is, after all, what genius is: a label for instinct.
    I plaited my long dark hair with trillium and elderberry, too. And that was much less successful. As I recall, the trillium died before the morning was over, and the berries left my braids sticky with juice. But at the moment of leave-taking, when I went upstairs to give Great-grandmother the respect I owed her, I felt the proper griever. And she turned in her bed, the one with the carvings of wreaths on the posters, the one in which all the women of our house have died. Then she looked at me with her luminous, half-dead eyes.
    â€œYou will make them remember me?” she asked.
    â€œGreat-grandmother, I will,” I replied.
    â€œMay your lines of grieving be long,” she said.
    â€œMay your time of dying be short,” I answered. And the ritual was complete. I left, for I was far more interested in the Hall of Grief and my part in it than her actual moment of death, when the breath leaps from the mouth in a great upward sigh. That is a private moment, after all, though grieving is all done in public. Still, I know now that all our mourning, all our grieving, all the outward signs of our rituals are nothing compared to that one quick moment of release. Do I startle you with my heresy? It is an old woman’s right.
    I did not look back, but ran down the stairs and into the light. My mother and her mother walked with me to the Hall of Grief. And though we marched