A Shrunken Head and Other Mysteries

In the book nook I found it— a face no bigger than my palm, leathered and silent, its eyes forever pressed shut against whatever it had seen. Grandma said a missionary friend brought it back from a place where spirits walk in daylight. On the dining room window sill, a dozen squat green strangers kept their spines to themselves— silent travelers from the Southwest when my dad was still a boy, and I heard the first call of the desert. Her chairs wore lace crowns like saints at rest or queens without courts. I thought maybe macassar was a sickness you caught from leaning back too far. So I sat up straight and careful— not ready to die of comfort. The sink had no faucets— just a hand pump I wrestled until water gushed up cold. Beside it, Grandma’s lye soap waited, rough as a scab, yellow as old teeth, melting slow in a cracked dish. It smelled like something old being made clean again. And once, on a snowy afternoon, I found a wooden kaleidoscope— not colored glass and beads, but prisms and clever mirrors that turned the parlor lamp into a slowly unfolding star, spinning lambent silence across the ancestral hush. I didn’t know then how a house could hold its own prayers— uttered in lace and iron, in spines and stubborn blooming, in water wrestled from the earth and a small, hard bar of grace. But I remember now: it listened, even when no one spoke.