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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.
Copyright ©
Roxanne Andorfer
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