What I Didn't See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler

Author:Karen Joy Fowler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2011-04-13T19:57:00+00:00

Private Grave 9

Every week Ferhid takes our trash out and buries it. Last week's included chicken bones, orange peels, a tin that cherries had come in and another for peas, an empty silver-bromide bottle, my used razorblade, a bakelite comb someone sat on and broke, and several early drafts of Mallick's letter to Lord Wallis about our progress. Meanwhile, at G4 and G5, two bone hairpins and seven clay shards were unearthed, one of which was painted with some sort of dog, or so Davis says, though I'd have guessed lion. There's more to be found in other sectors, but all of it too recent—anything Roman or later is still trash to us. G4 and G5 are along the deep cut, and we're finding our oldest stuff there.

I'd spent the morning in the darkroom, ostensibly to work but really because I was tired of the constant gabble of the expedition house. When I grew up, it was just my mother and me. I had the whole third floor to myself, and she wasn't allowed to come up unless I asked her. I've got no gripe against anyone here. It's just a question of what you're used to.

The photographs I was printing were all of infant skeletons. There's an entire level of these, laid out identically on their sides with their legs pulled into their stomachs. Davis had cleared each tiny skull and ribcage with his breath because they were so delicate, and it took a week because there were so many. That seemed very intimate to me, and I wondered if he'd felt any attachment to one more than another. I thought it would probably be rude to ask. My pictures were of all different babies, but all my pictures looked the same.

At lunch, I shared some philosophical thoughts—all about how much sadder finding a single child would have been and how odd that was, you feeling less with each addition.

Mallick, our director, said when I'd put in a few more seasons I'd find I didn't think of them as dead people at all, but as the bead necklace or the copper bowl or whatever else might be found with the body. Mallick's eyes are all rimmed in red like a basset hound's. This gives him a tragic demeanor, when he's really quite cheerful. The whole time he was speaking, Miss Jackson, his secretary, was seated just past him with her head down, attending to her food. Miss Jackson lost her husband in the trenches and her son to the flu after.

Remembering that, and remembering how each of her losses was merely one among so many they might as well have been stars in the sky, made me wish I'd kept my thoughts to myself. Women take death harder than we men. Or that's been my experience.

"No signs of illness or malformation.” Davis has a face round as a moon and that pale skin that takes color easily; he's always either blanching or blushing. I watched him clean his fork

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