The Masks on Grandmother's Wall

By Kim Pearson

The Masks on Grandmother's Wall is about the power of storytelling and how it connects, inspires, teaches, and heals us. It is about the elusive nature of truth and the illusion of safety. In the end, it is about the search for identity, and finding a place where you belong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kim Pearson
• Release date: May 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781881849070

Book preview

9781881849056-Perfect-cover-front.jpg

The Masks on Grandmother’s Wall

Kim Pearson

Published by Kim Pearson, Snoqualmie, Washington, USA

Copyright ©2021 Kim Pearson

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to Permissions Department, [e-mail].

Cover design: Kim Pearson

Mask art: Kim Pearson

Interior design: Davis Creative, DavisCreative.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kim Pearson

The Masks on Grandmother’s Wall

ISBN: 978-1-881849-05-6 (paperback)

978-1-881849-07-0 (ebook)

BISAC subject headings:

FIC000000 FICTION / General 2. FIC01000 FICTION / fairy tales/folk 3. FIC045020 FICTION / family life, siblings 4. FIC029000 FICTION / short stories

2021

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Flea: How to Stop an Itch

Chapter 2 The Orangutan: How to Go Back In Time

Chapter 3 The Trout: How to Know it All

Chapter 4 The Beaver: How to Lighten Up

Chapter 5 The Mole: How to See the Truth

Chapter 6 The Frog: How to Take a Leap of Faith

Chapter 7 The Dragonflies and The Bees: How to Know Your Place

Chapter 8 The Dog: How to Smell a Fake

Chapter 9 The Turtle: How to Be Happy

Chapter 10 The Rats: How to Know Who to Trust

Chapter 11 The Owl: How to Look Where You’re Going

Chapter 12 The Tiger: How to Change Your Perspective

Chapter 13 The Robin and The Goldfinch: How to Act Like a Queen

Chapter 14 The Snake: How to Lay an Egg

Chapter 15 The Spider: How to Find Your Way Home

About Kim Pearson

Chapter 1

The Flea

Emma:

We opened the door and trooped eagerly into the house, just like we always had before. But we stopped in the entry way, bunched together as if uncertain where to go, because Grandma wasn’t there to show us. Only a moment, but a long one, while her absence shouted from the walls and echoed in the empty air.

Lucy and I walked to the top of the stairs. When we were kids we often held hands as we hurtled down these stairs, with our other hands holding the banisters as we swung our feet off the ground and skipped three or even four steps at a time. Grandma didn’t stop us. For years this was our normal way of getting downstairs, until Lucy broke her ankle when she was eleven and I was fourteen, way too big, in our mothers’ opinion, to be playing such silly games. Grandma just shrugged and called it natural consequences, which pissed off our mothers, who forbade us to do it anymore. But I don’t think that’s why we stopped. It had a lot more to do with Grandma’s natural consequences. Broken ankles hurt.

Lucy and I are close, much closer than most cousins. This in spite of our age gap, and the fact that we aren’t at all alike. Maybe it’s because neither of us has a sister. Both of us have a younger brother, but this is not the same. A big influence in my life, and in Lucy’s, is the unbreakable bond existing between our mothers. Their need for one another makes having a sister seem like a necessity for happiness. Since our parents didn’t give us sisters, we had to make our own.

But maybe what really binds Lucy and me together is that we shared Grandma. She was ours, in a way that our brothers or mothers did not seem to know.

Standing at the top of the stairs, I held out my hand. Lucy grinned and took it in hers. But we were no longer so carefree, or so foolish, to try to careen feet-free down the stairs. We are grown-ups now, or supposed to be—Lucy is twenty-two and I just turned twenty-five. Plus we are bigger, not just older. All the women in our family are big women. Lucy is six feet one, and I’m not far behind; and we have bones and flesh to match. All those s words—slender, slim, svelte, skinny—do not apply to us. Grandma used to say our family had chubb. She certainly did. It’s a good word. To me it means warm, comfortable, fun, full of laughing kindness. This is what I tell myself when I go up another dress size.

Lucy and I held hands as we walked sedately down the stairs into Grandma’s basement. This is where she had her office and her studio, where she worked and where she played. Upstairs I had been struck by how empty the house felt, how obvious it was that Grandma wasn’t here any longer. But as soon as we opened the door at the bottom of the stairs, there she was, waiting for us.

Lucy is more practical than I am; any talk of spiritual matters will cause her to pinch her lips and roll her eyes. So I knew better than to say I felt Grandma beside me. Lucy would say it is only the masks making me feel this way.

Maybe she’s right. There are hundreds of masks hanging on the walls of the studio, all designed and made by Grandma. Animals, magical creatures, gods and goddesses, heroes and legendary figures—you name it, if it had a face, Grandma probably made a mask of it.

My God, murmured Lucy, standing in the middle of the studio and revolving in a circle to take them all in. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them all hanging up at once. I’d forgotten there were so many. I don’t understand how she had the time to make them all.

I shrugged; I didn’t know either. Grandma was always busy working—she ran a freelance writing business and wrote, and often ghostwrote, hundreds of books. Making just one mask took hours, even days. First she sculpted a face out of clay, then made a plaster mold of the sculpture, and then filled the mold with hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny bits of paper glued together in layers. Then she dried, painted, and decorated the paper mask with bones and feathers and beads and claws and teeth and whatever else Grandma had in her vast collection of such things.

Making masks was how Grandma played. But it wasn’t just the masks, it was the stories that went with them. I don’t know what Grandma made up first, the story or the mask, but it doesn’t matter. I think she made them for us. From before Lucy and I could read, up until just a few months ago, Grandma would call us a couple times a month, and say, Want to come play with me? I’ve got a new story …

Even when we were teenagers and full of cool, we nearly always said yes.

I miss her, I said. I can’t believe all her stories have been told.

I depended on those stories, whispered Lucy.

I couldn’t blame her. Grandma was easy to depend on. You knew where you were with her. You could ask her anything, and she always told you the truth. But she also told you stories in which truth was conspicuously missing.

And the haikus have stopped too, said Lucy. It feels so weird, not to get those haikus. She sent me a haiku every day for the last—what?—fifteen years?

Grandma had been writing haiku for over forty years, one a day without fail. That’s how I know I’m still an artist, she told me. Even if I do nothing else that day, I’ve created something. Earlier in her career she had published books of haiku, but for a long time now she just wrote them—and shared them with Lucy and me. Only us. The haiku, along with the masks and the stories, were how we knew Grandma