The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Singing Face
by Donna J. W. Munro

Once upon a different time, faces were as private as excreting holes and genitals. From birth to death, porcelain shells of many colors and expression would be fitted to faces by the family called Mask whose eldest always did the clay molds, shaped only by touch for their eyes had been burned out when they rose in age and skill to the most private profession of the time.

Master Mask, they were called.

Only they knew the beauties and deformities that might lie hidden among the shining masks tied so carefully around the head of each man, woman, or child.

Master Mask waited until the next youngest delivered the wet and bloody newborns into waiting clay smeared hands. The square mold had to be pressed before the first breath for a wailing babe would ruin the careful visage that needed capturing.

No omen was worse than a babe with a screaming mask.

Memories are long and no matter how many new masks the Master made after a screaming one, the child and then adult would be remembered as unlucky, ugly, and exposed. It was better to abandon such a child to the troops of wanderers who wore the graveyard discard masks they could gather and stop to their own unmatched faces often so ill-fitting that chins and cheeks and foreheads peeked through with scandalous flashes of flesh if the wanderer wasn’t careful.

The Master Mask makers did their best to not allow such things to happen, waiting even at the hip of a to be mother as she pushed the child from her body to press the mold to the still veiled face of a new babe to save them such a reviled life.

Unless they deserved it.

The Mask families were kept in splendor second only to the priests in how they were cared for. The mothers made the clay and fired the masks while the eldest children painted and honed the shapes into beauty. Young ones cleaned and watched, absorbing the wisdom of the making so they would be the next great maskers. Because it was a lifetime of work, the families of other skills supported them. Fed and clothed them. Built for them. Offered the best marriage stock.

No one dared insult the Mask family or short them what they were due.

Sometimes it couldn’t be helped. Accidents happened.

Once, a girl child named Grendy fell and cracked her mask. No one saw her beneath the mask because she wrapped herself up so well, but the shards cut her face to ribbons beneath. She cried out to all that would listen, “This is the Masker’s fault!”

Only a child would say such a thing and expect people to side with her. She was a willful girl, prone to stories and sass.

“The Masker used weak clay. It burns me!”

She pressed her hands against the seam her mother had bound with strips of cloth.

The others grumbled. “Quiet your girl,” they told her mother

But the Mask family had already heard. No one came to touch the girl’s face and make a new mold. No one asked what colors she wanted. Even when the girl’s mother bowed before their porcelain gates begging, none of the Maskers answered.

Grendy was too young to understand what she’d done. She let her mother fill the cracks in her mask with mud and build out the edges with burned dough, still complaining loudly that the Master Masker should be making her a better mask. That she was owed something better.

When her mother struck her, Grendy finally fell silent.

“You’ve done this to yourself, Grendy. You’ve made them mad and now no one will apprentice you. No one will marry you.”

The girl sniffed, finally understanding a bit of what she’d lost.

“How can that be?”

The knock at the door saved her mother from having to explain. The hollow sound metronomed and echoed through their little house and before the sound died, the mother turned away from Grendy, silently weeping.

“Come in,” she said before Grendy could say anything else.

The handle clicked and the door swung with a fetid breath. Pressed there in the opening were masks crowded in the space, old masks Grendy didn’t recognize, chipped masks like hers repaired poorly and strapped with willow braids.

She knew them. They’d come for her.

“Wanderers?”

She snuggled back, clutching at her mother. “I didn’t mean it. I… I could tell them…”

Her mother didn’t react to her voice, wouldn’t turn her way. Her mother’s white clay face gazed away, as it did when she thought of things far or lost.

The whole world seemed to freeze while Grendy plead for sanctuary, but finally she understood. She sniffled and went to her bed and using the quilt she’d made she gathered up her shifts and spoons, odds and ends. All the things she thought she’d need and some she just wanted. She even took her baby masks. Then she tied them up and dragged them to the door where the others waited for her.

They led her out and back through town where masks pressed in windows and doorways watching her be led from them. Silently they passed. Shadows leading dreams to the edges of town. Broken things that couldn’t be fixed by clay or cloth.

Grendy had broken more than a mask. At the center of town, next to the Mask family’s grand home, the wanderers circled around her. They whispered to her about evil and stank of bad teeth. Their shabby shrouds and chipped masks barely hid the madness perched in their overly wide eyes or the neediness written in gaunt skin over pronounced bones.

They plucked at her bag, ripping strips of cloth away, stealing spoons, taking her into them a piece at a time. In the great windows of the Masker house, Grendy saw them watching, saw they’d all switched to their smiling masks, saw that this was what they wanted for her.

Young Grendy was doomed. She knew that now. She’d skulk through the graveyard, eat leavings from the slops for the pigs, and never know the feel of a mask made for her again.

Something shattered inside her.

“No,” she told the wanderers as they pressed in take her hands in their own.

She broke from them and climbed up the Masker’s gate, the highest point in the town, straddling the porcelain frame so the Maskers and the townspeople might see her.

She’d never been quiet. She wouldn’t be a whisper now. She remembered how she’d seen a screaming mask when she was younger and how her mother had made the sign of protection against the poor baby. She remembered how her mother said screaming, loud voices twisted us and made our masks into ugly things.

Grendy wondered what it would feel like to scream.

There, above the whole town with the weight of a hundred eyes watching, she threw back her hood, shucked off her shift and her unders until she was all skin and light, then pulled away the silken bindings of her patched mask letting the pieces fall away from her face.

Before they could look away, hide from her shame and cover children’s eyes, she raised her face to the sun, opened her mouth and let her unfettered, unblocked voice spill from her mouth. Not a scream, but a song. As beautiful as the most delicate mask painting, as bright as the yellow paint mixed on a summer day she sang out.

Maskless, undressed, singing… free.

The first porcelain mask struck her cheek, edge sharp as a knife cutting into the already scarred flesh with a snick. The wanderers pelted her with all the extra mask pieces they’d stored up in their ragged mantles.

As the hailing mask pieces struck her head and shoulders, peppering her with stinging wounds, Grendy slipped, falling off the gate and hard onto the clay brick path with a crunch of bone.

Townsfolk came next with tools and knives, muttering inside their masks and making the sign of protection as they pierced her body and beat her exposed skin blue.

Finally, the priests came with the Masks, pushing through the crowd, praying to the gods that her blasphemy would be forgiven. The prayers, muffled by thick masks, went on as the Mask Makers encased her whole body in clay and rolled her to the furnace, thumping and screaming through the mouth hole they’d left her.

As she baked, her screams softened. As she hardened, the wind in her became song. As she glazed, her grimace drew up into a smile.

More from author Donna J. W. Munro:

Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book One

In a dark future, people with money live in doomed cities and use the recently deceased as
repurposed servants and workers called poppets. Ellie DesLoge is the teen heiress of the
company that makes and distributes poppets–your basic reprogrammed flesh robot complete
with training chips and kill switches. If Ellie does everything her Aunt Cordelia says, she’ll have a
life of wealth and power. If she chooses to be what is planned for her, life will be perfect.
Everything she ever dreamed. But something about her sweet poppet Thom goes against what
Aunt Cordelia and tradition have taught her. Will she choose to believe what everyone knows is
true or will she follow what her heart tells her about Thom? Her choice will change the world.

Available on Amazon!