Page 57 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #1

“These past two years Dad had been digging holes to find the truth of himself...”
you’re going to die because blood is leaking through the hole in your heart and out of your body. I started bleeding Granddad and now I’m going to die. I don’t want to die.”
I began to cry.
“Well, Lizzie, you are not dying,” Granddad promised. “You never had a hole in your heart. Aunt Alice will be coming down at the week- end, because I am going to tell her she’s coming down. She’ll chat with you. She’s a doctor, she’ll know all about this.”
I knew that Granddad was upset by my news, because he hit his fist against the side of the burrow three times and broke a bit of the wall. He shouted something like “fuggan doman.”
Aunt Alice was Granddad’s oldest child and my Godmother.
“Listen to me Lizzie,” Granddad said. “Have I ever told you a lie?”
“But Granddad,” I said. “She’s not a real doctor. Aunt Alice only knows about poets and stuff.”
I thought about how every morning Grand- dad used to give me a different reason as to why my face was upside down on the slope of my egg spoon. I asked him why there were so many different explanations and he said “sci- ence isn’t...well...an exact science, and so just when you think to yourself, that’s great now, I know why my face is upside down on the slope of my egg spoon, they ring you up and say, hoi no, hold on, there’s another thing we hadn’t thought of.”
“Poets my arse,” Granddad said. “If she is going to be calling herself a doctor, then a doctor she is. Sure was there ever a poet that didn’t ail for something.”
I was secretly very glad the scientists were
so thorough, because I loved each new story. These weren’t lies, they were stories about the
“Because when God made her, he got the red and black wires crossed in her head and the fuse is blowing every live long day.”
inexactness of science.
“No, Granddad you’ve never lied to me,” I said.
“Granddad.”
“Yes, Lizzie.”
“Why did Mother tell me a lie?”
“Is that a lie, like the hole in my heart lie, Granddad?”
“Lizzie, I really don’t know why your mother told you this, she was always very hard on you
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