Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
A debut novel about a young girl at the center of the secret world of professional mourners, where women are trained extensively and paid handsomely to attend the funerals of strangers.
Mem is a wailer, a professional mourner hired to cry at funerals. One of the few remaining American girls in this secret, illegal profession, Mem hails from a long line of mourners, including her mother, a legendary master wailer hired for the most important funerals in her hometown of Philadelphia.
Though Mem is to eventually become a renowned wailer herself, she at first struggles with her calling. She is a girl who cannot make herself cry, and though her mother loves her fiercely, she must use ancient, emotionally abusive, cultlike rituals to train Mem to weep. When Mem emerges as the greatest wailer that the profession has ever seen, her infamy brings with it unwanted attention, especially from the authorities.
Interweaving poetic prose and artifacts spanning six thousand years and seven continents, Open Me is an utterly original novel about mothers and daughters, dark underworlds, and the play between fact and fiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781596922365 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | MacAdam/Cage Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 06/28/2007 |
| Pages: | 225 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
An award-winning poet, essayist, and educator, Sunshine O’Donnell teaches experiential workshops in creative writing, visual art, and quantum physics to underserved children in poverty-stricken schools and youth residential facilities throughout Pennsylvania. Through The Coffeehouse Project, a mobile-classroom program O’Donnell founded in 1994, she has published hundreds of literary magazines for underserved adolescents and abused and abandoned children. O’Donnell lives in the Germantown section of Philadelphia with her husband. Open Me is her first novel.
Read an Excerpt
“Do you know what you look like when you’re crying?”
The little girl and the old man who had paid for her are standing beneath the deep-green grave canopy when he asks her this. They are standing on opposite sides of the casket, waiting for its slow drop to end so that the little girl can begin. While they wait, the little girl picks at the edges of her handkerchief and watches the sleek brown coffin that is dropping, the shrinking open gap between the casket and the hole, while her mother stands behind the real mourners, counting the money and turning away.
“Come a bit closer for me,” says the old man, gently. “A bit closer to the grave.”
Is the young minister still talking? The little girl can’t tell, can’t hear much but the sound of her stiff black lace rustling against itself, the rain, the sound of her heart in her ears. She tries to be sad but she doesn’t feel sad now. What she feels inside is the ghost-self growing, curled at the edges, gray and unstable as burnt paper. A scorched wisp.
She moves closer to the grave. I am stupid, she remembers. I am worthless, I am disgusting. The grass by her feet is fake and bright green, fringed with frail shards of gnarled brown leaves. “Don’t be scared,” the old man says, and with some difficulty, he walks closer to where she is and stands behind her, clamping his hands down onto the shoulders of her dress. His fingers shake as he leans forward, whispering into the little girl’s hair.
What does he whisper? At first she can’t tell, the rain is beating its glass fists against the tent. She closes her eyes and pretends she’s under her secret salt tree with leaves like thin tongues of glass. The old man’s fingers press and squeeze. She keeps trying but the tears won’t come, she only sees white, white on white, something she can barely see the shape of, like a reflection caught in a puddle of milk. She doesn’t want to leave the salt tree but it is too late, the man’s whispers reach her even there, his not-white sounds, his wordless noises navigating toward her through the salt wasps and dry flowers.
What does he whisper? Unbearable. A hot breath, damp and loose. Unbearable. A wet smoke.
If you don’t cry for me, I will turn your mother in.
She opens her eyes and looks at her hands and sees the color gray. The little girl feels his fingers squeeze, his breath get thick, his dank gray whisper. The ghost inside her is whisper thin. The old man doesn’t know her name. He whispers, gently, into her hair, Start crying.