The Mummified Head
By the time she heard about the mummified head, it had already been missing for thirty-seven years. This fact alone should have acted as a warning. Instead, it felt like a dare issued by someone long dead and therefore immune to consequences. The head had been hidden behind the northern wall of Saint Elias Cemetery sometime in the late seventies, wrapped in linen, placed in a biscuit tin, and buried beneath a fig tree. Why? Depending on who told the story, the reasons ranged from ritual to panic to boredom. What united all versions was the shrug at the end.
Why not? She accepted this logic as sufficient.
Saint Elias Cemetery now sat wedged between a luxury apartment complex and a car dealership whose slogan promised SECOND LIVES FOR USED CARS. The cemetery had not expanded, but the city now pressed against it with bureaucratic persistence, filing down its edges, trimming its wildness. What had once been the northern wall was now a café with polished concrete floors and ironic typography.
She stood outside the gate longer than necessary, as if waiting for the place to refuse her entry on moral grounds. It didn’t. The gate creaked open, indifferent.
Inside, everything felt smaller than it had seemed when she was a child, or perhaps she was simply older and less forgiving of crowding. There were benches now. There were trash cans. There were signs politely requesting visitors not to picnic among the dead.
There were no fig trees.
She walked slowly, attempting to look like a person with legitimate grief. This involved a downturned mouth, a slight hunch, and pauses that suggested memory. Unfortunately, she did not know the names on the stone slabs and her eyes darted too quickly, scanning rather than mourning. She looked like someone casing the place, which was accurate. After ten minutes, she was already tired.
The story, as she had heard it, was precise in the way all unreliable stories are. The fig tree had been “just there.” The wall had been “that one.” The head had been buried “not too deep.” These phrases had sounded comforting when spoken aloud, as if proximity were enough. On the ground, surrounded by concrete and planning permissions, they meant nothing.
She paced the perimeter, counting steps, then recounting them, then abandoning the exercise altogether. The northern edge of the cemetery had been reinforced, beautified, landscaped. Memory had been bulldozed and replanted with decorative shrubs chosen for their inability to grow wild. She knelt once, pretending to tie her shoe, and pressed her hand to the ground. It was compacted, unyielding, disinterested in confession.
The presence of a security camera blinking patiently near the caretaker’s shed made her skin prickle. She straightened and moved on, aware that she had already stayed too long in one place. Her incognito plan—thin to begin with—was unraveling.
She attempted reconnaissance through conversation, which went poorly. An elderly woman sat beside the wall of graves on a folding chair, cracking pistachios and dropping the shells into a plastic bag. Her face was sharp with survival.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Do you remember if there used to be a fig tree here? Near the wall?”
The woman looked at her without surprise, which was worse.
“There were trees,” she said. “Then there were no trees.”
“What kind?”
The woman shrugged. “Green ones.”
“Do you remember one by the northern wall?”
The woman spat a shell onto the ground. “The wall moved,” she said. “Everything moves.”
This felt less like wisdom and more like dismissal, but she thanked her anyway and walked on, the words sticking unpleasantly to her ribs.
She approached the caretaker next, a young man with headphones and a hedge trimmer attacking a hedge that had done nothing wrong.
“Excuse me,” she called.
He removed one earcup, irritation already in place.
“I’m looking for—” She stopped herself. She was not looking for a head. She was not looking for anything. “I was wondering if there used to be a fig tree here. Years ago.”
“Before my time,” he said.
“When was your time?”
He considered this. “After things got organized.”
This was not helpful.
“Do you know who might remember?”
He put the earcup back on, ending the conversation with the authority of someone who had decided she was not worth remembering.
By early afternoon, she had circled the cemetery so many times that her sense of direction collapsed inward. Every grave began to look like an accusation. She took out a small notebook and began sketching the layout, which only succeeded in making her look more suspicious. She measured distances with her steps, then mistrusted her stride. She stood very still in corners, waiting for something—intuition, memory, the ground itself—to reveal what had been erased. Nothing obliged.
She crossed into the café built over the former northern wall and ordered a coffee she didn’t want. The place leaned hard into the theme: skull motifs, Latin phrases misquoted, death softened into décor. She stared at the polished floor, imagining layers beneath it—soil, rubble, roots, secrets—flattened into submission. If the head had ever been there, it was certainly not now. The barista noticed her staring.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, too quickly. “Just thinking.”
“About death?” he offered, hopefully.
“About development,” she said.
He nodded sympathetically, which annoyed her far more than it should have.
As the day thinned, so did her sense of purpose. She realized with dull clarity that even if the fig tree had existed, even if the wall had once been where the story said it was, time had moved the coordinates beyond recovery. The city had absorbed the mistake and reclassified it as progress. She made one last pass along the perimeter, slower now, less hopeful. The cemetery did not yield. It remained stubbornly itself, full of what was meant to stay and emptied of what had not been sanctioned.
She sat on a bench and let the disappointment settle. It was heavier than she had anticipated. She had not expected to succeed—she was not delusional—but she had expected something. A sign. A fragment. A sense that the journey had been more than a poorly funded pilgrimage to a rumor. Instead, she felt foolish. Obvious. Visible in the worst way.
She left as the shadows lengthened, the gate closing behind her with finality.
She flew home two days later with nothing to show for the effort except a notebook full of useless diagrams and the particular exhaustion that comes from having chased something that never intended to be found. She did not tell anyone how thoroughly she had failed. She condensed the story into a joke, then stopped telling it altogether. The head faded back into abstraction. Something that had once seemed solid enough to travel for returned to its rightful state: rumor, anecdote, an interesting aside.
What she never knew—what no one told her, because no one tells these things out loud—was that the head had been found years ago, during renovations that came with permits and safety helmets. It had startled the workers. There had been shouting, a brief argument, and then the quiet intervention of an old priest who had lived beside the cemetery long enough to recognize when something did not belong to the ground anymore.
He took it home in a biscuit tin. It sat now on a shelf in a small, dim house behind the church, between jars of nails and mismatched keys. Wrapped in linen. Undisturbed. Occasionally dusted. Not revered, not displayed, merely accommodated. It was neither lost nor found, only relocated into obscurity with intention.
In the evenings, the priest passed it on his way to make tea. Sometimes he forgot it was there. Sometimes he remembered and nodded, as one does to a difficult but familiar presence.
The fig tree was long gone. The wall had moved. The story persisted, detached from its object, wandering until it found someone willing to cross oceans for it.
And the head remained exactly where it was, waiting for no one, while the woman who had gone looking carried home the heavier burden: the certainty that some searches end not with revelation, but with the quiet humiliation of having believed there was still something left to unearth.
Why not? She accepted this logic as sufficient.
Saint Elias Cemetery now sat wedged between a luxury apartment complex and a car dealership whose slogan promised SECOND LIVES FOR USED CARS. The cemetery had not expanded, but the city now pressed against it with bureaucratic persistence, filing down its edges, trimming its wildness. What had once been the northern wall was now a café with polished concrete floors and ironic typography.
She stood outside the gate longer than necessary, as if waiting for the place to refuse her entry on moral grounds. It didn’t. The gate creaked open, indifferent.
Inside, everything felt smaller than it had seemed when she was a child, or perhaps she was simply older and less forgiving of crowding. There were benches now. There were trash cans. There were signs politely requesting visitors not to picnic among the dead.
There were no fig trees.
She walked slowly, attempting to look like a person with legitimate grief. This involved a downturned mouth, a slight hunch, and pauses that suggested memory. Unfortunately, she did not know the names on the stone slabs and her eyes darted too quickly, scanning rather than mourning. She looked like someone casing the place, which was accurate. After ten minutes, she was already tired.
The story, as she had heard it, was precise in the way all unreliable stories are. The fig tree had been “just there.” The wall had been “that one.” The head had been buried “not too deep.” These phrases had sounded comforting when spoken aloud, as if proximity were enough. On the ground, surrounded by concrete and planning permissions, they meant nothing.
She paced the perimeter, counting steps, then recounting them, then abandoning the exercise altogether. The northern edge of the cemetery had been reinforced, beautified, landscaped. Memory had been bulldozed and replanted with decorative shrubs chosen for their inability to grow wild. She knelt once, pretending to tie her shoe, and pressed her hand to the ground. It was compacted, unyielding, disinterested in confession.
The presence of a security camera blinking patiently near the caretaker’s shed made her skin prickle. She straightened and moved on, aware that she had already stayed too long in one place. Her incognito plan—thin to begin with—was unraveling.
She attempted reconnaissance through conversation, which went poorly. An elderly woman sat beside the wall of graves on a folding chair, cracking pistachios and dropping the shells into a plastic bag. Her face was sharp with survival.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Do you remember if there used to be a fig tree here? Near the wall?”
The woman looked at her without surprise, which was worse.
“There were trees,” she said. “Then there were no trees.”
“What kind?”
The woman shrugged. “Green ones.”
“Do you remember one by the northern wall?”
The woman spat a shell onto the ground. “The wall moved,” she said. “Everything moves.”
This felt less like wisdom and more like dismissal, but she thanked her anyway and walked on, the words sticking unpleasantly to her ribs.
She approached the caretaker next, a young man with headphones and a hedge trimmer attacking a hedge that had done nothing wrong.
“Excuse me,” she called.
He removed one earcup, irritation already in place.
“I’m looking for—” She stopped herself. She was not looking for a head. She was not looking for anything. “I was wondering if there used to be a fig tree here. Years ago.”
“Before my time,” he said.
“When was your time?”
He considered this. “After things got organized.”
This was not helpful.
“Do you know who might remember?”
He put the earcup back on, ending the conversation with the authority of someone who had decided she was not worth remembering.
By early afternoon, she had circled the cemetery so many times that her sense of direction collapsed inward. Every grave began to look like an accusation. She took out a small notebook and began sketching the layout, which only succeeded in making her look more suspicious. She measured distances with her steps, then mistrusted her stride. She stood very still in corners, waiting for something—intuition, memory, the ground itself—to reveal what had been erased. Nothing obliged.
She crossed into the café built over the former northern wall and ordered a coffee she didn’t want. The place leaned hard into the theme: skull motifs, Latin phrases misquoted, death softened into décor. She stared at the polished floor, imagining layers beneath it—soil, rubble, roots, secrets—flattened into submission. If the head had ever been there, it was certainly not now. The barista noticed her staring.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, too quickly. “Just thinking.”
“About death?” he offered, hopefully.
“About development,” she said.
He nodded sympathetically, which annoyed her far more than it should have.
As the day thinned, so did her sense of purpose. She realized with dull clarity that even if the fig tree had existed, even if the wall had once been where the story said it was, time had moved the coordinates beyond recovery. The city had absorbed the mistake and reclassified it as progress. She made one last pass along the perimeter, slower now, less hopeful. The cemetery did not yield. It remained stubbornly itself, full of what was meant to stay and emptied of what had not been sanctioned.
She sat on a bench and let the disappointment settle. It was heavier than she had anticipated. She had not expected to succeed—she was not delusional—but she had expected something. A sign. A fragment. A sense that the journey had been more than a poorly funded pilgrimage to a rumor. Instead, she felt foolish. Obvious. Visible in the worst way.
She left as the shadows lengthened, the gate closing behind her with finality.
She flew home two days later with nothing to show for the effort except a notebook full of useless diagrams and the particular exhaustion that comes from having chased something that never intended to be found. She did not tell anyone how thoroughly she had failed. She condensed the story into a joke, then stopped telling it altogether. The head faded back into abstraction. Something that had once seemed solid enough to travel for returned to its rightful state: rumor, anecdote, an interesting aside.
What she never knew—what no one told her, because no one tells these things out loud—was that the head had been found years ago, during renovations that came with permits and safety helmets. It had startled the workers. There had been shouting, a brief argument, and then the quiet intervention of an old priest who had lived beside the cemetery long enough to recognize when something did not belong to the ground anymore.
He took it home in a biscuit tin. It sat now on a shelf in a small, dim house behind the church, between jars of nails and mismatched keys. Wrapped in linen. Undisturbed. Occasionally dusted. Not revered, not displayed, merely accommodated. It was neither lost nor found, only relocated into obscurity with intention.
In the evenings, the priest passed it on his way to make tea. Sometimes he forgot it was there. Sometimes he remembered and nodded, as one does to a difficult but familiar presence.
The fig tree was long gone. The wall had moved. The story persisted, detached from its object, wandering until it found someone willing to cross oceans for it.
And the head remained exactly where it was, waiting for no one, while the woman who had gone looking carried home the heavier burden: the certainty that some searches end not with revelation, but with the quiet humiliation of having believed there was still something left to unearth.
