Following the deaths of Kiowa, Meggie, and Kathy, we will now consider their corpses:
“He explained to us at various street corners and crossroads, gesturing with his long, thin hands, how he stitched the lips of the dead and cleaned their flesh of its blood. He told us how he washed their faces and their hair, and how he folded their hands over their hearts before sending them down to be cradled by coffin wood in the dark, warm earth.”
The narrators of ‘The Undertaker’s Apprentice’ are a town’s children, the central figures are an undertaker, who exchanges objects with them for symbolic equivalences, and his apprentice, who always carries a large, shiny black, unadorned box. It might or might not be a coffin; all of the symbolisms are kept vague, making them more haunting.
None of the characters have names and their physical descriptions are scant. Hana Gammon is from Cape Town, so I assume the “little town” in which they live is in South Africa, but it is so lightly sketched that it has both a universality and a rootless, mythological unreality. Objects, textures and moments, however, are minutely described, like this dead bird:
“The splinters of bone ground against each other under the skin, which I remember felt so soft and thin that my shaking fingers seemed to pose the danger of unwittingly pulling it apart.”
The result is an unsettling read, the sensation of which lingers.
First published at Granta online, here, 12th May 2023, and anthologised in Ocoee and Other Stories, Paper & Ink, 2023 , both as a result of winning the Africa Region of the 2023 Commonwealth Prize
A Personal Anthology 