A Mouth Full of Stones — Part One
By Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran
Happy New Story Sunday! This week, we have a mythic masterpiece with roots in all sorts of places by the Canadian science fiction writer, poet, playwright, and folklorist Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran. The art is a detail from a first-century bronze handle attachment in the form of a mask, notable for the traces of copper inlay preserved on the lips…
“Let me see your tongue.”
Lia lifted her head and opened her mouth, tender with the greeting she had just given, as if an insect had carved the words upon her ashen flesh with a stinger. Around her, the other students leaned toward the spectacle, their eyes alight with malice. The teacher gripped Lia’s chin with a long thumb and forefinger, scraped a fingernail across the glossographia on her lips, frowned. “Have you been taught to read the rash in your mouth?”
“No, ma’am.” Lia cringed and slurped at the cobalt runnel of blood she left behind. “Mama says nobody knows what the letters mean.”
“If you can’t read them, and nobody knows what they mean, they aren’t letters.” The teacher jerked her hand away and gestured at Lia with it. “Children, your new classmate is a sick girl from a delusional kindred, and you are not to believe anything she says. Pity her instead. Pity everybody with her…infirmity.” She bent the slender length of her neck down until Lia could smell the disdain in her pheromones, narrowed her lavender eyes, and sank the knife of her rebuke all the way to the bone. “The next time you feel the urge to babble, do us all a favour and swallow it.”
Lia cowered at her desk and did what she was told. When the bright rays of Red Mother Sun called to mind a dead yellow star, and her mouth blistered in a language born under its aegis, Lia bore the sting of it in silence. When the taste of bread told of a grain that grew in the light of that star, she waited for the symbols on her lips to recede. Each time, a soft, black stone coalesced on her quiet tongue, and she swallowed it, the words and memories fading as it slid into her belly and settled there.
Later that day, Lia wept in her mother’s arms.
“Oh, my dear girl. You are not sick, and we are not delusional.” Betuna’s dark hair, redolent of spice, tumbled over Lia’s body like a shelter, a blessing. “You are a writ, a record of the Universe Before, like I am, like your grandmother is, and like my grandmother was before her. It’s a rare gift, but it is a gift; to you, to your teacher, and to everyone, everywhere.” An evening breeze blew across the garden, scattering pollen across the bench where they both sat. Black and grey blossoms turned inward all around them as Red Mother Sun sank below the horizon. “You know this.”
“She doesn’t believe us.” Lia shivered. Her own dark hair was matted against her back, and her dress was damp, and she was tired. They had been cruel, those children counselled to pity, who had pushed her into the creek on the way home. “She said if we can’t read the words on our skins, they’re not real.”
“She doesn’t understand us. Most unwritten don’t, and some are afraid of us, too.” Betuna pulled the wrap from her narrow shoulders and tucked it around her daughter’s. “Your grandmother could read her skin, a little. She was a Writ of the Hands and built the most wonderful things. When she was a girl, like you are now, she would wake from dreams to find blueprints on her palms.”
A nightbird called in the distance; a long, low sound. Lia yawned and spread her fingers wide to stare at her own palm.
“You are a Writ of the Mouth,” Betuna continued, rocking her, “and I expect you’ll be an historian someday, or maybe a storyteller.”
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Dr. Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran holds a B.A. in Celtic Studies, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing, and a PhD in Folklore. Work from her two fiction and poetry collections has been shortlisted for the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and nominated for the Rhysling Award. Recently, her podcast radio drama “The Belt and the Necklace” was produced by the Odyssey Theatre in Ottawa. She’s a member of the American Folklore Society, the International Society for Folk Narrative Research, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, and many other professional societies for folklore scholars and authors. You can find her online at csmaccath.com, folkloreandfiction.com, and linktr.ee/csmaccath.
Copyright © 2025 Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran