"We're here to make money, right?" Shauzia said. Parvana
nodded. "Then let's make money." She grabbed hold of the bone that was sticking out of the ground and pulled. It came out of the dirt as if it were a carrot being pulled up from a garden. Shauzia tossed it on the blanket.

Not willing to let Shauzia get the better of her, Parvana took up her board and started scraping away the soil. The bombs had done much of the work for them. Many bones were barely covered with dirt and were easy to get at.

"Do you think they'd mind us doing this?" Parvana asked.

"Who?"

"The people who are buried here. Do you think they'd mind us digging them up?"

Shauzia leaned on her board. "Depends on the type of people they were. If they were nasty, stingy people, they wouldn't like it. If they were kind and generous people, they wouldn't mind."

"Would you mind?"

Shauzia looked at her, opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again and returned to her digging. Parvana didn't ask her again.

A few minutes later, Parvana unearthed a skull. " Hey, look at this!" She used the board to loosen the ground around it, then dug the rest of it up with her fingers so she wouldn't break it. She held it up to Shauzia as though it were a trophy.

"It's grinning."

"Of course it's grinning. He's glad to be out on the sunshine after being in the dark ground for so long. Aren't you glad, Mr. Skull? She made the skull nod. "See? I told you."

"Prop him up on the gravestone. He'll be our mascot."

Parvana placed him carefully on the broken headstone. "Hel'll be like our boss, watching us to make sure we do it right."

They cleaned out the first grave and moved on to the next, taking Mr. Skull with them. He was joined in a little while by another skull. By the time their blanket was full of bones, there
were five skulls perched in a row, grinning down at the girls.