The scissors swoop and shear away the top to her dress, and her breasts tumble out and sparkle with blood. The scissors move down her torso and over the isthmus where her legs part, taking pubic hair with them before finally scything the dress in two. The scissors do it all without guidance, by their own volition. She stands then, boring into the mirror, that pitiless arbiter.
She takes it all in.
On a good day, and today began as a luminously good day, she might have seen her body as a deluxe-sized hourglass. Generous breasts. A firm neck sloping into a slight face mottled with, but not distorted by, rosy freckles that peppered the bridge of her nose and her upper cheeks. Conspicuous eyebrows several shades darker than her dark red hair, crowning fertile, startlingly green eyes. Even on the bad days, when she is loath to be naked in the shower, she is thankful for her eyes. Sometimes, she can start with them, and let the positive self-regard radiate outward.
But days always shift so quickly. Now, every feature is tilted to its contrary. Now her freckles are a rash. And why are her eyebrows so weirdly dark? And her skin isn’t creamy enough. Not like other redheads. Hers is just, bleh. Flat.
She hounds a few pre-zits with her fingers and squeezes, waiting for a satisfying pop. A release. But the skin just breaks under the scrutiny, wells up with little tears of blood.
She focuses away from her face and probes in the places she wishes her bones were more glaring. Shoulders. Elbows. She hates how her upper arm gums around her elbow like a toothless mouth. She’d kill for a collarbone.
She lifts her sagging breasts to an optimal angle and altitude and, holding them in that impossible position, sucks in her breath until her rib muscles cry out. Then she sighs and lets go, giving them up to gravity. They smack into her upper belly, repulsing her as she watches the ripples in her disturbed pond of flesh.
She follows with her finger the slight, but insistent, trail of hair running from above her navel to just beneath her cleavage. Shaven, it irritates and catches on the inside of shirts, so she tries to leave it alone. The blood loosed by the errant scissors has stained it a bolder red.
Even her eyes are no diversion tonight. Now they’re too pretty to be wasted on her.
Looking at herself magnified, laid bare, bright blood running down her chest, the spirulina green eyeshadow streaks on her cheeks, she sees a once-fabulous layer cake in rot.
Duffy was right. No one wants to eat her.
She decides to call her friend Dallas. He knows persecution intimately. Then she remembers he is taking Connie. Di is there too. They’re all there.
She eyes the telephone cord coiled noose-like.
Mr. Yeager’s voice comes back to her as salve. “My world is safer than it was,” it says.
“My world is safer than it was,” she says. She tries to believe it.
She dredges up that toothless old tenet, “Don’t give them the satisfaction.” But when it comes down to it, they have all the satisfaction in the world. She can’t give it to them, and she can’t take it away. What she wouldn’t mind giving them is the guilt.
The hardest part would be finding the rope. Her house is barren of useful tools. She’d scour the garage and then, if she had to, borrow some from a neighbor. She’d have to put on some clothes. And she’d need a good reason why she needed it, and why it needed to be so thick and sturdy. But when she finally had it, she’d make the knot like she’d practiced on shoelaces, and tie it to her ceiling fan. Then she’d be ready.
She imagines she would not feel her neck snap. Life to death would be a seamless transition. The fan would spin faster and faster until its bolts popped out like tic-tacs against her forehead and its blades sawed through the ceiling, drawing her delicately up through the splintered floorboards of her attic. Everything would be weightless. She would grab boxes of memorabilia, as much as she could fit in her arms, and the fan blades would chew through the attic ceiling and the shingles and she would pass through the roof. The rough furrows in the rope would feel like satin, and the pirouetting fan would carry her like she was nothing and she wouldn’t be a burden and she would comb through her boxes, selecting what she would take with her to Heaven. What pictures to bring?
Her father giving the thumbs up to a cardboard cutout of the Dalai Lama.
Her mother glimpsing her for the first time as a newborn in the nurse’s arms.
A runt Beddy bearhugging the gallon of jelly beans she got for Christmas, tipping from its weight.
The rest she would cast off into the ant cities below. She would sort through her mom’s scorned vinyl, selecting Jeff Beck with Rod Stewart, The Band, Jesus Christ Superstar. If there is a Jesus, and she has ample reason to doubt this, maybe He hasn’t heard it yet. She would play that for Him, and maybe they could drop acid and listen to The White Album.
“Probably too fat to hang from the ceiling fan anyway.” She laughs a raked and mirthless laugh.
There must be some familiar voice to cheer her. Someone to spill to. She picks up the receiver and thinks.