Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

“I look like Frankenstein,” she said of the stitches.

The doctor snapped off his gloves and smiled. “He’s my favorite monster.”

At Bianca’s request, the doctor let her keep the cyst. He handed her an opaque jar filled with formaldehyde and suggested she not open it. “Dermoid cysts aren’t much to look at,” he said. “Just put the jar on your bookshelf and use it as a bookend.” Bianca nodded and pretended she would. Then she wrote the doctor a check for all the money she had.

That night Bianca slept better than she’d ever slept. She dreamed there was a hole in her head and that a white dove flew into the hole and then the hole closed up like it had never even been there.

In the first week after the surgery, Bianca went around her apartment and opened all the blinds. She lay on her bedroom floor in a square of sunshine and smiled as her skin turned from skim milk to heavy cream. In the second week, Bianca went and stood on the front stoop and waved at passing cars. In the third week, she put on a hat to cover her bandage and walked two blocks to the gas station. She bought Fig Newtons and beer and made small talk with the cashier about the weather. When she returned to her apartment, she went inside to put five beers in the refrigerator, then she promptly came back out with one beer and the cookies. She went into the neighbor’s backyard and sat on one end of the rusted seesaw. She sat there in the yellow, late-winter grass and drank her beer and ate her cookies and looked up at the empty end of the seesaw in the blue sky and was happy.

In the fourth week, Bianca opened the jar in the kitchen sink. She rinsed the cyst under running water and set it out to dry on a tea towel. It looked like a raw chicken breast but darker—maybe a duck breast—and when Bianca cut into it, she could see the red hair she’d assigned Bjorn, plus a row of tiny teeth, a weak attempt at a smile she’d taken away. When she was done looking at it, she put the cyst back in the jar and put the jar back on her bookshelf so it could go back to doing its job.

Bianca ordered a half dozen Royal Verano pears for herself. When they arrived, she held them up to her face in the mirror and compared them to her new forehead. They were like six little twins and she loved them so much that she ate five in one sitting. Afterward, she slept for a long time and dreamed the dream of the dove. When she woke, she went and got the jar from the bookshelf. She opened it in the sink and poured off the formaldehyde and rinsed the cyst as she had before. Then she wrapped it in a tea towel and packed it in the padded Royal Verano crate and drove to her local veterinarian.

“He was born the same day I was,” she told the vet, handing him the crate.

The vet was solemn. “You must be devastated.”

“I don’t know how I feel,” said Bianca.

The doctor took the crate gently. “Give yourself time,” he said.

Bianca said she would. She went back to her apartment and looked at herself in the mirror. She arranged her bangs to hide her stitches, then she turned on her webcam.

When Bianca went to pick up the ashes from the vet, she realized the urn she’d bought was too big. The ashes only filled a small envelope, but Bianca took the envelope home anyway and folded it into the urn and glued the urn’s lid shut. The urn was painted blue and white and featured a girl and a boy at a wishing well. The boy was just standing there while the girl brought up the pail. Bianca tested the urn’s lid to make sure it was secure, then she went to the kitchen and boiled an egg. When it was cool, she placed it on her forehead where the cyst had been. She wrapped a scarf over the egg and around her head, but she wasn’t satisfied with how she looked. She wanted the cyst to be bigger. She wanted her mother to be horrified, more defeated than ever. So, Bianca rummaged through the kitchen until she came across the last Royal Verano pear in the back of the refrigerator. She placed the cold twin against her head and wrapped her head with the scarf. Bianca looked in the mirror and approved.

Later that night, when her parents opened their front door and saw Bianca on the stoop, Bianca’s mother gave an audible gasp. She put her hands over her mouth and shook her head violently.

“Here,” Bianca said, holding out the urn. “I brought you something for your trouble.”

Bianca’s father took the urn. Her mother cried like she had after the twelfth doctor visit, the one where neither Bianca nor the cyst had been deemed problematic.

“We were just going to eat,” her father said. “Won’t you join us for dinner?”

Bianca said she would. She set the urn in the center of the table. They ate in silence while her father stared at his plate and her mother stared at the cyst and Bianca stared at the urn.

When it was time to leave, Bianca put her hand on her forehead and said, “Thank you for dinner, but we really must get going.”

Bianca moved to a new town. She threw out her webcam and thongs and push-up bras and grew out her bangs. She let her skin turn from white to pink to tan. She began a new career as a life coach and told everyone the same thing no matter what their problem was: that they felt guilty about being alive and needed to write letters to the dead.

On dates, over steak and wine, or duck breast and beer, she always told the men the same thing: that she didn’t want children because she’d already lost one. She would describe the seesaw and the accident and the death. She would describe the cremation—how few ashes there were, because the child had been so small—and she would describe the blue-and-white urn, how she’d chosen it, how the girl painted on it pulled the bucket up from the well while the boy just stood there. Men never asked Bianca out again, but she didn’t care. She always sent a crate of Royal Verano pears to thank them for their time. She wasn’t looking for love. She just wanted to tell the story, her story, over and over again. It was a story that grew with each telling, that developed with each new detail. Sentence by sentence, cell by cell, the story emerged and enlarged. Until it was larger than Bianca. Larger than life.

I am indebted to a host of midwives who helped deliver this beast baby of a book. Endless thanks to the brilliant Sarabande team of Sarah Gorham, Jeffrey Skinner, Kristen Renee Miller, Emma Aprile, Joanna Englert, Danika Isdahl, Alban Fischer, Natalie Wollenzien, and Lacey Trautwein; the Spalding MFA gurus Sena Jeter Naslund, Kathleen Driskell, Lynnell Edwards, Karen Mann, Katy Yocom, Ellyn Lichvar, and Jason Hill; my many beloved teachers, particularly Penny Lastinger, Ann Eames, Geoff Marchant, Bill Rosenfeld, Margaret Price, Leslie Daniels, Robin Lippincott, Pete Duval, Neela Vaswani, and Rachel Harper; and the kind people and publications who/that took an early chance on me, notably Michelle Dozois, Kurt Luchs, Lauren Passell, Greg Olear, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New Limestone Review, Grist , and The Pinch .

Above all else, I am grateful for the love and support of my family and friends, especially my parents Ginger and Dan, my sister Liz, my bestie Tori, my literary life raft Donna Gay, my writing buds Amanda Burr Xido, Clint, and Natalie, my indispensable Lexington and Lakeville women, my late loved ones, my gracious God in Her many forms (new plotlines and old trees, to name the top two), and—most of all—Robbie, George, and Mark.

The stories in this collection were previously published by the following literary magazines:

Moon City Review , “The Nest”

The Southeast Review , “Sunday” (originally titled “Disarmed”)