Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

Her parents try to grant her wish, but all the doctors say no. The specialists, the plastic surgeons, even the celebrity doctors — they all say no. “No, no, no,” they chant in unison, a Hippocratic chorus. Soon the naysayers crowd into her dreams. They stand strung together, identical and frowning and folded arms, paper-doll doctors.

Four . Cassie has blind spots, too. When she gets home from school one day, Cassie’s aunt and her mother are sitting in the living room waiting for her. Her mother is smiling, and her aunt is frowning. There is a strange man with her father in the kitchen, and he is a doctor who has heard all about Cassie and has volunteered to make her pretty.

He’ll do it for free, Cassie’s mother says, holding out her arms to her ugly little girl. Cassie’s heart explodes like trumpets, like fireworks and streamers. She’s going to be beautiful. It suddenly seems okay that she’ll die, now. It suddenly seems like a natural price to pay. She will be a flower, yes, a moonbeam, yes, shining briefly but bright — a silvery, shimmery memory forever.

Oh, child, says her aunt. I wish you wouldn’t. Everyone loves you now. What do you need prettiness for?

Cassie says nothing. She knows she can’t possibly explain. How the love people give you when you’re ugly just isn’t the same.

Oh, hush, says Cassie’s mother. She holds Cassie to her, while her daughter cries without knowing she’s crying. Her face is even uglier with the redness and the squinty eyes and tear tracks. Cassie’s mother tries not to look. She was the Caton County Corn Festival Queen once, and she’s still the prettiest cashier at the Safeway. Prettier than most of the other girls twenty years younger. Oh, Babydoll, won’t it be nice, she murmurs into her daughter’s mousy hair. Won’t it be nice.

The doctor is young and good-looking, with long slender hands that will work magic on Cassie. The doctor has heard from another doctor that Cassie is going to die, and nobody exactly disabuses him of that notion. Everyone in Cassie’s family believes at least a little in her Sight.

The doctor says it will take six months, and does she have that long? Cassie thinks about it, and it feels right to her. So she says yes, and the family echoes her. Yes.

Then he rolls up his metaphorical sleeves, and Cassie rolls up hers, and they get to work. He breaks her nose, puts in a chin implant, performs eyelid lifts, pins back her ears, plumps her lips up with injections, liposuctions her thighs, and gives her breast implants. It is all very painful, but Cassie has a mantra, though she doesn’t know that word. I will be a moonflower, she says, over and over, when the pain gets so bad she feels she might black out. I will be a moonflower. I will.

Five . Cassie is a little in love with her doctor. This is one of her blind spots. He tells her that he will throw her a party when the bandages come off, just like Cinderella. She tries to tell him Cinderella was always pretty, but he cuts her off and smiles wider. You’ll be the belle of the ball, he says.

No one has ever checked the doctor’s credentials. He just showed up on Cassie’s doorstep, and the family has attributed it to Providence. If anyone had checked, they would have noticed he was no longer allowed to practice medicine. If anyone had checked, they might have seen some scary things.

Six . Cassie has always disliked mirrors. Tonight, though, she is almost dizzy at the thought of what they might reveal. Tonight, the bandages come off. And Cassie gets a haircut and highlights and her teeth whitened and even a pedicure and a manicure, and the doctor pays for it all. Tonight is the night Cassie will be reborn, briefly, before she dies. A phoenix in reverse.

Cassie puts on the dress first. It’s a new silver lace froth, long and grown up, and the heels are pale pearl. She is leaving the mirror for last. She is terrified of still being ugly. The doctor’s nice blue eyes widen in appreciation. You look like a beautiful fairy princess, he says. Cassie snorts — she’s not a fool — but then she realizes, she might. She might be that lovely now. The thought makes her tingle and light up from head to toe, like fireflies are dancing all over her skin.

The doctor puts his hands on her bare shoulders and gently spins her around, until she’s facing the full-length mirror. And then Cassie forgets all about dying, forgets about her fears and her family and everything but the floating girl before her in the glass. That’s me, she whispers, and the doctor laughs. You’re my very finest creation, he says. My Galatea.

He leads Cassie into the backyard, tells her the guests will be arriving soon. Will you dance with me first? he asks, and though she’s never danced before, she knows she can. She’s not afraid. Not even when the doctor puts his arm around her waist, and her breath catches. She ignores the strange warmth in her blood and concentrates on stepping in the right places. She’s so beautiful, she realizes, is it any wonder he would want to dance with her?

And as they dance he starts to sing to her, softly, Oh, you must have been a beautiful baby, you must have been a wonderful child. .

Cassie smiles to think of her own history rewritten. She looks down, shy in her new skin now, and sees her pearl shoes sink into a green patch of grass, edged by pink and purple flowers. Big flowers. Her vision goes black for a moment, then as her sight ebbs back in waves she looks up, really looks, right into the doctor’s nice blue eyes. They have gone soft, unfocused, pupils wide, and she sees her new pretty face reflected in the empty blackness.

And she doesn’t See it but she sees it just the same: her mother weeping prettily beside a casket with pink and beige insides, her aunt’s head bent in sad disapproval. Her cousins shifting, uneasy at the funeral, uncomfortable and bored in stiff black suits and ties. Her class, politely shuffling by at the wake, puzzled by what they suppose are the wonders of mortuary makeup. She looks better dead, an unkind classmate will whisper, and Cassie’s father will clench his fists and plant his huge, useless bulk on the front pew because what else, whatever else can he do?

But now she twists away, she tries to run, shedding one shoe; but the doctor catches her hard by the wrist and throws her to the ground. Please don’t hurt me, she says, but she knows he will hurt her, hurt her so badly she will never get up again. She’s been resigned to her death, but now that she knows how she’ll die it seems wrong, it seems bad and unfair and a cheat. And so she cries for the beautiful little girl she had living inside of her all along, like a wood spirit trapped in a tree.

Seven . Cassie can no longer See, and she sobs and sobs as the man kneels stiffly down beside her to whisper the rest of his song in her pinned-back ear. You must have been a beautiful bay-ay-bee , he sings softly, his fingers long and slender and working fast. She opens. She closes. She is a single flower, born and then gone under the silver strands of moonlight.

Sandbags rim the mouth of the trench, swarmed by tangles of barbed wire. The sentries lie here and there with their periscopes, improving their loopholes, bolstered by the approach of dawn. You climb the fire steps and look through the early morning mists, silvering the white and chalky soil. The dreams of the dead seem to swim through the shadows of No Man’s Land, just past what you can see. There is almost nothing to mark the horizon: farms, churches, landmarks — even the ruins have been ruined, pounded into oblivion by the constant shelling. One small cottage is all that remains of the broken village past the field, just bits of plaster and a wall.