Paper Tigers (4 page)

The sensation faded from her fingertips as soon as her mother left the house. Alison unpacked the bags, slamming both the freezer and cabinet doors. Then she stalked back into the living room and gathered the photo albums. Halfway into the dining room, her sock slipped on the wood. She let out a shout and lost her grip on the albums. They cascaded to the floor with a rattle-thud of old paper and heavy covers. She grabbed for something, for anything, her body jerking forward like a ballerina with lead feet attempting a pirouette. The heel of her foot came down on the corner of an album, sending it across the floor in a slow spiral. She cried out, and knees buckled. The right landed atop a cushion of photos and thick paper; the left slammed into the hard wood, and all the air rushed out with a loud gasp. Both palms struck the closest album with a dull thump.

Breathing heavy, she held still, eyes closed, while the hurt in her knee sang a lullaby of pain. Once it subsided to a soft hum, she lifted her head. George's photo album rested beneath her hands, the cover flipped open, his face covered by her palms. She shifted her weight back on her heels and lifted her hands. George's eyes glared from the photo. The intensity of his paper gaze sent a cold chill down her spine.

“Stop looking at me,” she muttered and closed the cover.

The long crack in the worn leather ran sharp beneath the skin of her left hand. The chill returned. She raised her hands to her face,
her fingers trembling. Warmth kissed her skin. Under her right palm, the scars nestled against the ridges of scar tissue on her cheek, a rough map of almost-matching lines. Under her left, the skin a smooth, unmarked canvas, pulled the heat in. She took her hands away, held them out, and tipped them from side to side. Scarred and ruined, as always.

She stood, keeping her weight on her right leg, picked up the albums one by one, and slid them back onto the shelf. Spirals of pale rose filled her. Pink held only a handful of hope in the palm of her hand, hope as light as dandelion fluff and equally as prone to shifts in the wind. She was as fragile as spun glass, and battered and chipped at the edges. The others banished her to the far corners of Alison's mind and did their best to keep her there.

When Alison's skin turned to nothing again, she hooked her finger around the spine of George's album and carried it with both hands as she limped into the kitchen.

The pink swirled deeper when she set it on the counter.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, a little voice buried deep within—neither distinctly Red nor Yellow, but a melding, not a blending, of the two—said, but the pink swallowed it up.

Her hands didn't shake. In slow motion, she spread her fingers wide and lowered them onto George's picture, breathing slow and easy while the second-hand on the wall clock tick-tick-ticked away the time.

“Please,” she said, her voice a rasp of sandpaper.

The clock ticked. A car raced down the alley, prompting a slew of barking from several dogs. Alison leaned her hips against the counter and flexed her left knee. The ache in the joint was too big to ignore, but too small to cause worry.

Stupid. This was so stupid. She flipped the cover shut, and left it on the counter.

CHAPTER 5

When Alison unlatched her door for the grocery deliveryman, an unfamiliar face stared at hers. Chubby cheeks instead of sharp cheekbones, lank hair instead of a bald head. His eyes widened. She shook her hair forward, covering as much of her face as possible, and fought to keep her hands by her sides.

“Where's Sam?” she asked, holding the door halfway open.

“He has the day off.”

“Will he be back next week?”

“They changed our schedules around, so I'll be the one delivering to you. Least until they change it again. Can I bring these bags in?”

Alison nodded and stepped out of the way, wincing at the stiffness in her knee, and crossed her arms over her chest. He left the first set of bags on the floor next to the coffee table, and went back out for more.

When he returned, he added the bags to the pile, and handed her the delivery form. His gaze lingered on her face as she scrawled her name. She thrust the paper toward him, turning her right side away.

“I'm Tyler, by the way. Were you in a fire?”

“Thank you for carrying all the bags inside,” Alison said. Each word tasted like gravel in her mouth.

“My sister was, too. It took her a long time before she could leave the house, but once she did, it got easier. Just saying,” he said.

As soon as he was gone, she shut the door hard enough to send an echo through the room, but his words persisted.

“It got easier.”

Sam never said anything but hello and goodbye. Sam never asked questions or offered advice. Tyler was wrong.

It didn't get easier. Not for her.

She put her head in her hands and grimaced. She should've met his eyes. She should've at least tried instead of cowering like a kicked puppy. How was she ever going to move forward if she didn't keep taking steps, even if they hurt? It wouldn't be easy, she knew that, so why in the hell didn't she try harder? Next time, she'd look him in the eyes. She would.

She held the words tight, hoping she'd be strong enough to keep their promise.

The last of the groceries put away, Alison sat down with her laptop. Her fingers pecked at the keyboard and black text filled the screen, each ugly phrase a nail from her casket of living death. She lifted her hands from the keyboard with a heavy sigh and flexed her fingers. Tiny cramping pains stabbed her from the inside out, her muscles twitched, and her fingers reflexively curled inward. Before the fire, she'd kept all her poetry in notebooks; after, she'd torn them all up, hating the inherent shape of her words even more than the careful, neat handwriting.

Maybe one day she'd write out all the rage and the pity and find some peace. She skimmed the page.

Or maybe not.

She hit delete until the cursor ate all the words away. Inside, a cold ache twisted, a strange, trembling hurt without the black and grey of real pain in its depths.

She opened a browser and scanned the job listings. She suspected many of the work from home options were scams but found a few that appeared legitimate. None of the jobs meant anything, though.
The world didn't need another telemarketer and the job she wanted, she couldn't have. Not now. She could finish the three semesters needed to get her degree online, but becoming a teacher was a once-was dream. She'd send the children screaming out into the hall and plague their nightmares. Or she'd be the teacher whose name children dreaded seeing on their schedule. She doubted she could find a school that would hire her anyway, even with her two years of experience as a teacher's assistant.

Miss Reese, Miss Reese, come see what I made! Come see!

She curled in a ball on the sofa, her hands tucked under her good cheek. When tears slipped from her left eye, she made no move to wipe them away, too lost in the ebb and flow of the storm within.

Her eyelids grew heavy, slipping down over one real eye and the other, crafted from some sort of plastic, as hard as glass, yet more durable. She'd opted for the eye and all the reconstructive surgery when she still thought they held the power to turn her into something else, something close to a normal girl. The doctors never lied, but their ideas of improvement and repair ended up a far cry from her own. She didn't need to be beautiful; she wanted people to be able to look at her without fear or cringes. She wanted to be able to look at herself the same way.

She smelled something sweet and sharp. Not a phantom, but real. And too close by far. She stumbled into the kitchen (Half-asleep? Half-awake? Half-away in a Monstergirl fugue?), her hands limp at her sides.

George's album still lay open on the counter, amid a haze of bluish-grey smoke. She heard laughter, low and enigmatic. Then another laugh, higher-pitched, a feminine trill of blonde perfection. More voices, hushed and distant. Murmurs of conversation. Music in the background.

“She plays beautifully, doesn't she?”

The clink of glasses.

“Not yet, but soon, I think.”

A whisk of rustling skirts.

“Always nice to have a new guest, don't you think?”

Another laugh, George's laugh. Softer, meant for no one else to hear.

“Won't you join us?”

Goosebumps pebbled Alison's left arm as she waved her right hand through the smoke. Tendrils of grey curled around her fingers and thumb. She exhaled and the smoke dispersed, taking away the laughter and the voices. Another plume of smoke crept from the picture—a semi-transparent snake that coiled in a spiral below her palm. Thin wisps encircled first her thumb, then her index and middle fingers. They touched the air where her ring finger and pinkie should be and created gauzy finger shaped outlines in the air.

“We're waiting…”

Alison jerked her hand back. The smoke held the shape, then puffed away. Her mother's words echoed in her mind.
“It doesn't feel right.”

But she reached for the album again, stopping when the shape of her hand fell across the page. A shadow with five fingers. She took several deep breaths. Two of her fingers were gone, gone, gone, burned away to useless char for the snipping.

Her vision clouded with the color of plums. She knew this Muse well. Purple screamed hello when the fire began its heated kiss. Shrieked when the doctors descended with their scalpels and needles. Purple trembled and shook with fear. Purple's voice was never quite as loud as the others, but far more insistent. Purple kept her from meeting eyes, from taking steps, from trying.

Alison grabbed the photo album without pause (no need to linger for shadows and shade, for waiting imaginary voices) and threw it in the trash can.

Gone, gone, gone.

“Photo albums don't talk,” she said, her voice too loud.

Lonely in isolation
—what her make-believe George wrote in his journal. Lonely enough to dream up lives for dead faces, yes, but lonely enough to hear them speak? More proof her isolation wasn't healthy. She knew she was hiding (it wasn't a crime and surely anyone would understand the why), but she wasn't strong enough yet to face the world, and she was too afraid. Knowing was half the battle, though. She simply needed to find the armor to help her withstand the fight.

Before she went to bed, she took the photo album out of the trash can, dusted it off, and put it back on the shelf. An overactive imagination was no reason to throw it away.

PART II

THE TIGER BITES

She sits in her prison alone and the time ticks slowly by. Hours into days into months. She waits for the sun to set then emerges like a moth to wander through her neighborhood cloaked in shadows and scarves. She doesn't see many people, but when she does, she hides her face, turning her chin down.

She walks and walks, remembering what it felt like to walk in the sun, to walk into the stores instead of looking through dark windows. She remembers when she wasn't afraid of people looking, of their eyes, when she could meet their gazes with her own. She remembers forever and ever instead of ugly, love instead of solitude. The memories hurt more than the scars and when she returns to her house, she locks the doors, encases herself in pity and loneliness, and wishes for something more.

How she wishes…