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Authors: Damien Angelica Walters

Paper Tigers (5 page)

BOOK: Paper Tigers
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CHAPTER 6

Alison sat in the examination room, wrapped in a soft gown, with her hands folded in her lap. The door swung open and Dr. Simon came in, all white coat and perfect teeth. Her stomach twisted. She put on her careful smile.

“Hello, hello,” he said, his voice bouncing off the walls and ceiling. “How are we today?”

“Fine.”

“Fine is not as good as good, but better than bad, I guess. Have you had any problems or abnormal discomfort? Noticed any tightening or more constricted movements?”

Alison shook her head and stared over Dr. Simon's shoulder. A long, thin crack in the wall marred the yellow with a jagged line of white. He parted the back of her robe, tracing his fingers along her skin; when his hands traveled from scars to real flesh, Alison twitched away with a hiss.

“Sorry, my hands are cold,” he said. “Now bend forward slightly and lift your arm please.”

The top of the crack, an exclamation point of drywall stress, almost met the ceiling; the bottom disappeared behind a small clock with a round face and a red second hand moving with tiny, staccato ticks.

“Mmm-hmm, okay, you can drop your arm.”

His shoes made tiny squeaks on the tiled floor as he rounded the table, blocking her view of the clock and the wall crack. She closed her eyes when he folded down the robe. Fingers poked and prodded,
moving across with even, gentle pressure—her upper arm, her shoulder, collarbone, then down, down where her body curved in instead of out, where she appeared neither feminine nor masculine, but a thing. Alison turned her head to the side.

“Lift your arm again, please,” Dr. Simon said. He lowered her arm. Placed his hand under her chin, turning her face in his direction. “Any problems with the eye?”

“Not at all.”

“Good, good.” He stroked his hand along her jawline. “I'm noticing some tightening here. Can you open your mouth?”

The skin stretched, like taffy at the tearing point.

“A little more. Have you had any problems?”

“No.”

“Hmmm.” His fingers rubbed back and forth. “I want to keep an eye on this. Please call me right away if you notice any change at all, no matter how minor, to your facial movements, okay?”

“I will.”

“Okay. Even if you don't notice anything, I'd like you to come back in a month, as well, so I can take a look.”

“A month? Do you think—”

“Yes, a month.”

Alison nodded and stared down at her hands.

“Okay, jump down and walk for me.”

Alison limped across the room, then back to the table. Dr. Simon nodded. “Good.” When Alison sat back down, he linked his fingers together and rested them on his abdomen. “I ran into Dr. Rothmann the other day. He said you're not seeing him anymore?”

Alison gripped the gown in both hands. “No, I'm not.”

Dr. Simon leaned back against the sink counter. “Alison, I'll be blunt. I'm not sure if that's a wise decision. With injuries such as yours, it helps to have someone like Dr. Rothmann. Now, if you'd like to see someone else, I can give you a referral. Dr. Rothmann is
considered one of the best when it comes to helping burn patients, but there are several others I know and trust to give the same level of care.”

Alison focused her eyes on the lines across his forehead—three of them, with an even deeper furrow between his brows.

“With injuries such as yours.”

Her fingers clenched even tighter. Dr. Rothmann, he of the bushy eyebrows and calm, gentle voice, wore the same expression when she'd told him she intended to stop the sessions, but the fault didn't belong to her.
He
broached the topic she told him she didn't want to discuss. From the beginning, she'd been clear, and he said he understood, but he lied. He lied and brought it up anyway when he decided it was time to discuss it, forcing her to think about it for one brief moment before she shoved it back down in the deepest, darkest part under the scars.

“Face it, acknowledge it, and move past,” he said. But he didn't see the look. The revulsion. He didn't see
any
of it, but most important, he didn't follow the rule, the simple rule. She didn't need help dealing with an old ghost; she needed help figuring out how to live.

“That would be fine,” she said to Dr. Simon, giving him the careful smile again; when he turned around for his pad and pen, she let the smile go.

“I also wanted to ask if you've given any more thought to the surgery we talked about,” he said, over his shoulder. “I do think we can improve the appearance of the facial scarring.”

“No. I mean, yes, I've thought about it. I'm not interested.”

He turned back around and handed her the paper, meeting and holding her gaze.

“Okay,” he finally said. “I'll respect your decision. You can go ahead and get dressed.”

After he left the room, Alison sat with her arms wrapped around her body. Reconstruction meant scalpels, stitches, stretching skin,
and
pain
with no guarantee of improvement, and what if something went wrong and they made her worse? She shuddered. They couldn't make her whole again no matter how many times they tried. The hope wasn't worth the suffering.

On her way out, she crumpled the list of psychologists penned in Dr. Simon's looping scrawl and threw it in the trashcan below a mound of paper towels. They couldn't help her. Only she could do that.

Arms crossed over her chest, she huddled in the back corner of the hospital shuttle van. Two women with grey, cotton candy hair and tissue paper skin spoke in quiet tones several rows ahead. The van bounced over potholes, its wheels thrumming not far beneath Alison's feet, a hypnotic sound lulling her into a hazy half-awake state.

It slowed down for a light and a bright yellow school bus stopped alongside it. Alison turned her face away from the window and sank down even further in her seat. Even through the windows, she heard laughter, but it was safe, not mocking. She closed her eyes as a memory rushed in. Standing at the edge of the playground while the class ran around. Seeing Olivia struggling to climb the jungle gym. Offering to help. Then biting back a laugh as Olivia stomped one foot and said, “No, Miss Reese, I can do it myself.” Olivia hadn't done it that day, or the next, or the next, and she'd rebuffed every offer of help. Even a first grader knew that sometimes no one else could help you find your way.

When the van arrived at her house, Alison exited quickly, avoiding the driver's eyes. Once inside, she stripped off her scarf, sunglasses, gloves, and coat and fetched George's photo album before she sat down on the sofa with a soft sigh. She stretched out her hand, nodding at the truth in the shadow—three fingers and a hand with an odd, sloping edge.

With the edge of the paper held between the tip of her index finger and thumb, she flipped the page back to the inscription and traced her fingers over the letters.

“Paper tiger, paper tiger, swallow me whole,” she said, her voice a soft near-whisper.

Her vision blurred. The ink smudges turned into amorphous blobs of violet. High-pitched music notes trilled, like the tinny sound from a child's wind-up jewelry box. Phantom music. Smoke music. Dusty music motes floating in the air, bereft of a sunbeam.

Her shoulders slumped. The tune played on and on, soft and sweet. A spinning ballerina, moving round and round. And in between the notes, a soft murmur of voices. Children's voices—a nursery rhyme.

“One, two, three, tigers at a time.”

Little girls twirling, their pink-yellow-white-lavender skirts flying up and out, all ruffles and eyelet.

“Four, five, six, tigers in a line.”

Chubby hands linked together and the children sang and laughed and sang.

“Seven, eight nine, stripes in the night.”

Hair like spun silk, gold and dark. Cookies and talcum powder.

“And when it's ten, the tigers bite!”

Laughter, laughter. Rising.

Alison turned the page, her hand a heavy weight, and the laughter slipped back into the page. George's eyes stared at hers, good humor in the dark depths. A teasing sort of humor. A
feline
sort of humor. She blinked. Once. Twice. The music shifted and changed. Piano notes replaced jewel-box. A mournful song of love and loss and empty rooms. Tree branches rattled against glass windowpanes; the sound of bones tap-tap-tapping “let us in.”

“Let me in,” Alison said.

The notes paused.

“Let me in and make me whole.”

The notes resumed, laced with melancholy. They slipped in between her thoughts and hovered in her ears. She held out her right hand, covered George's face with her palm, and closed her eyes. The song vibrated through her bones and prickled her skin.

Voices again. Speaking, not singing. Adult voices engaged in quiet conversation, their words slurred at the edges. Glasses clinked together. Footsteps. Sturdy men's shoes on a dark wood floor, their soles clicking in-between the music notes. Pins and needles exploded into life beneath her skin. The warmth traced spirals in the places where fingerprints used to hold their shape. The music swelled to a crescendo, all the notes blending one into another. Her hand lifted, pushed by the secret heat, and then dropped back down.

A cool breeze wafted over her fingertips and palm, and rough callused fingers curled around her own, stroking and tugging.

“Come in,” a husky voice said.

The hand tugged harder, pulling her in? Down? A thumb stroked her palm, a soft, tiny arc of movement. The edge of a fingernail scraped against the side of her pinkie finger.

She opened her eyes.

Her hand no longer rested on George's photo. Her hand no longer rested on anything, but in. Inside the photo. Inside the album. In with the laughter and the music and the nursery rhymes. Inside with a hand wrapped round her fingers. She yelped, jerked back her arm, but neither the album nor her hand budged. Her skin held no indentations. It sat atop the photo as though severed at the wrist and glued to the surface of the paper.

She wiggled her fingers—five fingers, not three, magicked into existence in a paper world. The hand around hers tightened, pulled, and the album swallowed another inch of her arm.

“No, oh no,” she said.

Her forearm slipped in even more; she yanked as hard as she could and the unseen fingers let go. Her arm came up and out of the
album, away from the paper, into the real. As she fell back against the sofa cushions, her teeth snapped together with an audible click. A narrow band of smoke rose in the air. Every bit of moisture in her mouth vanished.

With a wordless shout, she frantically waved her hands to disperse the smoke, seized the album with both hands and hurled it across the room, severing the music in mid-note. The album hit the wall with a dull thud and a ruffle of pages, and fell, landing with the cover and pages open. She squeezed her eyes shut tight. A single note, one piano key pressed down for a final goodbye, so long, sorry we have to go, broke free from the paper. She covered her ears.

“Stop. Just go away. You aren't real.”

A thin trail of low laughter…

She stumbled from the sofa, her socks slipping on the wood floor as she gave the album a wide berth, and lurched up the stairs to her bedroom. Slammed the door behind her and sank down to the floor with her back pressed against the wood and her face in her hands.

Had it been a hallucination or a daydream? A ghost in the pages? A
tiger
in the pages to swallow her whole?

She dropped her hands onto her thighs. The scars on her right arm ran down in stripes of pink and red—too pale to be normal skin, all the way down to three inches above the lines on her wrist. And below? Healthy skin. Whole skin, with not a scar in sight. Delicate blue veins peeked through the skin, lines crossed her palm, and prints whorled and looped on her fingertips, visible even in the dim light. She turned her hand (still two fingers short of normal) over. Her fingernails gleamed pink.

Something is wrong. Something so very wrong.

She flipped her hand again and traced the lines on her palm. Then she tightened her fist. The flesh didn't pull, like ill-sewn fabric, but gave and flexed. A skin glove of perfect.

“What could possibly be wrong with this?” she said.

She splayed her fingers. The fragile bones rose and fell under the thin veil of skin.

How was this even possible?

She smiled. It didn't matter how. It didn't matter at all.

A tiny patch of skin near the base of her thumb pebbled and turned dusky. Then another, on the back of her wrist. And below the fingernail on her index finger. More spots appeared, polka-dots of melted wax, expanding and replacing the healthy and whole with ugly.

“Please, no.”

Her fingers curved, forced into arcs by the tightening skin. On her palm, the scar tissue swallowed the lines, recreating familiar patterns. The changing skin made its way up her arm, a dreadful film running backward to ruin. On her forearm, pink edges rose like strips of ragged leather and joined together with the old, leaving no trace of a seam. She moaned low in her throat.

BOOK: Paper Tigers
8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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