Read Online Bearded Women by Teresa Milbrodt - Free Book Online

her shade. Half of them ask where they can get one before asking her to snap a photo of them standing beside Drogo.
    The cyclops woman keeps her arm tense and ready at her side, wondering and worrying and almost hoping that someone will try to snatch off the shade. Sometimes she puts her hand on the black half-moon lens, her fingers tugging gently, wanting both to greet and prevent revelation. In the end she keeps it on because worrying over the consequences, the might-bes, gives her a headache. She could be invited on all the talk shows, or doctors could cut her up and put parts of her in test tubes.
    She calls home twice a week to tell her parents of her travels.
    Her mother says the touring finger has made the local news and business has increased in the shop. More people are visiting the six eyelashes still safe in the glass case across from the counter. The cyclops woman’s travel-weary body aches less to hear of her successes. Then her father gets on the phone.
    “You need to come home,” he yells so loudly that she has to hold the receiver away from her ear. “How is Drogo? Have you taken off your shade?”
    “No,” she says. “Dad, don’t worry. This is going to save us. I’m keeping the shade on and keeping close track of Drogo.”
    “I just know someone is going to steal him,” says her father.
    “We’ll both be home soon,” she says, “and things will get better. Business will pick up. This is just the sort of attention the shop needs.”
    “People are wondering when the finger will be back,” her father mutters. “Six eyelashes just don’t cut it.”
    In San Francisco people start claiming to have visions after touching Drogo’s finger. They imagine themselves in multiple, having divided like a cell.
    “I could knit a scarf from both ends,” says one elderly woman.
    “I could play golf with myself,” says a middle-aged man.
    “I could hold twice as many ice cream cones,” says a pudgy kid.
    The cyclops woman tilts her head. No one ever had visions in her father’s coffee shop. Maybe they just weren’t attracting the right crowd. But her father never let anyone touch Drogo. Every night the cyclops woman runs a slim finger over Drogo and notices his wrinkles are a little less deep. Drogo is wearing away. The cyclops woman bites her lip and tells herself that she is imagining the change. But she thinks of her own bones, if they will exist like this after she is gone. Even now, what would people see if they touched her? What sorts of visions might erupt after they gazed into her single eye? She wants to know. She doesn’t want to know.
    The cyclops woman holds her breath as patrons whisper prayers to the finger, asking for the wart to be removed from their big toe, the bald patch on their scalp to fill in, their right arm to grow an inch so it’s the same length as their left, their lips to get a little fuller, their hair to be straightened. They peer in wall mirrors or tiny compacts dug from the bottom of purses, wrinkle their noses at their too-freckled, bushy-eyebrowed, eyes-too-close-together faces. The cyclops woman squints at them, those who decree themselves unlovely, and knows that no one would look at them twice in a crowd.
    After four months, two weeks, and five days on the road, the cyclops woman drives home from Orlando, twenty hours straight, because she just wants to get back. She arrives at three in the morning, her body cramped and car-weary. Her father appears at the front door. He has always been a light sleeper, probably heard the car engine. His face glows red in the streetlamp light.
    “I’m home,” she calls from the driveway.
    “I’m sure you were discovered,” he yells. “I’m sure someone knows about you now and they’ll come pounding on our door tomorrow.”
    The cyclops woman walks closer and sees how her father grips the doorframe too tight, how his legs waver, how his eyes focus somewhere over her head.
    She takes off her shade.
    “It finally