Read Online Bearded Women by Teresa Milbrodt - Free Book Online Page A

worked,” she says. “I have two eyes now. I don’t have to hide.”
    “Really?” he says. For a moment she sees a glow in his vacant stare. Then his eyes dull again.
    “Don’t lie to me,” he says.
    “How do you know I’m lying,” she says, “you can’t see.”
    “Of course I can see you,” says her father. “I’m fine.”
    “Fine,” says the cyclops woman.
    “I don’t want you working at the shop anymore,” he says. “It’s too much of a risk.”
    “Don’t be silly,” says the cyclops woman.
    “You shouldn’t have gone,” he yells, his hand shaking against the doorframe.
    “We have more business, don’t we?” says the cyclops woman.
    Her father marches back inside.
    The cyclops woman goes back to her car, grabs Drogo’s box from the passenger seat, stomps in after her father.
    “He wouldn’t let me tell you he was getting worse,” her mother whispers later. “And he kept telling me he was fine, but then he’d miss the door and bump into a wall.”
    “But I should have been home,” says the cyclops woman, smacking her hand against the kitchen table. “He should have been able to see me just a little longer.”
    “The tour was going so well,” says her mother. “I didn’t want to tell you, didn’t want to upset you. There was nothing you could have done if you had come home. We needed those articles in the papers. We’re doing better now.”
    The cyclops woman grimaces as she watches her father walk down the hallway, his fingertips skimming the wall until they hit the doorframe and he turns into his bedroom.
    In her dream the cyclops woman is beside her father in the coffee shop, removes her shade and has sprouted another eye.
    “It worked,” she says. “Drogo worked.”
    “No, he didn’t,” says her father.
    The cyclops woman holds her shade and knows in the end this miracle didn’t matter. Her father can’t see both her eyes. And now that she has two of them, they are both going blind.
    Before the shop opens in the morning, the cyclops woman rests Drogo’s finger back in its glass case, the creases worn smooth. Cynthia Liss and a few other regulars are standing at the front door, anxious for the shop to open. There will be more customers for a while, but the cyclops woman wonders how long it will last. Will people keep coming when her father is blind? When she is blind? Four months on the road was not enough. But maybe there isn’t anything that would be enough. She thinks of her father at home trying violently to see and knocking into the kitchen table. There is more money in the family bank account and her mother bought her father a new white cane he is refusing to touch. The cyclops woman knows he will use it in time, just as in time he will be less angry with her. She locks Drogo’s glass case and imagines how Cynthia would beam if she knew the cyclops woman was a cyclops woman. She imagines the gifts Cynthia would bring—single contacts, bottles of mascara, eyeshadow in every colour of the rainbow.
    Outside the customers press their fingers against the glass, leave temporary smears the cyclops woman will have to wash off in the evening. Her eye hurts as she squints at them through her shade. The world is blurrier than it was before she left. She will have to remove the black lens eventually. It will not be a choice. Now she is simply prolonging that moment, that revelation. Maybe she will wait until she can no longer see faces.

Snakes
    They are slim and brown and look like dreadlocks. The longest ones trail halfway down my back. I wrap a scarf around the snakes and tie a loose knot to keep them in a ponytail and out of the way, especially when I’m bartending. They can’t be close to the half-empty beer glasses because they’ll get drunk if I let them. When I’m not paying attention they try to sip beer on the sly. The snakes and their tiny primal brains are connected to my instincts, my subconscious, so I can’t always control what they do. They’re