I should hate my reflection. I stand too often in the mirror, admiring my nose, a prosthetic. I’m doing that now. And it’s not recognizable as a nose. It’s my design. I have no cartilage. It’s exposed, like a crater. Lined with circuitry. In the center by the nasal bone is a single colored light. Cool blue. It has a soft glow that’s interrupted by an occasional flicker. I’m not sure why it does that. Sometimes the light flickers a few times in a row, kind of rhythmically, like a coded message. I’m not sure why. I reach a finger inside the cavity and touch the bulb. It’s small and hot. I think of how much pain I would be in if I snapped it off. I’d probably scream. After a while I leave the mirror and go to Penny’s bedroom. The door is locked. I lean against it, thinking I should knock, but I just stand there. Listening. I’m not sure what for. She’s probably still asleep. I think of calling her name, Penny! in a cool tone. To get her attention. Or maybe I whisper it, softly, with that tenderness I know mothers to have. Penny. She might like that. But I don’t say anything. I walk past the door, thinking, I’ll make enough noise fixing breakfast to wake her up. Penny will come out then. She’ll be hungry. And then we’ll eat. In the kitchen I prepare toast and poached eggs. It’s the only recipe I know. Enough for two. I keep a jar of strawberry preserves at the table as I eat. Penny doesn’t come out of her room. It’s difficult spreading the jam on the toast. I fumble with the knife, jab it awkwardly into the jar’s mouth. I spread the jam unevenly, so that the toast is dry where it shouldn’t be, and I need half a glass of almond milk to wash it down. After finishing two plates I pick at the black crust on the table and consider a third serving. I’m used to living alone. My apartment is cold and mostly empty -- a knot of open white rooms. I have very little furniture. In the living room I keep a small, blue couch stained with alcohol. Across from it, built into the wall, is a television, a long silver monitor which I watch only when I want to drink. And I drink often. Always on the long nights, in the rainy season when there are storms. The voices from the monitor overpower the drum of the thunder. Yes. Those are the nights when I lay on the couch and rest half-empty glasses of bourbon on my stomach. Penny arrived two weeks ago, in the evening. She knocked hard on my door and when I saw her, I stared. I didn’t know what to do. She didn’t say anything. I stood with my hand on the doorknob. The dim electric light in the hallway struck Penny darkly. It colored her a dirty green shade that made her skin look blacker than it was. She wore a navy blue pea jacket and pants that hugged her thighs. She kept her hands at her sides. On two of her fingers she wore small, silver caps. Those two fingers were shorter than they should have been, and I knew the reason why. They were severed at the joint. Under the silver caps was patchwork skin grafted over fingerbone. I wanted to take her hand and examine the damage but I couldn’t. It was too dark in the threshold. I fidgeted. Penny didn’t smile. She just stared a little past me, into the apartment. “Are you gonna let me in?” she asked finally. As she said this she looked at my face. When I didn’t respond she added, “Mom,” and pushed her way past me into the apartment. She left a suitcase behind on the doormat, in the dark light. I brought it in. I expected Penny. She called an hour before she arrived at the door, but I hadn’t answered. I watched the phone ring in the kitchen as I sank into the couch. I couldn’t think of a reason to talk to her. She knew where I lived. What was there to say? I kept my hands tucked under the blue cushion. Penny stood in the living room by my stained sofa. She didn’t move, only turned her head to look here and there. It struck me that it was her first time inside the apartment. She lives with her father someplace across the country, in a town I can’t recall the name of. In the suburbs. From the images I’ve seen, I only remember that it’s bright, and small, and that there are many short houses in culs de sac. I live in a dark city with many long boulevards and people whom I don’t know. Penny kneeled by the couch and picked up the small glass and whiskey bottle I left by the leg. It wasn’t raining but I had been drinking. Without so much as a glance at me, Penny unscrewed the cap off the bottle and took a long drink. I felt that I should say something, but all I could do was make a vague nervous noise, like a groan. She looked at me, then asked what room she was staying in. I picked up her suitcase and started down a hallway. I have no guest room. I left Penny’s suitcase in my workshop, which I had managed to clean up enough to fit a small cot against the window. There wasn’t much of a view. A tall neon portrait of a small girl in a dress and a teacup pig glowed across the alley. Hard pink and blue lights filtered in through the blinds, coloring the white bedsheets. Penny sat on the mattress, looking unimpressed. I gave her a slight smile as I stood awkwardly by her suitcase. Tall and black. She stretched her lips into a strange grin and turned to look out the window. I left her there. I sweep the black crust of the toast to the center of the plate and then sink far into my chair. The food is cold. I think I hear something open and I sit very still, but nothing comes. In the chair next to me I have a dirty handheld monitor. It’s covered in dust and there are oil stains on the back cover. The screen is like a face in the chair, black and unattentive. I pick it up and turn it on. It boots up, groans with white noise. The screen flashes twice. Soon on the display there are procedures. Notes and descriptions of surgeries. I open a file and find diagrams of fingers, long and metal. There’s one I like that’s a perfect white alloy, sleek and expensive. I fix people. I have been a surgeon for twenty-seven years, and a private practitioner for ten. I work out of my home, specifically from my workshop, the room I offered Penny. It’s there that I design prosthetics and draft in ink all of the ideas I have for bodies. I lost my nose to disease. I don’t remember the name of the illness, which disturbs people. I prefer the one, or lack of one, that I have now, and don’t like to dwell on old appearances. It’s best to forget. I close the white alloy diagram and stare at the screen, gripping the monitor tightly. Penny hasn’t made her choice. She hasn’t spent much time deciding at all. It’s been two weeks and all that she’s done is rest. We talk irregularly, and she’s often in her bed. Most afternoons, I work at my desk while she sits on the mattress. She stares at the lights outside, the girl and the pig, which are on even during the day. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the city dark. She stares and I work, not really making preparations for her surgery but researching for other projects, other patients I’ve not yet scheduled for appointments. Sometimes I sketch idly. On occasion Penny has questions, about my designs, about my process. They’re simple inquiries, but something in her voice when she asks them tells me they’re genuine. I try to explain. I tell her they’re my bodies. I have many prosthetics for which I have drafted sketches, in ink, that I transfer and keep compiled in a database. These are viewable on the handheld. Every prosthetic has a set. For every white alloy arm I have a leg, and then a nose, an ear, a neck. All the way until I have a complete composition. A new person. Penny nods at my answers, plays with the silver caps on her fingers. Watches the lights. Turning it off, I place the monitor by a plate of cold eggs. I leave the table, doing nothing with the food besides setting a paper towel over the toast and eggs. On the kitchen counter I have a cigarette. It’s like a long, silver finger. Electric. I take it with me as I leave to go outside, out onto the fire escape, which is accessible through a small, crooked window at the end of the hallway. When I pass by Penny’s room, I don’t hear anything. The fire escape is slick and narrow, too close to the next building over. Down one way I can see the street. A busy avenue. People’s heads bob in and out of view -- a procession of dark heads in scarves. The city is never completely dark. It’s flooded with neon. There are small lights in the walls of my apartment and those of the building across from me. I can see into the complex without having to strain too hard. A two-story smart home. Its outside is all brick and tar but I imagine the inside to be sleek and precious. New. There’s two bold figures in the window. They stand close together but don’t touch. I smoke and watch them, sitting cross-legged on the escape. The people are still. I blow at them. Cold,white tongues of vapor disappear in the negative space between our complexes. I wonder if they see me. The lights on the building are small -- blue and white neon fixtures planted into the brick. They shine with a modest intensity. Unblinking. Every time I come out I try to see something profound in the arrangement. I fail. I’ve never been good at that. The fixtures closest to the ground are shattered. The bulbs cascade down the wall until they reach the alleyway pavement, which is like a long black river below everything. I smoke some more and then bite the cigarette hard with my teeth. Long threads of smoke filter out of my prosthetic. The people in the window continue to stand. Closer together now, maybe. I’d looked away, but not for long. They’re maybe touching. They look like one long, flat limb in the window frame. They’re stark black and slender. The cluster of lights catch them in the air and keep them suspended. They’re a weird torso in the brick levitated by a cloud of neon, high over asphalt. Eventually the light in the room goes out. I get up after. As I creep in through the window I hear a noise far down the hallway. Penny’s door is open. I walk past it, stopping for a second to peer inside. Her bed is undone and the blinds are pulled open so that the pink light across the street floods the room. My work desk is a tragedy, messy with loose sheets of paper and bolts, screws, dummy limbs. The noise becomes clearer the closer I get to the kitchen. I hear the clatter of a fork against a plate. Some clinking glass. “Morning, mom.” I hear as I enter the dining room. Penny is seated at the table, one long leg drawn under her, the other dangling, fervently eating the toast and eggs I left out. The old monitor is still by the plate, untouched. Penny’s wearing the caps over her fingers. Sometimes when she sets her hand by the plate her fingers hit the lip. It makes a hollow, ghostly sound against the ceramic. I set my cigarette on the counter and sit at the table. “This is good, like last time.” Penny says. She’s eating quickly, scraping her plate for eggs. I don’t like the noise, but don’t say anything. “Sleep well?” I ask, quietly. Some silence, more scraping against the plate. “I slept.” Penny answers. “You ask that a lot.” She adds. “Yeah?” I’m wishing I still had the cigarette, just for something to do. “Like, every day.” “Sorry.” “Yeah.” Penny scrapes the plate again for the last of the eggs. “Don’t worry.” After a while she pushes the plate away. Penny’s already finished the toast. We sit together, silent again. She taps her caps against a glass of cranberry-banana juice. Half-full. Once again I’m annoyed but don’t say so. Regardless, she stops, and somewhat suddenly -- I think that she may have noticed something in my expression. At times, I’ll catch Penny staring at my prosthetic. I don’t think she’s disturbed, but she scrutinizes it. All the metal in my nasal passage. She’ll stare and watch the light. She’ll watch it flicker. She hasn’t asked why it does that. I don’t know why it does that. She never gets too close and never asks to study it. She only stares at me from her bed, or from the floor by the couch, or from across the dining table. She’s looking now. “Have you looked at all?” I ask, indicating the handheld. “No.” Penny says, after some silence. She hides her fingers under the table. I stand out of my chair a little to reach for the monitor. I turn it on with a tap and a swipe. The screen is again full of schematics and diagrams. I navigate to the white ivory prosthetics, offer Penny the screen. Reluctantly, she takes it. Penny makes gestures with her fingers against the glass. She’s examining the sketches -- zooming, minimizing, all the time making a face like the one she has when she stares at my nose. Her bottom lip is puckered slightly, ponderous, playful in a way that’s betrayed by the strain in her eyes, the dark way in which her mouth tightens. It’s a look I’ve seen before. Penny looked at me that way when I left her and her father, years ago. She stood in the doorframe of her room, small, looked at me with her mouth tight, her bottom lip pushed out just so. She made a fist against the side of the frame, leaned into it hard. My bags were already in the cab. I told her goodbye and she gave me that look. I didn’t finish what I wanted to say. I ran my fingers through her short black locks, to which Penny jerked back violently, and then I left. We used to live at the fringes of the city, at the boundary. After leaving I moved into the city and never saw Penny. She and her father moved to a suburb, one that I never visited but sometimes dreamt of. In my sleep the neighborhood was perfect and round like the culs de sac I saw in images. Penny was always out on the lawn, maybe with a dog, maybe with a friend, rarely by herself. Those few times she was alone she sat under a tree, with a book, and a tall vial of ink by her side in the grass. Penny dipped her dark fingers into the vial and drew in the book. I never saw what she sketched. She made heavy strokes against the page, smiling, and I desperately wanted to see. But I could never actually move in the dreams. I observed, like a dark pair of eyes. Penny away from me. I had these nightmares frequently until they stopped. It was maybe two years after the separation. I’d lost my nose. Lately I’ve thought of them. Penny looks up from the handheld screen. “None of these.” she says.
After breakfast concludes I work. Penny returns to her room and sits on her bed by the pink and blue lights. I stay at my desk, writing the plans I have for new prosthetics. It is slow work. At times my eyes wander. I look at Penny. Her dark face is flushed with pink. I can’t tell if it’s the light. “Penny.” I say, a little loud. She turns her head to me, quiet. Penny presses her hand into her ribs. I can’t see the caps. “I…” I pause. She’s still looking at me. “Talk to me.” I say. Penny looks at me for a while. She takes her pillow off the cot and tucks it under her chin. “You don’t have to be quiet.” I try again. I indicate my work. “You know I can do both.” Penny’s quiet. She watches me. Her eyes are small and meditative. “I had a show out here once.” Penny says at last. She looks back outside. “With my band. It was at this small club, down this road, I think. I recognized some of the lights when I was dropped off here.” “Oh. You never said.” I say. I turn back to my work, pretend to draw dark lines on sketch paper. “Yeah.” A short pause. “We didn’t do well.” “I’m sorry to hear that.” I say, meaning it. “Yeah.” She says again. “I was fine. I mean, I did okay, singing and the piano, and our trombone and our bassist were fine, they were good. But our drummer got too fucked up the night before. Could barely hold his sticks. His name was Charlie. He was new. And that almost kept me from kicking his ass sideways afterwards, but it didn’t quite. I beat him hard. I held my breath until the show was over, and after we got paid and after we got back to the hotel. I even held it together when we ran to the market for drinks. But later on that night, when we were drunk and tripping down the street, and I saw him, drinking three times as much as any of us, saying stupid shit. Looking stupid. I finished off my bottle and crashed it over his skull.” “God…” “And after that I hit him. He cut his eye on my ring.” Penny started twisting her finger caps. “I can’t wear that anymore.” I’m quiet. My hands had turned a little hot. “How has it been on you, honey?” I ask. Penny looks at me at the last part. “Hard.” She sighs. “You’ll be able to play.” Penny says nothing. Just looks out the window again. “You’ll be able to play. I’ll make sure. It won’t be immediate. There’ll be a time for adjustment, but eventually. This year, even, if it goes well.” Silent again. “It’ll go well.” I say. I stop pretending to work and look at Penny. I say her name and after a few cold seconds she looks at me. I say it again. It’ll go well. She only needs to choose a replacement, a set, and I will do the rest. It’s easy. It’ll be fine. I say that a lot, she tells me. She says that I repeat myself. It’s true. And it’s because I don’t know. I don’t know if it will be all right. I only repeat assurances. There’s a tremendous, cold fear in me and I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t tell her about it. I can’t. And I can’t diminish it. We’ve both spent the last two weeks biding time. Alone together, in my home.We are afraid. Penny falls on her pillow and turns to the wall. She doesn’t speak for the rest of the afternoon. I resume my work. I think I feel the light in me flicker. The next morning I don’t make breakfast. I don’t leave bed. Penny comes in around noon and asks whether I’m okay. I tell her I’m fine, just under the weather. She can order pizza to eat. Only stay out of the workshop when she does. Penny nods and disappears. When the food arrives she delivers the entire box of it to me, setting it and a plate on my lap, over the bedsheets. Penny also carries in a chair, which she sets not too far away from the bed. She sits and waits, blinking at me. Watching my face, my nose. I look at her, confused, and she furrows her brow, tells me to dig in. She has a plate of her own that she taps gently. I take one slice out of the box. Pineapple and sausage. My favorite. Maybe hers, too, but I don’t ask. I drop a piece onto her plate and we stay there for a while, eating. We finish the box. After a while Penny leaves, taking the box and the plates with her. I don’t see her for the rest of the night. In my dream I’m out in the rain. I’m looking for someone. It’s dark and cold, and I’m walking down a boulevard I can’t recognize. The street lamps are lit up a candied pink color. It doesn’t look right. Something passes through me every time I walk through a light, something cool, like a ghost. I shiver and zip my hoodie. The people I pass on the sidewalk look me in the face. They frown. They do this so often that by the third block I’m staring into the ground, watching my feet pass over the pavement. My powder blue shoes look strange under the street lights. I walk for hours. Long enough for the sun to have come up, but it hasn’t. The sky’s black and starless and I feel worried. There’s something like a fissure in my chest. I can’t see it but I feel it there all the same. The longer I walk, the longer the split grows, and I’m not sure if it’s because of the people looking at me or because I can’t find the person I’m looking for. Penny. Where’s she? Against every building are electric pictures, portraits of men and women I don’t know. I don’t look at them. But they look at me. Eventually, I find a club. It has no name. It’s inside a short blue building, the same color as my shoes and the light inside my skull. I push through the doors. I don’t think anyone follows me. The club is one large room, full of tables, dimly lit, and it’s dominated by a single stage, a tremendous, square frame carved out of the club wall. The room is full of people, but they don’t look at me. They whisper to each other, drinking from tall glasses. Occasionally they look to the stage, momentarily quiet, and it’s like they’re anticipating something. Someone. I find a seat by myself, in a corner. I order a drink. Bourbon. I rest it in my lap, wary of the table cloth, which is colored the same sickly pink as the city lights. I’m reminded of pigs. I drink slowly. I’m on my second glass when the lights shut off. The whispers cease, and in a moment the stage is lit again in cool white light. There’s a woman and a piano. She takes a seat on a long, black bench, and her dress is short and blue.The stagelight hits her darkly, so that her skin appears blacker than what it really is. She doesn’t introduce herself but I know. It’s my Penny. Seeing her, I expect the ache in my chest to cease, but it doesn’t. I feel the split grow deeper, far through my middle. It’s hard to drink. Penny, I want to say. I want to call her name. But I can’t speak. I can only try to drink. Penny lifts the fall board. She doesn’t have her fingers. She starts to play at the keys and she doesn’t have her fingers. The ones I have to give to her. The crowd is listening, deathly silent, all of their dark faces watching the stage, and I think they enjoy it. The chords Penny strikes are dissonant -- melancholic, yet beautiful in their way. What fingers she has fly over the keyboard, and she moves with them. Penny’s waist sways. Her shoulders rock. Her neck is craned far over the piano and she lets her face hang low, close to the keys. The audience is quiet. I feel the fissure lengthen. It’s in my throat. Penny, I still want to say. Penny. I can’t taste the drink. And then she sings. In a rich, smoldering tone. Like a croak. It’s as though her throat, her voice, is frayed at the edge, and the sound of her song as it escapes her mouth is seething, possessed of all the power of a perished fruit. Dark and low, ruined, unsweet. Her face is turned high up, away from the keyboard. Penny sings into the air. The club is quiet. I drop tears into my bourbon, and the fissure is well into my neck. I feel myself splitting, breaking entirely. Penny is dark in her blue dress. She’s beautiful. My Penny. I see the light in my skull reflected in the amber of the liquor glass. And my tears. As Penny sings I disintegrate. The club is quiet. I fade out. And then I wake up. A strange dream. In the morning I leave the bed, make for Penny’s room. She’s not there, but her window is open. It’s raining outside. The pink pig and the girl in the dress shimmer across the street, coloring the bed sheets like they always do, except now the bed and the pillow are messy and wet, pretty ruined. I climb over the mattress and look out the window, up into the rooftops, down at the street. Nothing. I fall back, off of the bed. Look at the electric color in the pillow. Blue. Pink. No Penny. Penny gone again. I feel a pain, a sudden pressure in my chest. A pounding. I breathe to stay calm. Slowly, I shut the window and pull the sheets off the cot, stack them high in my arms and make for the kitchen. I set them down on the dining table. No Penny here, either. I grab detergent pods from a cabinet and pick up the sheets as best I can, then head for the door. The sheets, loosely gathered underneath my chin, are awkward and heavy. Soft, tremendous stones. I cut through the living room and as I step past the couch something catches my foot. It’s cool and hard and my toes jam into it painfully, so intensely that I crash onto the floor. I try to yelp but my face is buried in the heap of wet blankets. “Hi.” I hear from under the sheets. I turn my face to the couch and see Penny on its cushions, curled up, balancing an empty bottle of whiskey on her thigh. At the foot of the blue seat is a small crowd of shot glasses, spilled over the floor. “Sorry.” Penny adds. From her place on the couch she leans over to pick the glasses off the floor. They clink against each other. “I…” she trails off, carrying the glass in her hands, looking at me. “I needed to drink.” She finishes. Penny stands and walks the glasses and the empty bottle to the kitchen sink. I stay on the ground with the blankets. I’m staring after her, in her shorts and mint green t-shirt. I look from Penny to the blue couch. Something in my chest aches. I feel it sink. Penny walks back and sits on the couch. She sticks her hands into the cushions, grumbles loudly about the remote and how it’s never where she needs it. I’m still sitting with the blankets, working the pain out of my toes, still feeling something terribly wrong with my chest. Eventually she finds it, the remote. It’s short and silver in her hands. Penny presses a button and the television comes on in a spontaneous kind of explosion of color. But no sound. Penny apologizes again and adjusts the volume. She tells me that’s just something she does, sometimes, with the television. Watch without sound. It’s easier to drink that way. I tell her I disagree but don’t elaborate. And she doesn’t ask, just gives me a thoughtful look and turns back to the television screen. I finally gather the blankets and walk them over to the door, where I keep a hamper. I drop them inside with the pods of detergent and tell myself I’ll deal with it later. I return to Penny on the couch. “Are those mine?” She asks. I nod. “Shit. I’m sorry!” Her cheeks redden. “You sound like me.” I say. I think I sound wistful. I try to sit on the couch but Penny waves me off. She says wait, and snatches something off the seat. When I sit down I see that it’s the handheld, square, flat, and Penny presses it to her chest. She’s looking at the the tv, but she’s making her face. Mouth tight, lip pushed out. Her shoulders are tensed. She lowers the monitor onto her lap, face-down, and continues to watch the television with her odd expression. I start to say something but realize I know better. The people on the television are sword fighting. They duel in a dark corridor dimly lit with candles. The walls are cobblestone. They speak in a language I can’t parse. Maybe Italian. Their voices are deep and authentic and I think, when the candlelight strikes just right, one of them is quite handsome. I yearn for a drink. It’s strange for me to sit and watch television and not be drinking. For a moment I feel something toward Penny. It’s severe, like hatred, and I try to forget it. But it lingers. Penny on the couch, drunk and asleep. The empty bottle and all those glasses… “Why haven’t you made a choice?” I ask. I try to look at her but I can’t. I watch the television. I see Penny squirm out of the corner of my eye. “I can’t.” “And why not?” Penny is quiet. The duelists are out on a balcony now. They knick at each other against a pastel sunset. “Would I even see you again?” she asks. “When?” “After.” I clench my jaw. One duelist kicks the other off the balcony, onto a landing. He pursues. “I don’t know.” Penny opens the monitor and flicks through a number of windows. They’re all full of diagrams, and as she whips her finger across the screen I notice a ballooning fierceness in her eyes. It’s taut. Directed. The men duel in a garden now. Their boots fly between pots of tulips in rows. When one duelist crashes his foot into a vase, the other flashes his blade and finesses it into his opponent’s shoulder. He drops his sword and sprints into a crop of tall hedges. A maze. “I don’t know what to fucking choose,” Penny curses, mostly to herself, her finger flying over the monitor. “I don’t fucking know.” The duelists are lost in the maze. One of them is bleeding from his shoulder. He clutches it tight, stumbles over the path. His opponent is trailing him, following spots of blood on the ground when he can find them and taking chances the rest of the time. The camera work here is intimate. Immediate. A lot of close-ups. Both of the men are visibly exhausted, broken into sweat, cursing under their breath. Their loose tunics are ragged and ruined by knicks of the sword, from combat. “I don’t fucking know.” Penny repeats. This time louder. She’s examining and minimizing a dozen photos. All of the diagrams I have on file. I see copper, see platinum, see white alloy. All of these she opens, scrutinizes, and swats away. Penny’s shoulders are rigid. She isn’t making her face but her eyes are mostly-open and bloodshot, quietly ferocious. I try not to fidget. “Do you want me to leave?” Penny asks, her voice taut, tense, like her words are walking a tightrope. I ask her what she means. “After.” She looks at me for a moment before returning to the tablet. “No.” I say. A long pause. “Really?” “Yes, really.” “Why?” I don’t know. I don’t. I saw something when she asked. Penny in her blue dress, alone, at a club. Penny in the yard, alone, writing notes onto paper with her dark fingers. What I said felt right. It felt like what I needed to say. I didn’t have to think, so I didn’t know “why.” “I love you.” I say. Penny is silent. The men in the maze continue to be in the maze. They continue to stumble, continue to curse, continue to bleed over the path and the grass. One opponent follows the other’s blood on the ground when it’s there, and guesses the rest of the way. Each time one of the men turns a corner I see his face harden and his eyes grow narrow, as though one man could meet the other at any passage, any dead end. But they never meet. They creep through the maze, ever tense, but they catch nothing of each other. Not even a glimpse. “I don’t know that I can say that.” Penny says. She’s peering into the monitor but tapping less rapidly now. She pushes the windows away lightly. I feel another seizing in my chest. Another pounding, another ache. It’s deep and it’s painful. “Right.” I say. I strain to keep my voice even. “Mom…” Penny lowers the tablet. “Yes?” “Pick for me.” I’m quiet for a moment. Then I shake my head. “Pick for me, mom.” She’s insistent. Her lips are pursed, utterly thin, like the sharp sides of a blade. “It’s something you have to do.” “Everything’s something I have to do when it comes to you.” Penny grips the sides of the monitor tightly. Her knuckles turn color. “That isn’t fair.” “You’ve done nothing. Not for me. Not for dad.” I’m trying to watch the television. The men in an endless labyrinth. My palms are getting hot - I turn them over in my lap. “I’m doing this,” I say, “I’m doing the surgery.” Penny is silent but her mouth is drawn tight. “I can’t choose for you. Not now. It isn’t my place. It never has been.” “Then how can you say you want me here? That you love me. What bullshit.” She’s quiet again. Penny props her elbow on the couch shoulder, covers her face with her hand. The silver caps are dark against her skin. She turns away from me. “Jesus. Fuck. Fuck you. Why’d I ever come here?” I’m not sure what the thing to say is. “I won’t pick for you. I’m sorry.” I muster. “Yeah.” She replies, in a low tone. Penny twists her face into her hand. She shakes a little, from the gut. Tears fall down her cheek. I reach for her shoulder but she jerks it away. I should know better. The men in the movie have given up. They sit on the ground, their backs against the hedges. The one with the wounded shoulder does nothing to staunch the bleeding. His white tunic is ruffled, covered in mud, bloody by the arms. The other simply looks at his sword in his lap. His face is dark and angular. By now the moon is out and its light turns the leaves in the hedges a fine, frosty color. White in green. The men appear out of place, breathing haggardly, too dark against the white leaves. The camera lingers, on the swordsmen, their defeat. After a while it cuts to black. “That was stupid.” I say. Penny sniffles. “What?” her voice is hoarse. “This.” I point at the screen. “Nothing happened.” “You’re still watching? Jesus.” Penny pulls her face out of her hand. “It’s my favorite movie.” “What’s it about?” “Does it matter?” “I want to know.” Penny sighs. “Men and swords, mom. Honor, fights. Romance. All that. But it ends with these two, alone, in the moonlight. I like that. I’ve written songs about it.” The television is running advertisements now. Light beers and insurance. I press mute.“Do you think that you’re alone?” “I do.” “You’ve had your father.” “Not really.” Penny rubs her eyes. “He’s a lot like you. Only he sticks around.” I don’t think about her father. I loved him. I loved him when I left him, too, and for some years after. But sometime -- I don’t know when -- I stopped. I don’t know. We grew up together. Fell in love at fifteen, lasted through high school, broke up in the summer before college. We grew distant. I trained, became someone -- a surgeon staffed at a research facility. I did well for myself. Years later, I attended a class reunion. I had my hopes. I still had my nose. I wore a short, dark dress and pored over the bowls of punch. I debated leaving after another cup, until I felt a tap at my shoulder. I turned cold. Was it him, I asked. Yes, him. We hugged, later we kissed. We spent a night together, and another. Another. And I should have known, but I didn’t. I didn’t realize I was pregnant, not for several months. I didn’t want the child. He did. He sat me down at dinner, a number of dinners, and tried to convince me. He said, we can let this happen. We don’t have to do anything. We keep the child and we start a life together. My heart broke. Maybe something gave in me then. I wanted him, but not the baby. I loved him. I loved him, I said, and couldn’t we live together, just us? Just us alone. When I suggested adoption his face turned dark and loose, like spoiled fruit. I would have the baby, I said. But I couldn’t raise it. That wasn’t in me. I wanted to work -- my career was only beginning. He understood but he wanted the child. I conceded. I had Penny, and for a time I could stand it. It was unexpected. I still loved him, and I loved her, too, in my way. Like any mother. My child. My sweet daughter. My Penny. But I couldn’t stay. Something, eventually, went out in me. Like a light. “He loves you.” I say. “Like you.” Penny says. Her eyes are dried now. “Not like me.” “Whatever. I don’t think I’m going back. Back to dad. I’m going to make it out on my own.” “With your band?” “Yes. Or, no. I don’t know.” “Okay,” I say, folding my hands.”But I meant what I said. That you can stay here.” Penny is quiet. “Even if it’s for a short while. A week, whatever. But you don’t have to leave. You can stay until you can play. Until you’re recovered. I want you to.” “I don’t know.” She says. “Let me be here for you now, Penny. If never again, I want to be here now. At least for a while.” “I don’t know, mom. Just...stop. Please.” “Tell me you’ll think about it.” “I’ll think.” “Thank you.” I leave the couch and make for the hamper of clothes by the door. I take my keys, stuff the detergent pods into my pocket. I look back at Penny. She’s got the tablet in her hands again, and she’s looking at me. I think it’s my nose. It might be blinking again. But I don’t say anything. Just leave.
When I return, it’s raining. I come in wet, and the sheets are wet again too. I dump them off by the doorway and resign to give Penny the sheets off of my mattress. She’s still on the couch, looking at the handheld monitor. I don’t know if she’s moved. Penny greets me. There’s a coldness in her voice. She says she’s been thinking and that she’d like to have dinner now, if that’s okay. She ordered Chinese. Orange chicken and white rice. Crab rangoon. I say that I’m hungry too, and that I’ll join her after I change out of my wet clothes. Penny nods, still cold. Still distracted. Or else she’s thinking. I can’t tell. I leave for the bathroom. I shut the door behind me, look into the mirror. My nose is blinking out again. I remove my shirt and stare at myself, almost naked. In my bra. I don’t look like a mother. I don’t look like my daughter. My skin is black, like hers. My hair is short, dark, curly like hers. We have the same mouth, the same small eyes. Heavy eyebrows.The same gait in our walk. But we aren’t the same, and it’s my fault. I take a finger and reach inside my cavity, touch the small, hot light. I take another finger and grip the bulb. Squeeze it tight. Tweeze it. It hurts. I lost my nose to disease. I don’t remember the name and that disturbs people. I contracted it sometime after I left my husband and Penny, and it was a painful sickness. My skin degenerated, turned on itself. It ate away at the flesh and it was so painful that one afternoon I resolved to cut it off. Replace it with something new and electric. More perfect. But all the time I thought of her. My daughter, Penny. Penny was in my thoughts, my nightmares in bed. Penny was there when I sat down to design my new prosthetic. She was in my sketches, in the vials of ink I drew from. All the time I saw her face. Her puckered lip, her tight mouth, her little fist in the doorframe. It hurt. It killed me. It needed to end. I finished the design. Then, I finished the prosthetic, the new nose, which was really the lack of one. I performed the surgery myself. Heavily drugged. I can’t remember everything but I know it was strange. I cried, probably the entire time. I drank. Glasses and glasses of bourbon, until I broke off the old nose, the diseased one, the ruined one, and prepared for the new. After cleaning the blood away I applied the prosthetic, threaded lines of wire through bone, fixed a small light into my skull. A hot, blue one that flickered. I don’t know why it does that. It wasn’t in my design. Never in my plans. But after the surgery the pain stopped. And then the dreams stopped, of Penny. Finally, I ended the disease. I ended Penny. And then I forgot. I let go of the light and draw my fingers out of my skull. I turn away from the mirror and fish a new shirt out of a basket by the shower. It’s dark and red. I exchange my sweatpants for a pair of black shorts. When I enter the kitchen Penny is at the dining table, quiet. Still distant. I take a seat and she appears to wake up, standing up from her chair a little to open the sealed bag of Chinese. She uses her complete hand to remove the boxes of food. We distribute the rice, the chicken, without a word. We pour drinks. We eat in silence. I notice the handheld is on the table, face-down by Penny’s cup of soda. She doesn’t mention it. But she looks at it, occasionally, between mouthfuls of rice. Her eyebrows are slightly furrowed. Sometimes she looks at me. I find it hard to eat. I jab at my food listlessly. Chew, swallow. But really I’m thinking about Penny. Trying not to look at her too hard. I want to ask about the surgery, about her staying, but I don’t. I can’t. I can only chew and swallow. Drink. I finish one plate and have another. Penny’s still on her first. “Do you want the rangoon?” She asks, suddenly, quietly. She’s looking at me, with her cool, small eyes. I tell her yes and she passes me the bag. I remove one and crack the shell. Before I bite in, Penny makes a noise. She clears her throat and sets her fork on the table. “Um…” she starts. Penny picks up the monitor, turns it on. The light from the screen strikes her face. It’s colored, and familiar. After a moment, Penny drops the monitor onto the table and slides it close to me. “That’s what I want,” she says. “That’s it.” She’s chosen an alloy I’ve not seen before. It’s elegant, a matte kind of material. Very basic but effective. Precious. The colors are pink and blue. I’m reminded of the pig, and the girl in the dress outside my workshop. The sign Penny returns to whenever she’s sitting in that bed by the window. The one she watches. The place she’s spent the most time in the two weeks she’s been in my home. Nearby where I’ve worked. Pretended to work. “It’s not something you’ve done, I think.” She says. “It isn’t one of your designs. I did some research. It’s like a composite of one of your prosthetics -- it requires some materials I don’t know you have, but you can order them. I checked.” She’s right. I don’t have every material it calls for, but I can import them. “It might take a few weeks.” I say. “Okay,” Penny says. She looks at me, then at the monitor. She appears glad. Her dark eyebrows relax. “Look.” Penny waves her hand in the air. Delicately, she plucks off of her ruined fingers the silver caps that cover them. Under the kitchen light I see the scarring, the carefully grafted blankets of skin. These would be removed for the surgery. Opened, peeled away for me to tie into her fingerbone all of the circuitry, the electric thread necessary for the new implants. I can drug her but it will still be painful. She’ll probably scream. Cry. Penny takes her hand and suspends it over the monitor, over the portrait of her new fingers. The two prosthetics on the screen are slim, absolutely delicate -- all of their wiring is invisible, contained inside the implants’ metal shell. Slowly, Penny lowers her hand, until her palm is pressed against the tablet. She drops the ends of her fingers onto the image, where she would end and the prosthetic begin. I think she smiles, looking at it. I start to cry. “Mom…” she looks up at me. Something breaks. My face is wet, my palms are hot. There’s an ache in my throat, in my chest that’s like a fissure, some damnable wound. I can’t help it. I don’t stop. I drop tears into my rice. Without thinking I take Penny’s hand away from the monitor and bring it to my cheek. I grip it hard, press it firmly into my face. My eyes are wet and blurry. “I’m sorry,” I choke. “I’m sorry, Penny. So sorry.” Penny’s quiet. She idles there over the table with my hand over hers. Her eyes are cool again, distant, but not unfeeling. We stay that way for a while.
After dinner we clear the table. We don’t speak. I take the monitor and save the page with Penny’s choice. We walk down the hallway to our rooms, quiet still, and Penny carries a glass in one hand and a fresh bottle of whiskey by the neck. As I pass by her room she stops me. “Mom,” she says. Then she’s silent for a while. She stands in the doorway, looking small, holding the whiskey and the glass close to her breast. She tries again. “I can’t stay here.” Penny’s face is cool, dark. “Not after. I have to leave.” “Okay.” I say. I tell her goodnight. “Right.” She says. Penny turns away, falls back through the doorway. She drops the whiskey and the glass on her mattress and climbs in. The curtains are open. There aren’t any sheets on the bed -- it’s bare. But she isn’t bothered. She’s got that look in her eye, of distance, and she’s watching the lights outside. Her lights. The girl and the pig. They strike her darkly. As Penny screws the cap off the whiskey, I shut the door. Before retreating to my room I stop by the bathroom. I lay the monitor by the sink and stare into the mirror. I can’t see much. I don’t have the light on, but my nose is flickering. It’s a light, gentle blue. It’s blinking like it always does. Penny doesn’t know why. She doesn’t ask. I reach two fingers inside my skull and pinch the light hard. It’s hot and a little painful.With one controlled twist, the light unscrews some and the glow, the color is dimmer but it’s still blinking, maybe faster, now. I think the tips of my fingers are scalded but I don’t remove them. No. Instead, I turn it again, and keep turning, until the bulb is loose and the blue light is entirely extinguished. It’s entirely dark. And then I wait there, alone, in the mirror.