about strange things drugs were supposed to do to newborn babies.
The cyclops woman’s father makes her wear a shade, a crescent-shaped sunglasses lens that fits around her head, so the world looks a little dark to her. Her father’s world is also getting darker. His glaucoma is worsening and the ophthalmologist says he’ll be blind in a matter of months. He won’t stop working, though. At the counter of Drogo’s, the family coffee shop, he explains to customers that his daughter wears the shade because she has a condition that makes her extremely sensitive to light.
“I think it’s very becoming,” says Cynthia Liss, one of the regulars. She says the eyes are the most intimate part of the body and the shade lends an air of mystery like Japanese women with their fans.
The cyclops woman thinks the shade makes her look like a washed-up Hollywood starlet that happens to be working at the family coffee shop.
Her father boasts that Drogo’s is the only coffee shop in the world with a reliquary. Drogo is the patron saint of coffee house keepers and unattractive people. His finger and six eyelashes rest across from the counter in a tiny glass coffin etched with gold curlicues. The coffin is attached to the wall and surrounded by a big gilded frame. The finger looks like a piece of beef jerky, and the eyelashes could be anybody’s, but some of the regular customers make a habit of touching the coffin every time they enter. Cynthia Liss leaves small offerings—dime store rings, single fingers cut from gloves, and red nail polish because she says red is the most Catholic colour. On Drogo’s feast day, April 16th, the cyclops woman’s father has her festoon the frame with ribbon.
He brought the finger and eyelashes back from a trip to Belgium three months before he opened the coffee shop. At least once a month he stands behind the counter and tells the story of how he found them in a little apothecary shop in Brussels. He says, “The apothecary whispered to me that Drogo’s finger had been taken from St. Martin’s in Sebourg, where Drogo died and where the rest of his relics are kept. That old man said Drogo’s finger had worked miracles for others who had come into his shop. It had made an old woman’s gnarled hands straight, a little boy’s deaf ear hear, a dog’s lame foot strong.”
When her father finishes the story, he nods and smiles at the cyclops woman. She smiles back, knows he bought the finger hoping it would manifest a miracle, give her a second eye. When that didn’t work it became an attraction. Sometimes she wonders exactly how her father looked when he walked into the apothecary shop, if the way he squinted at objects suggested he had the loose wallet of a desperate man. Other times she figures that if she is a cyclops woman with brethren who taunted Odysseus, surely the finger could have belonged to a saint.
There are little cards with Drogo’s picture and biography next to the gilded frame and customers can buy them for a dollar. The picture is a painting really, a man with a huge nose, uneven lips, and eyes looking in different directions, a man Dali would have loved. The cyclops woman reads Drogo’s biography every night even though she’s memorized it, how he was the son of a Flemish nobleman whose mother died when he was born. When he grew older he became obsessed with the idea that he’d killed her, so he sold everything he owned and became a shepherd and a hermit and made nine pilgrimages to Rome. Later he contracted an odd disease that made him very ugly, and he spent the rest of his life living on barley bread and warm water. People said he was able to bilocate, be in two places at once, tending sheep and attending Mass. The Cyclops woman wonders if that is true with his remains as well, if he actually has twenty fingers, twenty toes, four eyes, and two noses roaming the world. She cleans the fingerprints off Drogo’s finger’s glass coffin every night. The cyclops woman knows
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