Bearded Women by Teresa Milbrodt Page A

the finger well, all its joints and creases, and likes it in the way that people like something because it is familiar.
    At night the cyclops woman’s mother frets over the books, how the small shop is barely keeping afloat even with the reliquary. Her father claims Drogo is why they’re still in business. The cyclops woman has been watching his latest ritual, how he stands in front of the finger before the shop opens and after it closes. She wonders how fast the glaucoma is progressing. The family ophthalmologist says she has the same disease, but he doesn’t know how long it will be before she is blind. It could be a year, five years, ten. She worries what will happen to her family when neither she nor her father can see. The shop isn’t making enough to hire extra help. Her father wants to keep working in the store, despite his impairment.
    “I’m perfectly fine,” he says. “Not blind yet. I can tell how much coffee is in the cup.”
    “You’re getting steam burns from the espresso machine,” says the cyclops woman.
    “I am not,” says her father, but she watches him run his hands under cold water for a few minutes in-between customers, wincing. She knows he is moving slow, trying not to bump into things. He misses the counter when giving a customer her coffee. The cup shatters on the floor, sloshes hot liquid behind the register.
    “It slipped out of my hand,” he hisses to his daughter while she gets another cup of coffee and helps her mother pick up the ceramic shards.
    At dinner he reaches for the salt and pepper shakers and knocks both over.
    The cyclops woman’s mother bites her lip.
    “I don’t know what we’re going to do about the finances,” she whispers.
    “What we’ve always done,” says the cyclops woman’s father. “We’re going to sell coffee and get a business loan to tide us over.”
    “I want to go on the road,” says the cyclops woman.
    Both her parents stare.
    “Talk shows,” she says, “book deals, maybe a movie. People will pay to see me.”
    “You will do no such thing,” her father says, stabbing his meatloaf. “That is what we’ve worked to help you avoid. Nothing good comes of that sort of fame.”
    “But it would be easy,” says the cyclops woman. “We’d be set forever.”
    “I will not have my daughter prostituting herself,” says her father. “I’d rather go on welfare.”
    “I’m not stripping in front of people,” says the cyclops woman.
    “You’re not taking off your shade,” says her father. “You can’t know what would happen after that.”
    “You can’t either,” says the cyclops woman.
    “What if doctors got hold of you,” says her father, “and you spent the rest of your life with needles in your arms and a tube up your rear?”
    The cyclops woman’s mother doesn’t say anything, just puts her hand over her mouth.
    The cyclops woman decides to let her father think he’s won for the time being. They all keep chewing. She knows she won’t let her family go on the public dole.
    That night she lies in bed and dreams her usual dream about serving coffee at the counter when a customer snatches her shade away. She stands there blinking her one eye. Sometimes nobody notices and sometimes everyone does, but it is pleasant to feel the cool air on her eye, not to have it closed behind the stuffy sunglasses lens.
    In the morning the cyclops woman’s mother has a headache. She has been complaining of headaches more often lately and the cyclops woman knows it is because of stress. The cyclops woman’s head hurts sometimes, too, and she finds herself squinting more, getting eyestrain. She knows the vision loss, the blurriness, will only progress until the day there is nothing. No black. No white. As if she’d never had an eye to begin with. When she cleans the glass on Drogo’s coffin that night she reads the information card for the five thousandth time and feels sorry for Drogo for the five thousandth time. He endured so much pain, so