Bearded Women by Teresa Milbrodt Page B

much misery, so much sacrifice, and his mother was still dead.
    The cyclops woman finds the key to the locked glass cabinet. Her father thinks no one but him knows it is hidden behind the counter in a five-year-old box of Earl Grey tea. She opens the glass case and touches the finger with her small hand. It feels hard and leathery, like it sat in the sun for centuries. She thinks she feels a slight warmth and a slight pain in her own fingers, stands there for a moment with that warm ache before locking the case again. The cyclops woman sits against the wall and slips the shade off her head, stares at her hand. It seems to be glowing slightly.
    Because she knows her father would never agree to it, the cyclops woman and Drogo’s finger leave at three-thirty in the morning after she makes a few phone calls, packs a bag, and tells her mother her plan. Her mother nods and takes a couple aspirin.
    “Everything will be fine after your father stops having a tantrum,” she says.
    At first the cyclops woman figures she’ll be gone for a couple of weeks, travelling to a few coffee shops several hours away, displaying Drogo and charging a small fee to touch him and buy an information card. The coffee shops she called were a bit sceptical, but agreed when she said she wouldn’t charge them for the display and she’d work the counters if things got busy.
    In Indianapolis the cyclops woman stands beside Drogo, her shade in place, reciting the story of his life until she is hoarse. She is tired and her hands ache from the long drive, but Drogo’s finger looks content in its temporary new home, a clear glass jewellery box she bought for five dollars and lined with red velvet. Coffee shop patrons gladly ante their dollars to touch the finger for ten seconds, pay an extra buck for a Polaroid snapshot beside the relic. Some people mutter that it looks like a piece of beef jerky and they’re certain they can smell pickling spices. Others say they feel a slight heat or ache or calmness after rubbing the first digit. The cyclops woman smiles and adjusts her shade. A young acne-stricken reporter from the local paper comes to do a story for the religion page.
    “There aren’t very many touring relics,” she says.
    “I guess not,” says the cyclops woman.
    The reporter says, “His mother died?”
    “He never got over it,” says the cyclops woman. She thinks of her own mother at the cash register trying to ring up customers and keep her father calm as he rants about the missing finger and mistakenly pours scalding coffee over his hands instead of into a mug.
    “Those are neat sunglasses,” says the reporter.
    The Indiana coffee shop owners are an elderly couple who let the cyclops woman spend a few nights on their uncomfortable couch. She wants to take the shade off when she goes to sleep but thinks the better of it.
    “I have a disease that makes me sensitive to light,” she tells them at breakfast, her back still aching from the flat couch cushions.
    “That’s some finger,” says the old man, spreading marmalade on his toast.
    “Once I thought I saw a vision of the Virgin in some sugar I spilled on the floor,” says the old woman.
    The cyclops woman does not like the endless black cord of road. She does not like peeing in gas station bathrooms, eating peanut butter sandwiches two meals a day because she wants to live on the cheap, sleeping in her car when she can’t find anyone to loan her their couch for a night. In the morning she neatens herself best she can in fast food restaurant restrooms, wets her comb and ties her hair back into a neat bun before driving to the next venue. Many of them are tiny places like the ones her father owns, coffee shops where the owners are struggling and sympathetic, eager to try any new scheme as long as it’s free. She stays three or four days at each, long enough for word of mouth to get out and for the crowd of sceptical and curious visitors to be exhausted. Many people compliment her on