Mischling by Affinity Konar Page B

the hand in her pocket. At the time, I thought she regretted touching me because a show of kindness could compromise her standing with colleagues like Elma. Years later, I would realize her sorrow arose from taking care of the children that Uncle claimed for his own. It must have been like stringing a harp for someone who played his harp with a knife, or binding a book for someone whose idea of reading was feeding pages to a fire.
    But these realizations weren’t available to me then as a semi-child, a hider-in-coats, a shrinking pretender to adulthood. There, in the laboratory, I knew only that we were flanked by two women who seemed to fall in interesting positions in the order of living things. They looked to be entirely without feeling, their soft forms walled with protective layers. In Nurse Elma, this seemed a natural state; she was an exoskeletal creature, all her bones and thorns mounted on the outside—a perfect, glossy specimen of a crab. I assumed that she was born this way, numb to everyone around her. Dr. Miri was differently armored—though she was gilded with hard plates, it was a poor protection, one that hadn’t warded off all wounds, and like the starfish, she was gifted at regeneration. When a piece of her met with tragedy, it grew back threefold, and the tissues multiplied themselves into an advanced sort of flesh with its own genius for survival.
    How long, I wondered, would it take for me to become like her?
    I hadn’t meant to wonder it aloud, but that’s exactly what I did, because Elma’s hand closed on my shoulder, and she gave me a shake.
    “Are you talking about me?” the nurse chided.
    “About her.” I pointed to Dr. Miri, who blushed. But she was adept at covering for us children and negotiating Elma’s moods.
    “She only means that she wants to be a doctor someday too,” she said, and her face, with its telling eyes, telegraphed that I should follow her lead. “Isn’t that right?”
    I nodded, and rocked back and forth on my heels as I stood before them, made myself smaller, more girlish. People usually found the gesture quite charming, for whatever reason. It worked for Pearl and Shirley Temple both, and it worked for me then, because the nurse released me.
    “Well, then,” she boomed, and she rapped her knuckles on my head. “Maybe if you work hard enough you will become a great doctor someday. Anything is possible here, yes?”
    Will you believe me when I say that the weather saved me from having to answer this absurd question? We heard a knocking at the windows of the laboratory, a sound like thousands of tiny fists pummeling the glass. A scatter of nurses and doctors rushed about, closing the windows, fastening them shut, while beads of hail spilled down onto the floors. It was as if a sea’s worth of oysters had been pried open in the sky and released the treasures that were my sister’s namesake into the halls of the laboratory.
    In this white tumult of hail, Pearl and I found ourselves unattended, and our interest was drawn to a room a few steps away, its door ajar. I stepped forward for a closer look at what lay within. Through the door slit, I saw walls lined with books, and I had a finger-twitch to steal one of the volumes. Surely, a laboratory book would be able to advise me on how to make my body withstand a place like this, how to fortress it and put the pain out. Books had never led me in the wrong direction. It seemed foolish to try to endure without such counsel by my side.
    On tiptoe, I approached the room and pushed on the knob gently, but the sweat on my palm made it too slick, and the door swung open and the hinges tattled on me with a creak—Nurse Elma, her cap askew, stormed in and yanked me from the doorway, but as she did so, the door opened still further. And that’s when I met the eyes, or when the eyes met me.
    I remain uncertain as to how to classify the exchange of glances that took place.
    All I know was that rows of eyes presided over the