B: Chapter 2

Surly Ann, Chapter 2

Many peopled asked, "My goodness, what happened to her?" An easy
question, though asked uneasily. Mostly the question was asked when
mothers and fathers gathered in the schoolyard, when she carried a pot
of chili to the tables covered in colorful paper, or - if nothing else
was to be had - newsprint, the ink leaving gray stains on her fingers
as she set the tables and read, haltingly, of wars, weather, and the
horoscope. She learned she was a scorpion.

Here is the truth: As a baby, she was taken by her brothers into the
woods. The brothers had been entrusted to watch over her. This did not
preclude their day's plans.
One, Jose, had been careful to make sure she was wrapped and swaddled
in a blanket to keep out the bugs. Then he promptly forgot her, going
off to a copse of dead trees. In his exuberance, he pushed a dead tree
onto his sister's face. As she bled, Jose ran back to their house. No
one was home, so Jose took a bottle of rubbing alcohol and applied it
diligently until his mother returned. When she saw her second-eldest
son crouching over her only daughter, a dishrag in one hand, the
rubbing alcohol in the other, and a beer at his feet, she let out a cry
and took the dishrag from her son. Her cry became one long wail,
high-pitched and so full of grief that the neighborhood children would
remember it in their dreams that night and, for some of them, even
later.

Jose had missed one thing, either in his drunkenness or his denial. Her
mother fingered the long cut over her daughter's eye, the siren of her
voice ending in a gasp when the lens of her daughter's eye came loose
and landed in the palm of her hand. At first, she refused to believe
it, but being the daughter of a farmer she closed her fist and punched
her son square in the middle of his face. He promptly covered his newly
bloodied nose with one hand, grabbed his beer in the other, and ran
from the room.

A doctor came, remarking that she was an awfully quiet baby,
considering. She would not remember it, of course, but in her baby mind
she was wondering about the sudden dark edge to her field of vision,
how her mother and various other faces seemed to appear out of nowhere
when before she always knew what was coming. Her mother's face was
blank but wet; the doctor's was smiling when she could see it. His hand
lifted and lifted, trailing a dark spider web that pinched as it got
too close to her eye.

She healed, one eye a milky mass surrounded by pinkish scars and the
dark hairs of what would have been an attractive eyebrow. And she grew
used to sitting next to strangers, whose smiles would quickly vanish as
she turned to face them completely.