BUTTERFINGERS

I watch. So does she. Her gaze becomes unbearable, and so I turn my head away. I can still feel her eyes sticking relentlessly on my face. I search for space, for anything that will keep me from having to look at this girl. But every three moments my eyes are inevitably drawn towards her. I notice everything about her again and again, as though I jump back in time whenever I look back to her. The first things I notice are her legs. Pale and damaged since her birth, they lie upon the matted floor, fidgeting as though they were only asleep. Then I see her back, arched above the floor, as though her spinal cord is Tantalus and the floor is cool, unreachable water. Next I see her arms. They flail about, as though she has no control over them. I remind myself she doesn’t. Her head is disproportionately large; it is almost half the size of her torso. She breathes with the desperate relief of someone rescued from drowning. The sound of her ragged breath assaults my ears. I inevitably see the rise and the fall of her chest, and I am convinced that her every breath will be her last. But all of this is fine; I have read news articles containing sickening, disturbing pictures. I have read books brimming with unimaginable horrors.  No, what chills me to the bone are not her deformities. What makes me shudder, what I know will remain carved in the back of my eyelids is not her arched back, her too-large head, her dead limbs. It is something a thousand times worse: her smile. It is unbearable. How many muscles is she capable of moving? She knows no happiness; she knows no hope for a successful future, yet she smiles at me as though I have given her an expensive toy for Christmas. What did that make me? I notice her hands. They look soft, as though they are made of butter. They melt in the midday sun.