Body and Soul: Short Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

doctor says.
    “I know,” Terry agrees. Now the slashes and spots aren’t so brilliant, and she is beginning to make out shapes filled in with what she realizes must be colour. Between the coloured shapes there is black.
    “What else do you see?” the doctor asks.
    “You,” she whispers, but it is an assumption.
    “What did she say?” Aunt Bea asks, wiping her fogged-up glasses.
    “She sees me.”
    “I see you,” Terry says, and now she does. That is his face. It grows, it comes closer. He is staring into one of her eyes and then the other. He is pulling down on her bottom lids. She stares back at his eyes. “An eye is greasy,” she says.
    When he moves his hand away, she looks down at her dress, then over at Aunt Bea, who isn’t green. More startling than that, Aunt Bea’s face is different from the doctor’s. Men must have different faces from women, she thinks, but when she looks at the nurse,
her
face is different, too. The nurse is very tiny, only an inch high. Terry looks back at Aunt Bea and considers the gleaming lines between her eyes and her mouth. “I see your tears,” she says.
    “Oh, honey,” Aunt Bea says.
    Terry extends her hand, and though it seems to touch Aunt Bea, it doesn’t. She waves it, and it brushes the doctor’s face. “But—” she says, confused.
    “That’s what I was telling you about,” the doctor says to Aunt Bea. “It’s going to take her a while to judge distances.” He turns to the nurse. “Let’s open the blinds.”
    The nurse goes over to the window. Terry watches her. She expands as she approaches Terry, shrinks as she moves to the other side of the room. This is no surprise—Terry has always figured that certain people are big close up and little far away. But she had no idea that you could see behind you, that what was behind you remained visible. She twists back and forth to try to catch the space behind her in blackness.
    “Stand up, why don’t you,” the doctor says.
    Terry comes to her feet and faces the window.
    “That’s sky and clouds at the top part,” the doctor says. “Blue sky, white clouds, and trees underneath, the green leaves of trees. These windows are tinted, so it’s all a bit darker than it is really.”
    Terry takes a step. She stops, certain that she has reached the window. She holds out her hand, and Aunt Bea jumps up and grabs it. “Oh, honey,” she says. It’s all she can say.
    “No,” Terry says sharply, shaking Aunt Bea away. She feels better with her hand out in front of her. She takes two more steps, but she is still not at the window. Two more steps, two more. The nurse moves aside. Two more steps, and Terry’s fingers hit the glass.
    It is her hand that arrests her, pressed flat against the pane. “What are those cracks?” she says, referring to the wrinkles on her knuckles.
    Aunt Bea is beside her. She scans the view outside. “On the building?” she asks, wondering if Terry means the lines between the bricks. “Over there?”
    “No!” Terry slaps the window. She is suddenly panicky. “Where is Julie?” she says.
    “At school,” Aunt Bea says, putting an arm around her. “You know that, honey. You’ll see her at home.”
    “Where’s my face?” Terry says, and starts to cry.
    “Okay,” the doctor says. “It’s a little overwhelming, isn’t it, Terry?” He tells her to sit down and close her eyes. Whenever she is overwhelmed, he says, she should close her eyes for a few moments.
    Terry targets the couch. She waves her hands to keep Aunt Bea from helping. She has the impression that she is walking into a picture of flat shapes and that the heat she senses radiating from Aunt Bea’s body is what’s causing the shapes to gradually melt from view.
    Terry’s hand is on her reflection in the bathroom mirror.
    “That’s coming off, remember,” Aunt Bea says. “It’ll be the same colour as the rest of your skin.”
    Terry’s hand moves from the mirror to the fair side of her face. With the