Haven.
She cut herself a piece of bread from the homemade loaf and
began mopping up bean juice with it.
Seeing that ... that mark on her forehead had unnerved her at
the time, unnerved her plenty. No sense kidding about that, just as
there was no sense kidding that it was just a mark, like a bruise. And
in case anyone ever wanted to know, 'Becka thought, she would tell
them that looking into the mirror and seeing that you had an extra
hole in your head wasn't one of life's cheeriest experiences. Your
head, after all, was where your brains were. And as for what she had
done next
She tried to shy away from that, but it was too late.
Too late, 'Becka, a voice tolled in her mind it sounded like
her dead father's voice.
She had stared at the hole, stared at it and stared at it, and then
she had pulled open the drawer to the left of the sink and had pawed
through her few meager items of makeup with hands that didn't seem
to belong to her. She took out her eyebrow pencil and then looked
into the mirror again.
She raised the hand holding the eyebrow pencil with the blunt
end towards her, and slowly began to push it into the hole in her
forehead. No, she moaned to herself, stop it, 'Becka, you don't want to
do this
But apparently part of her did, because she went right on doing
it. There was no pain and the eyebrow pencil was a perfect fit. She
pushed it in an inch, then two, then three. She looked at herself in the
mirror, a woman in a flowered dress who had a pencil sticking out of
her head. She pushed it in a fourth inch.
Not much left, 'Becka, be careful, wouldn't want to lose it in
there, I'd rattle when you turned over in the night, wake up Joe
She tittered hysterically.
Five inches in and the blunt end of the eyebrow pencil had
finally encountered resistance. It was hard, but a gentle push also
communicated a feeling of sponginess. At the same moment the
whole world turned a brilliant, momentary green and an interlacing
of memories jigged through her mind sledding at four in her older
brother's snowsuit, washing high school blackboards, a '59 Impala
her Uncle Bill had owned, the smell of cut hay.
She pulled the eyebrow pencil out of her head, shocked back to
herself, terrified that blood would come gushing out of the hole. But
no blood came, nor was there any blood on the shiny surface of the
eyebrow pencil. Blood or ... or ...
But she would not think of that. She threw the pencil back into
the drawer and slammed the draw shut. Her first impulse, to cover the
hole, came back, stronger than ever.
She swung the mirror away from the medicine cabinet and
grabbed the tin box of Band-Aids. It fell from her trembling fingers
and cluttered into the basin. 'Becka had cried out at the sound and
then told herself to stop it, just stop it. Cover it up, make it gone. That
