The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

She looked up at Mama, at her wide face, smooth and clear. She nodded and Mama took her hand, squeezed it in her warm, dry one. Pop-Pop took the other, damp and hot.

“Are you ready?” he asked them both, and Josie nodded again. She had no choice. She had to do what the grown-ups said, go when they said go, be still when they yelled for quiet.

They stood, all three together: mother, daughter, father. And they walked toward the door, water now leaking in underneath, a slow, dark drip, mixing with the red running in thick lines from Pop-Pop’s chest. She felt her hands slip and noticed she was taller again, her head nearly at her mother’s shoulder. Her father reached for the door handle and Josie was his height, then taller. She reached forward and pulled the knife free just as he opened the door.

The world flooded in and Josie swam toward the light.

Officer Baby Boy Blue

Douglas Ford

I almost gouged out my own eye at a young age. But not in the usual way you hear about, not with fireworks, and certainly not with a weapon.  I never broke rules, so nothing that glamorous.

Instead, it happened with a model kit, the plastic sort requiring a special sort of cement that came with a warning label about how sniffing it could cause brain damage. I never did anything like sniff glue, either.  I didn’t want to face consequences, and I certainly didn’t want brain damage.  What kind of future could I expect with brain damage?

But I nearly gouged out my own eye with a hobby knife, an X-Acto blade. Just a slip of the hand, and the blade pierced the skin just an inch below my left eye. Just imagine if the blade went into my eye and didn’t stop there but continued going and into my brain.  A horrid thought.

The kit I worked on was the Frankenstein monster, not the kind other kids put together, like a battleship or a bomber, but a monster out of a black-and-white film, lumbering away from a gravestone, arms outstretched. To remove the plastic pieces, I used my X-Acto blade, just like the instructions suggested, and somehow, I still managed to have an accident. Just one careless slip and the point of the blade sliced a two-inch incision, like a third set of eyelids.

A mental fog prevents me from explaining how it happened exactly, but I distinctly remember the panicked trip to the hospital and the chaos in the emergency room. The chaos didn’t happen right away though, only after a very long period of time in the waiting room, with my mother holding one of several paper towels to my face in an attempt to stop the bleeding. It came as a relief when someone finally showed me to a bed where a doctor would examine me.  They told my mother she would have to wait, and a nurse took me back and helped me up to the bed, smiling at me as she closed the curtain halfway, leaving plenty of space for me to see the doctors and nurses moving about the floor.

Then pandemonium broke loose.

To this day, I don’t know the exact nature of the crime or emergency, but the facility began filling with wounded policemen and burned firemen on gurneys, many of them still wearing their emergency gear, heavy coats for the firemen and armored vests for the policemen.  At first, just three or four of them arrived, but their count steadily rose until every visible gurney and bed held some horribly injured emergency worker.  I don’t even know where they came from.  Many of them screamed and groaned, sounds made more terrible by the glimpses of blood and burns covering their skin.

No one remained still, the whole area in constant movement, a flurry of confusion as injured firemen and policemen continued to pour into the hospital.

But one person moved slowly, taking his time and gazing about with what looked like curiosity and fascination. I could see him through the half-closed curtain, a police officer, strolling casually toward the bed on which I lay.

As he came closer, I could see that he wore mirrored sunglasses, even though we were indoors.  Despite the glasses, he looked friendly enough, and he even smiled as he walked into my curtained area.  I hesitated before returning the smile.  I wanted someone— preferably a doctor or nurse—to come tell me everything would soon be okay.  But I supposed the police officer would have to do.

When he approached, I saw how the mirrored glasses filled his face.  And worse, I could see my own reflection in the lenses. I looked horrible, so bloody and ragged.  The wound on my face gaped like the mouth of a dead fish.

The officer shook his head and made a tsking sound.  I had to look away, not wanting to see my reflection anymore.

“It looks bad,” he said, as if I needed confirmation of what I myself could see.  Then he added, “But it could be worse.”

I almost turned my head for an explanation, but I couldn’t face my own reflection.

“No, really,” he said, “it could be worse.  I’ll show you.  Look.”

That voice had real authority, so it compelled me.  I knew I had to look. I turned in time to see the officer lift his sunglasses, an act that made me thankful at first, grateful that it made the awful image of myself go away.

But then I saw what the sunglasses had hidden.

His left eye, just a folded mass of flesh, was held shut by a line of grotesque metal stitches.  Had I any presence of mind, I might have made an association to the model kit left unfinished in my bedroom, the Frankenstein monster.  I wouldn’t think of that for quite some time, just as I wouldn’t make another association until years later, when I would see the puckered folds of a woman’s labia for the first time.  At this moment, seeing the