Hiding Your Face, Irina Tall Novikova, 2024. Foil, ink, gel pen, thread, collage, cardboard, colored paper. 40 x 30 cm.
A Life in Shards
Tiff M.Z. Lee
The glass girl’s boyfriend likes to watch her squirm as he taps his fingernails—carefully, always so carefully—on her hips and stomach. He loves the pitter-patter sound and the way she reacts. He’s in awe that glass can be so sensitive.
When they lie together, he always cradles her gingerly, like an Amazon package marked CAUTION! THIS SIDE UP! In truth, that’s why she hates him in the end.
She’s heard all the jokes, mostly from her dad as he learned new English phrases from the guys at work.
“Don’t lie, baby! I can see right through you!” with a barely contained grin when she was five and came home from school with mud smeared all over and a layer of gravel settling in the base of her hollow torso. That was the last time she spent recess playing tag around the jungle gym instead of reading in the special chair the school set up for her in the library.
“So clumsy, baby! We should cover you in bubble wrap,” with a half-laughing, half-serious sigh when she was twelve and tripped over her own feet at a track meet, leaving a barely visible hairline crack along her left hand.
She remembers begging to join the track team that year. She wanted to train with the other kids and go on overnight trips to meets. She wanted to feel the hot sun shining through her and see the rainbow it cast on the track. She remembers the moment she fell and knew she would never be allowed to do this again.
Her parents were terrified that she would break herself. For the rest of her childhood, they never let her out of her bubble-wrapped life.
Wouldn’t it be nice, though, to break? To hit something—anything—with real force and shatter into a million pieces and have your body be as broken as your heart, at least for a few months, while your flesh and bones stitch themselves back together?
The glass girl remembers seeing kids with casts or in crutches and secretly envying them.
Her hand doesn’t fully crack for another ten years. She is on the couch with her boyfriend, watching pirated anime and holding hands. He’s careful as usual, adding no pressure of his own until a particularly dramatic fight sequence, when he starts unconsciously rubbing her smooth palm.
Then his thumb slips a little on his own sweat, and his nail digs into the old crack in exactly the wrong way. That’s all it takes. There’s a horrible sound and a sharp pain. Her ring and pinky fingers shatter onto the floor.
Her boyfriend screams and then apologizes again and again until he cries. The glass girl assures him that it barely hurts, in the hole where her fingers used to be.
They try all kinds of super glue. Eventually they hire a glassblower to meld her back together, but the reattached digits are immobile and unfeeling.
Her boyfriend stops touching her at all. He apologizes some more, until she finally breaks up with him.
After that, the glass girl only does one-night stands. She finds them on hookup apps and the occasional bar. They are all perfectly nice people who are curious about her body, how the glass feels in their hands and how she reacts. But unlike her ex-boyfriend, they are not in love with her, so they treat her less like a precious thing.
One older woman pays for a weekend in Paris, where they climb the Eiffel Tower, and she loses the tip of her ear somewhere in the king bed of their luxury hotel room. She meets a guy who somehow seems more into the fact that she’s Asian than the fact that she’s made of glass. It’s a revelation as he looks at her how she imagines he looks at other Chinese girls and touches her with that pressure she’s been missing her whole life. She’s so happy that she doesn’t even care when he crushes her big toe against the headboard. For three years, she leaves shards of herself behind everywhere.
“Oh, my dear baby! Those who live in glass bodies shouldn’t throw stones.”
These days, she can’t stand for anyone to touch her. Every time she shifts, her splintered pieces rub together, and the pain makes her want to scream. She DIYs the worst bits with glue and spray foam insulation. The glass blower would probably do it for free, but she doesn’t want to ask, and she’s not sure it would be better, anyway.
She sits alone in her apartment, broken at last, and she finds that she still wants to punch something.
She is limping around the local superstore, searching for cheap ways to pad out her furniture, when she passes by a dusty corner of the pet section. She finds a single enormous goldfish in a dirty tank. It has bulging, uneven eyes and swims lethargically in awkward circles.
The pet department manager says the fish has been there for more than five years. He lets her have it for free.
At home, she fills in her cracks until her lower torso is water-tight and swallows down the fish in one wriggling gulp. She uses the last of her disability check to buy a filter and changes the water every day.
She feeds the fish through a centimeter-wide hole in her chest, roughly where her heart would be. It swims up, just slowly enough that it doesn’t hurt her, and catches the flakes. It seems happier. The aquarium girl looks inside herself and no longer wants to break.
Tiff M.Z. Lee is a Canadian living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she contemplates fairytales and sea creatures. She can be found online at tiffmzlee.com