Lisa K. Buchanan
Window Dressing
She lifted an obedient chin to the white, hot light. Tears trickled over her crowfoot wrinkles while her eyeballs swooped down across the tray of tiny instruments, then fixed on the tip of her own nose. Having ditched my mother’s grasp, I hid behind scented ladies and observed the procedure through an eye-level clearing between two unacquainted sleeves: one, fur; the other, something silky. In reverent silence, we watched the white-coat technician place a clamp on the eyelashes and attack the brows with a sharp, gleaming tool. The lady was docile, but for the toes curling in her sandals.
“Edna,” said the white-smocked technician, “you’ll be transformed.”
The sleeves wandered off. Two ladies behind me rustled their shopping bags and whispered about lunch. Nobody held Edna’s hand or gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. Why was this gruesome procedure not happening in a hospital? Why had they not put her to sleep as they had done for my brother when they took out his tonsils?
When a second technician appeared, I fled. A lady with rabbit teeth and big hair tried to spray me with something. A baby in a stroller screamed to spare her life. Hurrying past a row of velvet, decapitated, pearl-strung necks, I found an upholstered platform and sat down. Just inches from my fingertips, was the pointy toe of a black evening shoe, its owner a tall beauty, gazing straight ahead. Her eyes were dry and unblinking and her lips were parted, but fixed. Even her hair was stiff. No heat rose from her body, no perfume or perspiration, or smell of breakfast. The backs of her legs had seams. Her fingers were petrified mid-air, as if reaching to open a door. Never again would she eat a drippy tuna melt, talk on the phone, or braid a daughter’s hair. How long before her kids would find her, sealed and mounted, a human trophy?
Rummaging through a sale table in the lingerie department, my mother was annoyed that I had strayed. But I didn’t mind her frown. Behind her on the escalator, I checked her legs for seams. I pressed my cheek to her freckled arm: warm. When she wiped her wet, sneezy nose with the back of her wrist, I knew the technicians hadn’t come near her. After lunch across the street, I pestered my mother for an ice cream I didn’t want, knowing the errand would take us past the store’s grand plate windows where even now, I expect to find Edna—fingers splayed, eyes painted open.
“Window Dressing” first appeared in Flashquake, December 2005
Lisa K. Buchanan (www.lisakbuchanan.com) lives in San Francisco. Her writings can be found in Bending Genres, The Citron Review, and The Ekphrastic Review. Notable, Best American Essays 2023; First Place, Short Fiction Prize, CRAFT, 2022. Current favorite book: Music Stories, Editor Wesley Stace
