Here is something short for you to read.
My recollection of the moments just after the attack comes to me now in flashes, like fleeting peeps of light through an almost opaque filter. I guess that filter is basically my brain’s way of screening me from the things it doesn’t really think mattered to my survival. Coming down from the mountain seemed to happen in real time, and I can remember that frighteningly clearly. Afterwards, though, it all speeds up. The shocked expressions on the group of grade-schoolers out in the big woods for a nice field trip scream past and through me like a photon stream of twisting faces. Their teacher, barely able to calm them especially in my sped up memory, whips a cell phone from her pocket which springs open with all the speed of a switchblade. Her stammered reassurances and the grimaces she couldn’t hide I remember now only as a kind of constant murmur. The ambulance came, I recall, with almost lightning speed.
It’s funny. I remember those things, the basic actions that took place, but lying in this bed I can’t for the life of me recall what I was thinking. I can remember staring at my hands after I took them away from my face for the first time, high up along the tree line just after it bit me and being so scared of how red they came away. I also remember wondering where Marc the photographer was, where he had run to. Then I remember that I ran down. Down to wherever I could find someone that could help me, and I got almost as far as the parking lot.
The ambulance ride is a blank, and I think understandably so. I wake up here, in this hospital bed, and my face is layered under bandages. I can only guess what shape most of it is, because I can’t touch it. I can’t breathe through my nose right now, and I could breath so clearly through it after the damn mountain lion bit me, after I stumbled down that stupid mountain and nearly killed myself trying not to bleed to death. And lost my nose.
For the first time today I find myself really thinking about my nose. It was a pretty medium length, and kind of pointy, but I thought it looked good on my face. I got it from my mother, and I think it looks almost better on her. Now she doesn’t have any competition. I think about my red hair and round eyes, my cute chin offset by my sharp cheekbones, and that splash of now missing freckles.
I move my hand to my face and lightly touch the bandages. It seems to shoot pain through the cotton and into my face, and I cringe and feel my eyes tear. My nose made my cheekbones look a little softer by comparison. Now they‘ll look…
I can’t even finish the thought as it leaves me aghast and picturing my own face completely without a nose, almost like a cartoon character. It might be funny, like something you made in Photoshop, except it leaves me paralyzed at the thought of the reactions of everyone I will see in person from this point on. If I even get off as well as only losing a nose. Maybe I have copious scar tissue. I’m momentarily grateful that I at least still have both eyes, but the thought of my once pretty face as a mask of discolored, disjointed scarring creeps in and dashes the glimmer of positive thought. I could’ve just gotten a glass eye, too.
I wonder if I’ll get a prosthetic, whether it’ll be something that looks okay from a few feet away or maybe will just look fake and creepy, like some sort of trademark hideous disfiguration of the villain in a movie. I think about buying everything mail-order and wearing big hats. I think about wearing sunglasses to disguise it too, and for a second it sounds like a big hat and sunglasses could maybe do the trick. Maybe I could step out in public and people wouldn’t stare. Then I realize I can’t support sunglasses.
I hit the hospital bed with my fist and the sound is muffled by the bandages wrapped even across my ears. They page a doctor over the speaker somewhere and I wonder if he’s being sent to my room. I’m moving around some by now, someone must have noticed. I wonder how I’ll pay for this, and suddenly Marc the photographer and all that comes back. I know I can’t ever pose again. I tilt my head down just enough to see that the American Eagle Summer Camping Sweater Vest has been cut off me and replaced with a paper gown. I wonder whether I could be a hand model to pay the bills and want to cry.
A middle-aged doctor enters the room. “Allison?” he asks me, apparently looking to confirm that I’m conscious.
“Yes?” I answer shakily, on the brink of hysterics, and this time I pronounce it “Des?” The nose-less model Allison Heart. Ex-model. I’ll have to wear a mask. Or never leave the house. Recluses are kind of glamorous, in a mysterious way.