The Chin I’m In
By Beth Kephart
Word Count 386
Look, he said, you can have this.
I squinted at the screen.
Or this.
Heart-shaped, he was saying. Square. Distinguished. His finger pointing, my eyes following, the computer screen alit with versions, visions, transfigurations into pretty.
Imagine being pretty.
Twenty-five, newly married, ill-equipped. In a week, I’ll go whoosh beneath the flash fluorescents as they wheel me down scrubbed hospital halls, dizzy me up and then down from one bed to the next, say relax, count backwards, you’ll be fine. I’ll thrash awake, eight hours on, with a face of bruise and barbs and bolts, a stomach pulpy with surgical blood, the chamber of my mouth clamped shut, and no air no air no air; I will not drown, but barely.
Some disruption in the genetic code that seems to have slipped every member of every generation except for me has left my jaw joints porous, my mandible incongruous, my teeth biting air, and I have spent the previous year having my teeth braced and chiseled, my gums sliced and grafted, my mouth triggered for the surgery that everyone agrees I need, if I want to chew, if I want to smile, and now, a week ahead of then, there is the matter of my chin.
The surgeon, his screen, his versions:
Choose pretty. You can have pretty.
I dodge, I defer, I suggest that perhaps I should be who I have been, in the years before my jaw went ping, before my bad genes had been decoded. And who have you been?, the physician asks. And what? I am a young woman steeped in ideas of color and reckless with the vocabulary of self and inadequate as I survey the alternative me’s on the surgeon’s screen. This is my chance, my best chance, the physician says, cosmetic opportunism as provoked by an accident of insufferable genetics, and I have no girlfriend and no mother there beside me, no imagination for heart, square, or distinguished, and the clock on the wall that I remember being green is ticking. Ten minutes to choose a face, to conjure me as pretty, to answer the physician, who is waiting, to fool the world, still waiting.
Covering the face I’ve carried forward with the heel of my palm as I write. Covering my chin with my fist.
Beth is the award-winning author of three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania.
