Faces

She had little to do in her summer afternoons so She’d taken to studying murder cases and when She got too self-conscious about the librarians following her down the stacks She took up studying man-eaters. She had made it her summer goal to collect as many books on man-eaters as she could. She would walk into bookstores and say, “Man-eaters” instead of “Hello! Good afternoon! I like your shirt!” Tigers, sharks, obscenely large snakes; anything that Disney made evil She was rip-roaring to investigate. She especially liked large pictured books because then she would force herself to look at the attack photos. Spider bites were good ones because they tended to have a lot of puffy redness. They transformed the human body into something else, skin became gooey and limbs bloated and venom-logged.

She was aware of the horror, She wasn’t desensitized to it, in fact She felt it very much, the slight turn of the stomach, the hair on end, the dry mouth because it’d been open too long. When She was reading and looking at these books She would get lost and forget what time it was and if She were wearing shoes. Man-eaters. It sounded like a bad all-girl eighties band name, but She didn’t care. She had long since overhauled that perception of the word and now all that came to mind was misshapen body limbs and cropped out faces.
That struck her immediately. There were never any faces. It seemed that in all the pictures the faces of the victims would always be cropped out and there would just be their severed leg or stumpy bloody arm. She speculated there were no faces because they made it too personal. You would be able to see the tears running down their cheeks, the horror struck twitches and you would feel sorry for them. No, She wasn’t a sick freak like the librarian mildly and, in truth, indifferently suspected, She wanted to see the faces, more than the muscles and blood and strings of flesh, She wanted to see the faces.
Her goal for August was to find a book that didn’t show the injuries at all, just the faces of eaten men.