“Daughters of God” by Dinh Vong
--page 3

         And if she stopped with this business about the parasitic heads. Anne is the only family I’ve got. Being my little sister, I feel responsible for her.
            But she wouldn’t stop it. Later, she insisted there was more than one. That there were five heads coming out of her cheek.
            “They have their own personalities,” she said. “Sometimes one will cry and wake the others up.”
            “Do you really want to go where Uncle Joe is? Even twelve-year-olds get sent to the loony bin.” I must have told her a hundred times about Uncle Joe, just to shake her up a bit. How he’d been so wild with schizophrenia that he spent whole days yelling obscenities at people on street corners. He would sometimes spit on passerby, and got punched in the face a few times because of it. They had to tranquilize him in the end like an animal. He got a lobotomy, which means they cut out part of his brain, and now he just drools all the time in a madhouse in Connecticut. They don’t do that anymore though, so Dad’s safe. But even so, I tell Anne that they still do, and if she doesn’t stop talking nonsense, they’re gonna lobotomize her.
            “It hurts enough that I’m deformed. Why are you trying to scare me?”
            “Look,” I pulled out my compact and centered it square on her chubby face.
            She screamed and knocked it out of my hand.            “Fine, act crazy. See where it gets you. Just don’t do it when anyone else is around.”
            “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t let anyone see me like this.”
            “What’re you going to do? How’re you going to go to school?”
            “Ms. Parks said she would home school me.”
            “Do you really want to sit around here all day, talking about Jesus with Ms. Parks and not make any friends?”
            “I’m too mature for kids my age.”
            “You’re crazy is what you are.”
            “Stop calling me that. Now leave me alone, I need to make glasses for my heads,” she said, turning toward a pile of paper clips on the coffee table.
            “But if they’re parasitic, they’re sucking the lifeblood out of you.”            “They’re still my sisters, and like me, they’re almost blind.”
            Anne wore glasses. Large glasses that made her look cute to grown ups, but to other kids she was just weird. She didn’t have any friends, even among the other foster kids we lived with. Whenever anyone would walk into a room where Anne was, she’d turn her back and ignore them, even when Elvin or Shayna were nice enough to try to talk to her anyway.

~

            “If you’re gonna look like that on purpose, you better get good grades,” I told her when she brought home the big square frames from Lens Crafters. “Otherwise you’ll have nothing going for you.”
            “At least I don’t dress like a floozy.”
            “What?”
            “Nothing. Just that I don’t want to dress like some girls do.”

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