Maw

by Miriam Gershow

I once heard a story about a one-eyed girl who showed up to eighth grade without even an eyepatch–just a sucked-in socket, a permanent, fleshy wink. The class was past the age when a teacher stood a new arrival in front and announced name and last known locale. (“Everyone, this is Robin from Sacramento.”) So the eyeless girl—or the eye girl, if you’re a glass half-full type—shrugged into a desk in the middle back acting like she didn’t notice everyone looking, which maybe she didn’t given her natural limitations: no depth perception, maybe no peripheral vision. “Was it a BB gun?” a brave and lippy boy asked, and everyone laughed. She smiled when she said ‘childhood cancer’ so no one knew if she was joking, everyone too stunned to ask in the maw of silence before the teacher tutted from her desk, as rescue or maybe taunt, “All eyes on me.”

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Miriam Gershow is the author of Closer, Survival Tips: Stories and The Local News. Her writing is featured in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Oregon Book Award.