EUGENIA

To reach the CITGO truck stop where I bought supplies, I rode my bike through the part of Ashton made of nothing but memories. All the structures were gone. Houses, stores, churches, schools taken by the state of Pennsylvania through eminent domain, condemned and later demolished. Still, there were hints of what once was. Cinderblock outline of a foundation that used to hold up life. Half a brick wall. Porch steps leading nowhere. Pile of window frames. Stray limb of a busted, rusted swing set. Over the years, the streets buckled, became overgrown with weed and vine, and graffiti artists had their way with some sections of the old asphalt. I liked the graffiti. Colors so bold and brave even the heaviest of rainstorms lacked the grit to wash them away.

I steered carefully through those deserted streets, traveled on sunny days to avoid the worst crumbly spots, the deepest road fissures. I taught myself to ride a bike even though I was born with one arm half the size of the other, and a bitty hand sticking out where the elbow should have been. A one-armed person can operate a bike safely if she is strong, has a tight grip, practices, and doesn’t get discouraged. It’s also a wise idea to travel mostly straight roads. My blind eye never held me back. All I needed was one, good eye. The only problem with the blind eye was that people were afraid of it, afraid of me. A milky film veiled the blue iris, and the pupil didn’t change size. A steady black dot the size of the bubbles you fill in on standardized tests.

I didn’t mind Ashton’s ghost town section. I had memories of people going about their days, thinking they’d always live there and go about their days. Also, my grade school friend Violet used to live there. She wasn’t afraid of me. We chased butterflies in her backyard. Her kitchen smelled of cinnamon. She had a black cat with yellow eyes. Her family moved away when an underground coal vein caught fire and sent poison fumes into basements. People had no choice except to leave behind what they’d built and start a new life elsewhere.

Not many people moved to the side of Ashton that had escaped the fire where I lived. The mountains that rose above our valley were perfect for coal mining. After the fire, the Ashton mine closed its operations and just like that, the promise of a decent living and a tight knit community bled out of our hills. Still, there were cattle farms, a spring water bottling plant, turnpike stop. Some of Ashton held on. Mom said it was fine for me to remain where I’d been born and raised after she was gone. There was plenty of cash in the crawlspace, and if I needed help, I could call her brother John in Chicago.

Most every week, I rode my bike to the truck stop for food instead of the local grocery. I preferred shopping among strangers. On the way, I visited Miss Lydia Pratt’s back porch. She was a former teacher of mine, high school English. Miss Pratt stacked books for me on a white wicker table with treats she baked and couldn’t eat all by herself. Oatmeal cookies. Brownies. I returned the books quickly, so she wouldn’t get into trouble with the lending library. Sometimes Miss Pratt opened the door to chat. I didn’t like talking to people, even the ones who’d been kind to me, but she meant well. More than once, she had information about college courses by correspondence. I thanked her; told her I would think about it, that I might try a class someday. I didn’t want her to worry about me. If there was something to worry about, I’d do the worrying myself.

Once a year, I biked to the travelling medical bus that parked in the post office lot. I promised Mom I’d do that to be sure I didn’t need medication for my blood sugar the way she had. I dreaded that day. There was always a new, young doctor who looked at me like I was a half dead dog without a collar in the middle of a road. You’d think someone highly educated in the medical establishment would have more finesse. One time I finally blurted out: I know I’m not normal looking. Stare fast and get it over with.

When Mom died, I called Uncle John. He didn’t come to Ashton in person, thankfully, but he sent an undertaker who came to the house and took Mom away. She hadn’t been sick, just “old as the hills,” as she put it. At first, life was torture without her. I cried, couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think, but I knew I had to get used to being alone. Mom often reminded me that I was strong and smart, that I had the best of friends inside books. If I got sad, I could listen to records. If I got bored, I could crochet, do jigsaws, spend time in the garden and the greenhouse out back. Never met a plant I couldn’t grow. Peas, potatoes, lettuce, chard, sweet corn, tomatoes, onions, peppers, rhubarb, strawberries, sunflowers. Sunflowers were my specialty. I had a gift. Mine grew huge. Some of their heads were bigger than mine. Conceited, loveable buggers.

Shortly after Mom’s passing, I discovered a treasure. I wasn’t sure Mom would have approved, but she did always want me to be happy. What I found didn’t replace my mother, my best friend, but she made me feel better. I could breathe easier. I felt hungry again. Best of all, there was someone else in the house when I crawled into bed at night, someone there when I opened my eyes at sun’s break. No one would have been willing to take her in the way I did. I thought she was beautiful the moment I laid eyes on her. A baby. My baby. Not a real baby. Not anymore, though she’d been a real baby once. I named her Eugenia. I’d read a book with a character named Eugenia. I loved how the word sounded on the tongue, like something unique and reborn. If heavenly angels had names, Eugenia was one of them, though I wasn’t convinced there was anything like heaven or angels or a merciful god worth knowing.

Eugenia came into my life one morning as I was pedaling along the street where Violet used to live. It was bright, blue-sky day. I was distracted by some balled up wire lying in an old yard, wondering why I’d never noticed it before. It didn’t look too far gone. Something I could take home and use to tie up wayward plants. I should have been watching where I was going, because my bike tire got stuck in an iron storm drain grate, and down I went. I arched my neck so my head wouldn’t hit the ground too hard. I lay there rubbing my temple, seeing some spectacular shooting stars. Maybe that’s where the good luck of the day came from. When I finally rolled onto my hands and knees I saw Eugenia for the first time, down inside the storm drain. She was sunning her cute, little face, looking up at me with huge, adorable holes in her skull where her other eyes had been.

I hopped up, grabbed my bike, yanked my tire free. Half the grate was over the drain and half was lying on the road, like someone had started to remove it and changed their mind. Lying on my belly, I reached my normal-sized arm into the hole, hooked one finger into Eugenia’s eye socket. I hated to rescue her that way, but I had no other way to get to her. I sat there on the side of the road, not believing what I’d found, what I was holding in my hands. Eugenia’s hard, boney head was so indescribably sweet. Her lower jawbone was missing along with the rest of her body, but she didn’t need those parts. What I’d found was more than enough, more than I deserved. I postponed my quest for peanut butter and milk. Eugenia was in dire need of a bath, and I was in dire need of two aspirin tablets. I zipped the baby inside my backpack, and we headed home.

At first, I just kept the baby clean and dry, washed her with a warm, soapy washcloth, patted her dry. I sprinkled baby powder over the lovely, jagged lines running here and there across the cool bone of her, stuffed cotton balls into the precious hole on the top of head so she wouldn’t feel a draft. Eugenia’s enormous eyes never failed to take my breath away. So captivatingly oversized. I’d lose myself in them. And the little triangles she had for a nose were set perfectly in the center of her face. More than anything, I wanted Eugenia to feel as soothed and comforted as possible. She must have been through a lot.

After a few months, I remembered the box of Mom’s silk scarves stored in my old bedroom with the rest of Mom’s clothes. I’d moved to the biggest of the three bedrooms in the house. It smelled like almonds, Mom’s Jergens Body Lotion. I cut the scarves into smaller pieces to wrap and tie around Eugenia’s head. She looked so festive and smart in them, like a high fashion pirate baby, gutsy, adventurous but always sweet. I rotated the scarf pieces, that way she had something different to wear each day. Eventually, I dragged out my old doll stroller from the attic so I could wheel Eugenia with me throughout my days. I crocheted a pink and white blanket for the stroller, tucked the baby at the top. Unless you took everything apart, it seemed like Eugenia still had a body with baby-sized legs and arms and miniature, pink hands clapping for joy underneath my handiwork.

I’d had Eugenia for nearly five years when another July 4th rolled around. I woke up thinking about Mom. Maybe I’d been dreaming about her, because I thought I smelled her Maxwell coffee brewing in the kitchen. I still faced plenty of days I missed Mom as much as I ever had. Fortunately, there were tasks in the garden that promised to keep me busy that day. I shook off the blues, yanked on my gardening gloves and wheeled Eugenia out into the sunshine so she could watch me, listen to birds and breeze in tree leaves, or marvel at the magical way bumblebees land light as feathers. I set her near the sunflowers, because what baby wouldn’t adore a giant, yellow flower as round-faced as the sun itself.

The day ahead had promise, but it was a Monday. I’d noticed that if anything was going to happen that I didn’t want to happen, it happened on Monday. I found Mom dead in her bed on a Monday. The first day I had to leave my happy home and go to school it was Monday. When I was eight, I fell from a tree and suffered a concussion on Monday. The day I got my first monthly, which was nothing but a messy nuisance and stayed that way, was Monday. Also, I’d turned twenty-six recently, on a Monday. That felt old, older than I wanted to be. I didn’t buy myself a pack of Peanut Butter Kandy Kakes as I usually did to celebrate another year but then, when it was too dark to leave the house, I wished I had. I cut a hole in an apple, jammed a candle inside, lit the wick and sang. Though Eugenia was there in the kitchen watching me, looking cute as ever in a lavender and pea green scarf, I couldn’t find my way to cheerfulness. It was a depressing birthday celebrated on a Monday.

That July 4th Monday didn’t disappoint. An intruder, a spy, entered my private, tranquil garden sanctuary. I could feel eyes on me, tracking my every move. Other people claimed they could sense when someone was looking at them but not like me. I’d lived all my life with people staring, pointing, whispering behind my back, giving me wide berth in public places. I never blamed them. How could I. Sometimes I stood and stared at myself in my full-length mirror and couldn’t believe how bad it was. Besides the half arm, bitty hand, and spooky eyeball, my hair was fuzz, not hair. Fuzz that didn’t adequately cover my scalp skin, shiny as an inside layer of an onion. That’s why I wore hats. My favorite was a baseball cap. It was fun to be a fan along with other fans. Go Pirates!

A person stood behind the last row of sweet corn. I told myself to remain calm. Whoever it was must have climbed up the steep bank behind my property. At the bottom of the bank there was an overgrown apple orchard, left unattended years ago, mostly gone to seed. I still climbed down there during apple picking season to fill a sack with relatively decent apples. Past the orchard another half mile or so, there was a pond with a fishing pier and log cabins dotting its bank used by scouts and retreat groups. Sometimes I heard noises from the camp at night. Drums banging, fireworks whining, exploding. I was crazy about fireworks. I’d run outside to see bright colors fill an empty, waiting sky.

This wasn’t the first unwelcome visitor to my garden. There’d been others, teenagers I’d watch from behind the lace curtains in my kitchen window. If I was outside, I’d grab Eugenia, hurry into the house and slam the screen door as hard as I could as a warning. My idea was to scare them and send them away. This worked though some helped themselves to a tomato or two, fistful of strawberries, green pepper. They’d chomp, peer up at the house, but eventually they’d lose interest and trot back down the hill. I didn’t mind the stealing. I could never eat all I grew, even though I left garden presents for Miss Pratt and boxes outside the truck stop. I figured truckers didn’t eat enough fresh produce.

For some reason on that July 4th Monday, I didn’t turn tail and run into the house. To this day, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because the person smelled so good. Some kind of exotic perfume. One of the best scents I’d ever sniffed.

“Hello?” I called out as bravely as I could, stepping in front of Eugenia’s carriage as any mother lioness would do.

“Hello?” came the reply.

A female voice, raspy and low, like she was trying to sound tougher than she really was.

“This is private property.”

I could spy what looked like a female build through slits in the corn stalks. Black shirt. Black pants. Part of a chalk white face under black hair. Black lipstick. Jet black. Inky black. Starless night black. This person liked black.

“Please leave,” I said. “Now!”

Even though I hadn’t run away, I didn’t want to go through the ordeal again. The ordeal of seeing someone new going through the ordeal of seeing me for the first time. The expression of horror on a face.

“No,” she answered.

I’ll admit I wasn’t prepared for that.

Black sneakers stepped toward me. Sunlight glinted off black nail polish on a pink hand. She marched herself out of the stalks, wound past the tomato stakes, halted at the edge of the sunflowers. A girl of seventeen or so. Short hair. Eyes outlined with thick, black lines. Lids powdered deep purple and glittery. Silver nose ring. Black leather choker dotted with silver spikes. Her face moon pale from some sort of skin product. She was a fairy tale character in a wonderful way, in an Alice in Wonderland way but not Alice. Alice’s more interesting and captivating cousin. Despite my good sense, I liked her right off the bat, the brazen way she folded her arms across her chest, tipped her chin up at my sunflowers.

“Awesome,” she said, this time in a normal voice, higher and clear. “Can I have one?”

“No.”

“Are you copying me?” she asked.

I snorted. “Why would I copy you? I think I’ve said the word “no” once or twice in my lifetime.”

She giggled then, a pleasant sound, like a quiet set of happy hiccups that happen when you’ve been crying but then someone says something funny.

“Okay, you win,” she said. “You’re hilarious.”

“I’ll say it again. Please get out.”

The girl held her ground, looked me up and down. She didn’t try to act like she wasn’t taking me in. She had a right, I suppose, to see me for what I was. Deformed freak. Outcast. Something to be avoided, like the person who leans over and vomits, and everyone jumps back. I felt my cheeks tighten; my lips press themselves thin. Same old story.

“Get out. Please.”

The girl didn’t budge. She let her eyes fall on the baby carriage. When one of her black eyebrows arched up, my heart pained. A baby’s skull in a doll carriage, head swathed in a red, white and blue bandana. I knew what Eugenia was, but I loved Eugenia. I didn’t want anyone to think mean things about her.

“No,” the girl said. “I’ll stay a bit.”

She plopped herself down in the middle of my garden, under my magnificent sunflowers, crossed her legs Indian style, dug into a shorts pocket, pulled out a cigarette, a lighter, flicked the silver case, flamed the cigarette and sucked deep. I’d never developed a plan to handle someone who refused to leave my property. I turned Eugenia’s carriage so that the baby was facing away from the stubborn girl.

Unsure of what else to do, I picked up a basket and began plucking tomatoes from vine. Maybe she would finish her cigarette and leave. Cherry tomatoes dropped warm into my palm. I popped one in my mouth. All things tasted best that way, fresh from the stem that bore them. The girl leaned her head back, blew smoke rings. They floated like halos above my garden. I paused to admire perfect circles, free as the breeze. On a whim, I tossed a tomato to the girl. She snatched the fruit out of the air like a pro and ate it. We continued that way. Me picking. Her catching and eating.

“What’s your name?” She asked at last.

I couldn’t imagine why she cared to know my name.

“June.”

“I hate my name. Corraaaa Leeeeee. Makes me sound like a dumb brat with blonde pigtails and freckles, missing front teeth, on the label of a jam jar.”

I stopped picking to stretch up straight. “Don’t forget the fake turquoise sky above you and the sun with eyes and a big-lipped, red-cheeked, weirdly disturbing smile.”

She laughed. Then I did. It was fun to laugh with her, even though she was a stranger, and she was pushy.

“This all yours?” Cora Leigh asked. “The house and everything or do you work here?”

“It’s mine now that my mother isn’t here.”

“Your little puppet hand is so cool. I’m totally impressed how you can pick up stuff with it. Amazing. That’s talent.”

Cora Leigh tapped her cigarette on the dirt. I felt my cheeks burn. I swallowed, then swallowed again.

“It’s not a puppet hand. It’s a real hand. Take your butts with you when you go.”

Coral Leigh stretched, yawned, not bothering to cover her mouth. Her fillings matched the silver spikes on her choker.

“What’s wrong with your nose?” she asked.

“Nothing is wrong with my nose. What do you mean? It’s my eye that’s not normal.”

“You mean the white one? I love that freakin’ thing. Amazing. You have a real White Walker eyeball.”

I sat down on the ground. My back was aching. Nothing new. My spine was a tad crooked. We looked across at each other, Cora Leigh and I, eye to eye, six feet or so dividing us.

“What is a White Walker?” I asked.

“Game of Thrones?” she asked, pulling out another cigarette she didn’t light, just twirled it between her fingers like a magician with a playing card. “TV series? HBO?”

“Heard of it,” I lied.

“White Walkers are basically ice zombies.”

“And that’s a good thing?” I asked. “What’s wrong with my nose? I thought that was the one thing I had going for me.”

“Good one,” Cora Leigh said, cracking one wrist bone, then the other. “You sniff a lot.”

Her lipstick left black circles around her cigarette butts.

“I like how you smell,” I admitted.

“That’s a little weird. Just saying.”

I felt my hands fist up.

“You know what’s weird? Someone who invades private property and makes themselves at home.”

“Don’t get pissy,” she said. “It’s Bombshell. Stupid ass store, but I like the smell.”

“Bombshell?”

“Perfume? Victoria’s Secret? Get out much? Ever been to a mall?”

Words that could have sounded mean, but they didn’t. We were just talking, having a conversation.

“I don’t need much. I mostly use catalogs and mail order.”
Cora Leigh lit the second cigarette, took in two short puffs, blew smoke from her nostrils. I didn’t think that would be good for the sinus membranes.

“Do you miss her?” she asked. “Your dead mom?”

“I never said she was dead.”

“She is, though, isn’t she.”

“What does your mom say about your smoking?”
“She’s busy banging her new boyfriend. That’s why I’m stuck here at this lame nature camp. She signs me up for whatever will get me out of the house. At least there’s an art room.”

“Won’t you get in trouble for leaving the camp?”

“Has it been bad? Looking like you look? Doesn’t bother me. I love things like you.”

“I’m not a thing,” I said.

A lump blossomed in my throat I didn’t know what to do with. I wished it wasn’t Monday, that this girl had never found my garden.

“Sorry!” she said. “Not what I meant! I think you’re totally bad ass.”

I reached up, pulled the baseball cap from my head. No reaction from Cora Leigh. She continued to puff and blow. Every now and then she glanced at the stroller behind me, but I ignored that.

“Why don’t you live with your dad if you don’t want to live with your mom?” I asked.

It was none of my business. This teenaged girl was absolutely none of my business.

“He’s got a new family,” she said, stubbing out her second cigarette half smoked into my garden dirt. “Is that a Halloween decoration?”

The acids in my stomach boiled up. I swallowed again, thinking I might puke.

“Please leave now.”

“I knew you’d get riled up, but I love bones, skeletons, skulls. That’s what I draw. That’s my thing. I adore the little one you have there, though I’m not sure it goes with the doll carriage vibe, but you do you.”

I smiled despite myself. No, it didn’t go. Nothing about Eugenia made sense. I didn’t have the strength to stop Cora Leigh when she stood up, walked to Eugenia, and picked her up. I felt frozen. Cora Leigh was a force of nature like wind or rain. She removed Eugenia’s headscarf, ran her fingertips tenderly over the crooked lines on my baby’s bare head.

“I found her,” I explained. “Some heinous person left her alone in the bottom of a storm drain. Maybe she was still born. Maybe she died suddenly, somehow. I don’t know.”

“You found a baby?” I could hear the fear dripping into Cora Leigh’s voice. Maybe shock. Maybe disgust.

“Just her skull. She’d passed long before I found her.”

“You sure it’s real?”

I’d never considered that Eugenia might not be real, as in not human made. I didn’t know what to think. My eyes burned, the kind of hot tears that would have a mind of their own. Cora Leigh paused in her pawing of my baby. I blinked. Mistake. Tears popped free and slid. I hung my head, watched as Cora Leigh’s black sneakers walked towards me again. She sat down, close by. The baby was in her lap. She wrapped Eugenia’s bandana around her head, leaving the knot in the front.

“Knot looks like a little flower if you keep it in the front, see?” Cora Leigh said as she reached over and placed my baby in my lap. “I think she looks cute like that.”
“She does,” I managed.

“For what it’s worth, I think that’s real. It’s heavy for its size. The surface isn’t perfect. It’s not smooth, like the plastic ones in the Halloween stores.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I rasped, giving my cheeks a quick swipe. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to camp?”

“I’ve handled real skulls in art studios.”

“You should go. The camp people will be worried.”

Up close, Cora Leigh looked younger. I wondered about her stone-hearted parents. Who were these people who failed to appreciate her unique, defining differences, the strength of someone who chose to look different on purpose, happy in her own skin.

“I’ll go in a few minutes, I promise,” Cora Leigh said. “Would it be okay if I took a few pictures of your skull with my phone?”

“Why?” I asked, not liking the idea at all.

“Just for me, I promise. Honestly, I think it’s so beautiful. Has its own personality. Please? Just for me to look at. I swear it on my heart and hope to die.”

Eugenia stared up at me from my lap, her big eyes curious and open to new things and why shouldn’t she be. Shouldn’t she have the chance to meet inspiring people, to experience something unforgettable like having her picture taken by a brave, young artist and a girl at that? I handed my baby to Cora Leigh.

“If you put it that way,” I whispered.

What followed resembled a professional photography session. I helped Cora Leigh find places in the garden with dappled light and interesting backgrounds. Eugenia posed under a corn stalk. She sat comfortably on the top of a tomato stake. In one, Eugenia rested on a dug-up part of the rhubarb patch, her white glow luminous against dark brown earth. Another was Eugenia on a bed of lettuce leaves, a princess on a velvet throne, and Eugenia atop a sunflower picked by Cora Leigh.

When Cora Leigh was ready to go, I had her wait while I went inside for a bottle of water. Best to be hydrated when taking a walk. Eugenia and I stood at the edge of our yard and watched Cora Leigh until she was out of sight. She stopped once, turned around to wave. I waved back enthusiastically with my “puppet” arm. Cora Leigh jumped up and down, like applause. I tried not to cry. Mom said it was a waste of time to feel sorry for yourself, and she was right, but it hurt.

As the days of summer wound down, I had a lot to do to prepare my garden for winter. There were plants that had to be dug up and moved to the greenhouse, vines to be cut down, pruning to encourage a good harvest in the next season. It didn’t forget about Cora Leigh, though I tried. I thought of her most when I was in the garden. Sometimes I sat where we sat together talking that day. Sometimes I paused at the places where she’d photographed Eugenia.

Late November, I hiked to the scout camp. It was unoccupied that time of year. I peeked into windows until I found the art room. There were easels, jars stuffed with brushes, a mounted deer head, bowl of plastic fruit. I looked at the empty lake mirroring clouds overhead and wished the best for Cora Leigh, hoped she had good friends to make up for her family, and a well-equipped studio where she could draw whatever she wanted to draw. Maybe she’d be famous someday.

December was the one time of year I received something personal in my mailbox. A greeting card from Uncle John, the idea being that since I was completely alone, getting a greeting card was gift enough. The cards always featured Lake Michigan. That year it was an icy, wintertime lake, blue icebergs all crashed into each other, fighting for space. Dear June, Wishing you a Merry Christmas. Best regards, Uncle John.

The next day, I was shocked to receive another piece of personal mail. A letter I was lucky to find, jammed inside the Penny Saver. A black envelope, my name and address in white ink. Cursive writing, a script with loops and flourishes. Instead of dots over the i’s, there were miniature, white hearts. The envelope smelled of Bombshell. Victoria’s secret scent. Inside, a black and white sketch of Eugenia, head wrapped, knot in front, but Eugenia had eyes instead of empty sockets. One normal eye and a White Walker eye like mine. I could barely breathe.

Dear June, I hope you like your present. My community college is showing the movie “Corpse Bride” during February for free. It’s a kickass movie. Call my cell, number below. Don’t say NO. If you don’t have a car, UBER it. You’ve heard of UBER, right? Your friend, Cora Leigh

I read the letter to Eugenia, cocked her head to the side so she could concentrate on Cora Leigh’s words. She looked worried, but it was hard to tell. I walked to the backdoor and tossed the letter and the Penny Saver into the compost heap. At the last minute, I tucked the envelope with Cora Leigh’s return address inside my pocket. When I turned back to Eugenia, I swear she winked at me.

Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in The MacGuffin, Epiphany, CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Eclectica Magazine among others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House was a category finalist in the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Awards, selected as one of the Best Indie Books of 2023 by Kirkus Book Reviews, and won third place in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Please visit her at https://virginiawatts.com/