Around the Edges

 By Brittany Roeper

It was 7:32 p.m., and Eliza waited underneath the restaurant awning, barely out of reach of the rain. Wasn’t rain on your birthday supposed to be good luck? She would need it. Second dates were always iffy. She pulled her phone half-out of her coat pocket. There was still no reply to her text asking for an ETA. Just cold rain dripping into her hair. Give it another ten minutes, and then she’d decide whether to leave.

She went inside to wait at the bar, deliberately avoiding eye contact with the hostess. Eliza ordered a white Russian. She thought about sipping it sparingly, but after two minutes, the glass was empty. After another drink, her ten minutes was up. As she walked home, she let the rain hit her and tried not to care.

Around 8:30, after changing out of her nice clothes and detangling her wet hair, she decided to call it an early night. She walked into the kitchen in mismatched pajamas and warm wool socks. The cat was already perched on the counter, meowing at her. Eliza pulled an open can of tuna from the fridge, removed the loose layer of plastic wrap, and turned the can straight over, sloshing it into his food bowl. By then, the cat was nowhere to be found. Getting stood up was the theme of the night, after all.

She returned a call from her parents to wish her a happy birthday, deciding to leave out the pitiful part of the evening where she was supposed to be joined at the restaurant. Instead, she talked about the marketing campaign at work and how a new coworker insisted on calling her “Elizabeth,” even though it wasn’t her name. Her parents would appreciate that—her insistence on the name they gave her twenty-seven years ago today, the result of months of discussion and thought. She tried to imagine what her life would have been like as “Elizabeth.” An image formed as she fell asleep of a librarian in a long skirt and cardigan, neatly placing books on a shelf.

The next morning, Eliza felt heavy and fuzzy around the edges. The sunlight was too much, and her head was throbbing. Funny—she wasn’t usually a lightweight. It was probably just the start of a long day. She rubbed her eyes and yawned, stretching her arms out in front of her. But there was . . . something. A shimmer at her fingertips—almost like the light was shining through them. It was shining through them. Straight through. For just a moment, her fingertips weren’t there at all.

She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. Then she balled each hand into a tight first. When she opened them, everything looked fine. Felt fine. She moved her hands in toward her face and spread them out, looking at each of her ten fingers. They were all there. She tapped each fingertip against the other hand. All there. It must have been a glint of sunlight or her tired eyes refusing to connect with her brain. She turned her hands over one more time. All there. Of course they were.

Eliza didn’t want to bother with dating for the next few weeks. With the new marketing campaign, she spent most of her time in the office and only the barest hours at home. Each night, she took a moment to examine her hands, tapping each fingertip against the other palm. (The cat had to wait for his food.) She repeated the inspection each morning, almost holding her breath until it was over. She was overtired; she thought. But she was focused now and motivated. A little drained, but moving as fast as she could. And maybe that’s why she didn’t see the change. It was unremarkable, like watching your hair grow. Unnoticed, until something jolts you into recognition.

It was a week later that she woke up thirsty in the middle of the night. She didn’t bother to flick the lights on, just padded toward the neon clocks on her kitchen appliances. She squinted as the refrigerator door opened and lit up the kitchen. Then a scream caught in her throat.

There were her pajama sleeves, ending in nothing. She froze. Her brain blinked in shock. She couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. Squeezed her eyes shut. Then opened them. Nothing changed. Her hands were gone.

She stood motionless until the cat on the countertop meowed at her, flicking his tail in her direction. Nonplussed, as usual. Wait . . . could she still pet him? Eliza reached out, imagining where her hands would be—where she felt them to be. The cat’s fur felt soft underneath her fingers.

She switched into the cool familiarity of work mode and spent the rest of the night at her computer. There had to be an explanation, or a treatment, or something. She tried to look straight ahead at the screen, ignoring the keys that looked like they moved on their own. Her search terms were variations on “hallucinating missing body parts” and “disappearing hands, real”. Results were a mixture of sites about psychosis, phantom limb pain, and closeup magic. Her algorithms would be totally screwed up after this.

Eliza called in to work the next day—dialing was a challenge—but that was a temporary solution. She had to get through the rest of the week, and HR would need a sick note. She called a nearby clinic to schedule an appointment. When the receptionist asked the reason for her visit, “nerve issues” was all she could come up with. Cryptic, but somehow true.

The doctor listened as she recounted everything she could remember, from her birthday until that morning. He nodded. Then she pulled off her unseasonable winter gloves and looked away, swallowing hard to keep from crying. After the exam, the doctor simply said, “Okay,” and left the room. He came back twenty minutes later with a few sheets of paper—PDF printouts about the condition. No prescriptions. No orders for lab tests or scans. No investigating or problem-solving. No cure. The doctor even said as much. He didn’t see cases like this often, but they happened. She was on her own from there.

After a few months, all that was visible was her head, neck, and shoulders. She had to bundle up when going out in public—wearing tall boots, jeans that were too long for her, and gloves that went up to her elbows. There was no telling how many people had seen someone going invisible, but she didn’t want to be someone’s first. The thought mortified her.

Her coworkers knew something was up, but they couldn’t quite pinpoint it. And of course Eliza wouldn’t talk about it. Her silence permeated every conversation, so it was a relief to everyone when Eliza finally put in her two weeks’ notice.

After a year, she was fully invisible, and felt it. She took a call-center gig she could work from home, unseen. UPS deliveries sat untouched on her doorstep until she could see the delivery men from her window, climbing into their trucks.

She eventually settled into a routine: Wake up, get dressed. (She could put clothes on by feel, but only with her eyes closed.) Drink coffee, eat breakfast, put on her headset. Spend most of her day in other people’s problems—other people’s lives. Eliza had solutions. Eliza could dissolve their frustration, lessen their anger. She ate microwave meals and cold pizza while the cat tried to warm himself on her computer.

Her parents still dropped by every now and again, knowing how difficult it was for her to go out, but she dodged her friends so much that most of them just stopped trying. A few stuck around longer, bringing food or magazines. They tried to keep things upbeat during their visits, but Eliza could tell they were unnerved. She was too. She had become a pro at ignoring her body, her physicality, herself. Having them around reminded her of her own strangeness. It was easier to spend the time alone with the cat and the frustrated callers that yelled into her headset.

The one thing that Eliza couldn’t keep away was the nagging question of what would happen to her. In twenty, thirty, forty years, who would stop by and make sure she was still alive? Maybe her landlord would go to collect his rent and realize it wasn’t there. That she wasn’t there. He’d call the police for a welfare check, and they wouldn’t find her. What would they make of a weighted, immovable pile of clothes on the floor? She had to force herself not to think about it—the idea was just too morbid.

Her parents worried about it, too. When they suggested she move in with them, her reaction was an immediate no. She was invisible, not a child. Instead, she sent text messages in an almost daily attempt to reassure them—things like “Got the wrong muffin at the coffee shop. Know you’d love it, though, Dad” or “Look, Mom! Saw your favorite flowers today”.

Of course, most of the messages were lies. The pictures she sent were usually from a single evening out, weeks before, where she braved the world in a sightseeing frenzy. Grocery store, cafe, laundromat—she found places she could wander through unseen, collecting evidence of her expedition to dole out slowly. No one would really look at her. They were all going about their own business. A silent agreement that allowed her to tolerate herself.

It happened in the grocery store on an evening of errands and picture-collecting. It had been a rough day. Her parents had called that morning, pleading yet again for her to come home. A caller had screamed—literally screamed at her—when she asked for their home address to verify the account. They claimed it was an invasion of privacy. She promised she wasn’t going to show up on their doorstep. “Believe me.” she said, “There’s nothing I want less than to show up. Anywhere.”

She tried not to think about it as she tossed cans of vegetables and soup into her shopping basket, barely bothering to see what they were. Then the pet-food aisle, with its cloud of kibble smell. She reached for a can of cat food, and at the top of her glove, there it was. A flash of skin. Real, visible skin. Eliza let out a small gasp and swallowed the urge to throw off her jean jacket in the middle of the store. It was a fluke. A flare-up. A sliver of false hope. But what if it wasn’t? She set her basket down and walked out of the store, making a beeline for her apartment.

She ran to her bathroom and yanked the blanket off her bathroom mirror—one that she had put up months ago, when her face started to fade. She closed her eyes as she started to peel off clothing, steeling herself for disappointment. Don’t look. She couldn’t look. Her jacket, her shoes. Then her shirt. Eliza took a deep breath and opened her eyes. There it was. Her entire left arm was there. Visible. Just like she remembered. A little paler, but visible.

Eliza quickly made another doctor’s appointment to find out what had changed. It wasn’t considered an “urgent” issue, so she had to wait. In the few weeks between the call and the appointment, her visibility continued to return. She woke up each morning and looked cautiously into the mirror, inspecting each newly familiar inch of herself. When the appointment finally came, there was a sense of déjà vu. She sat on the exam table, talking through the same questions. After the exam, the doctor raised his eyebrows and commented, “Interesting.” He placed her chart in a holder on the wall and told her she could pay at the reception desk.

Eliza was left there, motionless, on the exam table. What happened now? What was her next step? The determined isolation she was headed toward was suddenly gone, leaving an empty space, ready to be filled.

She pushed off the table and went to dress herself, but the feeling of the clothing in her hands made her bristle. It felt wrong. Almost a year of covering up, of hiding away. Fading out of the world, out of her life, out of herself. And it didn’t have to happen anymore. Eliza crumpled up her paper gown and tossed it into the trash can. She slipped on her shoes, leaving her clothes in a neat pile on the counter. Then she strode out of the room, not bothering to shut the door behind her.

Through the fluorescent-lit hallway, past the reception desk, where a woman shuffling papers smacked her gum. Through the waiting room of wooden childrens’ toys and worn magazines. Through a hall of offices, each door labeled neatly with the same blue lettering. Into streets full of passers-by, where Eliza didn’t bother to keep her head down. There were no scarves to hold up, no sleeves to pull down against her palms.

At home, Eliza pulled the curtains down from her windows. She sat on the floor in a square of bare sunlight. The cat jumped down from his perch on the counter and circled in front of her. He flicked his tail before curling into the perfect space of her bent arm—where he had always known she was.



Brittany Roeper is a recent transplant to Michigan, where she has fallen in love with the abundant freshwater. She is joined in adventures by her husband, Chris, and their dog, Ender. Her recent writing has been a way to explore different spaces, her place in them, and the concept of belonging.