Face scars guarded, though physically healed, her residual pain remains.

She’s sitting there in the waiting room, being watched, being judged: repulsive. What is she doing with her head? Is she striving to disappear behind Allure Magazine?
She feels their prying eyes. They burn her with stares as she looks at the lovely people in her magazine. Can she shrink away when un-assailed beauty hurts? She ponders becoming faux Muslim just for the headscarf, and an especially pious one, only her eyes naked.

Her name is called, her birth name. The nurse leads her into the small room, totally comfortable around her permanent wounds, taking vitals. Blemishes within torture her day and night. She jerks on the exam bed; the nurse grips her hand. Tears form at the corner of her eyes.

She can’t remember what started the fearful responses. She didn’t want to recall them; she hopes for rain, then she can hide her face with a hood and her hair. If only she could escape from here.

The RN leaves; the doctor enters.

    “And how are you doing today?”

Silence.

   “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

She nods.

   “The nurse tells me you’re still having flashbacks.”

She thinks for a moment and shakes her head in the affirmative.

   “Have you told your psychiatrist?”

She stares at him.

   “Sorry,” he says.

For the past two years, her medication-therapist PhD gave her sample after sample. Nothing helps, she thinks in the moment, not anti-anxiety or anti-depression, or atypicals or mood stabilizers. She feels hopeless; he suggests ECT. That is too far in her book, but she continues with the daily torture.

The doctor in front of her now, using an ultrasound machine, shows her the fetus.

   “Is it perfect?” she asks.

   “All looks well,” he answers. “It’s a girl”.

She cries with relief.

   “This baby,” she muses internally, will be attractive, will be loved”.

The obstetrician tells her he will see her in two weeks.

She walks out the door and into the world where she doesn’t care if they see her face. She has hope. But then paralyzing fear strikes her—What if…

   “No!” she banishes the thought. “I will make sure it doesn’t happen!”

She slides into the Ford Focus she rents, which she chose because she never flaunts her wealth. Her ex-husband lawyer had lifted her out of the carney slums and married her when she was so striking he had to have her: his trophy.

She takes a secret road toward home. She’s always afraid that her ex is spying on her because of his enormous losses in the trial, the court awarding her more than half of his assets, including the beach home.

In the neighborhood, an orange cat crosses the road in front of her car. She tremors violently, repeatedly skidding her brakes to the floor. She collapses onto the steering wheel; she fears she will hyperventilate.

   “Why?” she yells after the shaking stops. “That damn cat and all felines are…” She’s used to it by now: another flashback, another day. She struggles to vanquish remembrances.

Her ex comes into her mind again as she pulls into her driveway. She continued to work at the circus for months after their marriage. It was a bad idea. He told her over and over to leave those losers and her trailer; but it felt like home.

She lays down her keys on the kitchen counter, turning on the television set. News blasts after the main stories; she listens for a moment and takes out a cylinder of pistachios, cracking off their shells, munching them, and then turning to the voices and images. There is a story about how a lion mauled his trainer. She freezes; all the hair on her neck and head rises to attention.

She sees the tiger again, always haunting her, folding herself into a fetal position and screaming on the wood floor. The teeth and paws are flying toward her—those black striped orange monsters. She trained him, rode on him as Sheila the Exotic: beauty and the beast.

   “It is my fault,” she always repeats, stuck in her head forever.

Big cats, elephants, great apes, filling the bigtop then back to their cages—never meant to be chained, never meant for public amusements. She would keep her girl away; she would never let this happen again. She’d use her money to return them to their African homes and protect them in the wild.

She couldn’t ignore; she could not neglect. Her coming daughter would adore them on picture safaris in their real habitats of real grasses and real trees, as real as her mother’s scars.

She falls asleep. No jerks, no screams for the first time since it started—a broad smile on her now forgotten face.