Seeing my face in the mirror always surprises me. I am looking for the freckles from my third-grade portrait, the plump, upturned lip of my cheerleader photoshoot, the glowing happiness of a woman just back from her honeymoon. Instead, above the bridge of my nose are furrows that don’t disappear when I stretch my thinning lips into a smile, my eyebrows are sparse, and now there is a gash that runs clear through the left one, across my cheek.
“You’re lucky you missed your eye,” my husband tried to comfort me as he nursed the cut. I wasn’t sure how I’d fallen, my foot had tripped on air, forgotten how to stand. My neurologist told me the falls were a sign the Parkinson’s was progressing. “This is your third fall in a year,” she said. The last time I hit my collarbone and spent three months in a sling. “I’m relieved you didn’t break anything this time.”
I am too, but I don’t feel lucky, not when I look in the mirror and see the ugly purple streak tearing my face. It’s going to scar, I can already tell. I laugh it off and say, “Who cares, no one’s looking at me anyway.”
I study the scattered creases around my mouth as I brush my teeth, the way my jowls shake with each movement. I spit, scowl at the new line marring my reflection. My husband smiles at me from the doorway, “There’s the beauty I married.”
The muscles in my forehead relax, though the lines stay in place. I peer into my eyes, how deep they now sit. If I stare long enough, I can see the glint of my child-eye looking back at me, a five-year-old tongue wagged in my direction, a face full of laughter.
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Kristi Ferguson is a researcher and writer. Originally from Brazil, she currently lives in Arlington, Virginia, with the love of her life. Her fiction and creative nonfiction are published or forthcoming in Litro Magazine, BULL, MAYDAY, and elsewhere.