"She was the marvel with the bruised eye. The silver screen queen that could never die."

LIFE Magazine, 1952

The straps bit into her arms as the orderly drew the buckle another notch. He had red shoelaces and wore his seams inside out. Her fingers crackled in protest, bending like frozen twigs. But the circle of sun-dried tears paralyzed her.

Even without it, she couldn't do a thing. Not anymore.

The orderly squeezed another belt around her throat, binding her fully to the chair. She tensed under his heavy hand; he pushed back, draping a fourth strand of bitter leather over her forehead like a damp cloth for a fever. Lights flared, blinding. Shadows played; sliding down her nose and hiding the divot where the metal rested.

Would rest.

Had rested.

Her chest rose and fell with the innumerable pitter-patter of her heartbeat. Her flesh crawled, raising her thorns beneath the armor of her long sleeved jacket.

They had a cure for that. They had a cure for everything laid out on the paper lined tray. All the shiny things, resting in a nice, even row, same as before:

A razor for her unseemly legs.

A file for her fingers

Shears for cutting, cutting, cutting.

And the ice pick.

A normal life. The shiniest kind.

Her hands curled until the knuckles popped and her skin paled yellow-white.

Her mother had wanted this from the beginning, ever since the cradle. Her un-daughter had many adjectives attached to her, but none of them were spelled N-O-R-M-A-L. Because Penny wasn't normal. She wasn't even real—Not in the way the other babies were. Her mother knew that. The morning she found her in the crib, wailing on the pink flannel blanket, N-O-R-M-A-L became L-I-E. Because baby Penny wasn't baby Penny anymore. And her mother was suddenly a single parent to a sack of thin bones barely disguised as human. But she took what she could get like she always did, and kept her mouth shut to spite the neighbors.

Penny kept her name.

"Ready?" A voice said beyond the industrial lights.

She tried to see around them—to see through them—but the glare tricked her eyes. Light darted left and right, stretching anything that caught in her vision into ill-focused celluloid. She couldn't move her head—she could only breathe, nostrils flaring. Heart tripping. Everyone wore white. Even the walls! So bright and clean. Frightening.

And then there was The Voice—she knew that voice. Smelted like roasted coffee beans into a moneyed brew. If she squinted she could imagine him standing, just out of frame. One dark smudge commanding the rest. The man behind the curtain in a monogrammed sweater and caramel slacks.

She'd been chipping ice in Santa Cruz when she'd met him—the director. The beach was a busy place in summer. And snowball treats were close to free. Kismet. That's what her mother called it. Out of all the advertised snack shacks stretching from the wharf to the river, he'd walked into hers.

Mid July was a nasty time to be working the boardwalk. Everything melted and stuck like gum on cement. Half doused inside the freezer, the electric kick of the motor drowned her ears, blocking the sound of his approach. She basked in the cold, oblivious to anything but the welcome sting on her flushed cheeks. If she'd looked up, she might have seen the man in the drawstring shorts watching her shave the ice block with her bare palm. Thorns, like a rosebush, sprouted from her skin when her glamour dropped. Her mother had kept her locked in her room until she'd learned the illusion to hide them. If she'd looked up, she might have noticed why.

A hunger glazed him, slicking his gaze. And it had nothing to do with summer treats or her shy curves.

"Are you ready?" His voice startled her—thick as the syrup she pumped for the ice. Her thorns collapsed behind a sheath of smoothed suntan. Her soda jerk hat slid askew as she straightened, mussing her brown curls. (The real Penny was towheaded and fat as a peach). She nudged the folded paper into place.

When she finally looked at him, with his Tony Curtis face and crooked smile, she felt something in her chest. Her heartbeat quickened.

Her flesh crawled.

"Chocolate, strawberry, or Old Fashioned," she said, nodding to the chalkboard on the counter, trying to send his too-blue eyes somewhere else.

But he never stopped staring. "Gimme an Old Fashioned."

This time, her hand squeezed the splitting wood handle of the ice pick, and she drove the metal spike into the solid block again and again. Filling a striped paper cup to the brim, she liberated several ounces of yellow-y, egg custard flavor from the bottle, and jammed a straw in.

"One cent, please."

He didn't pay her right away. He took the cup slowly, brushing his fingers against hers, feeling his way to her fragile wrist bones. To her horror, his touch raised a patch of thorns clear into the daylight.

"Well, what do we have here?"

She tried to pull away, but he held tighter. The pinch in her chest worsened, bringing thorns up across her arms in a wave, from her wrists to her shoulders. He released her, sucking a sharp breath between his narrow teeth. A droplet of red welled on his pricked thumb.

Her fingers curled on their own, jagged like a broken mirror and completely apart from her asking. Heat vibrated along her prickly skin—

she vanished.

The man stepped back, surprised. Nothing but a quick shadow on the weathered planks, she ran. Paper cap fluttering loosely in her wake.

That night, he called her house.

"This is on you," said her mother, holding the silver fountain pen toward her. "Showing yourself like that. Or rather, not showing yourself."

"I can't control it, can I?" she said, spreading her fingers on the tablecloth. When she let her glamour fade, her nails were green as cut grass.

"Who else will want you the way you are? He'll make you normal."

"But I'm not, am I?"

Her mother grabbed her chin across the table. "You've got the face for pictures, but the rest of it has to go."

The rest of it, like too much rouge or an ugly purse that didn't quite match the outfit. But she knew what her mother meant: The part of her brain that made her invisible.

"Disappearing nuggets aren't worth the extra dime." That's what the babysitter said when it first happened. "The longest game of hidey-seek ever."

Her mother never left her alone with strangers again, at least, not until now.

In truth, she—Penny—had been sitting next to the babysitter the whole evening. A faint imprint on the couch cushion. A weak stain on the upholstery. Her tiny shadow caught by the flickering TV screen lights. Whenever she got scared, it happened. Doctor visits. First day of school. Other boys and girls. Something in her mind triggered it on instinct, and whatever piece it was, knew how to keep her safe. The thorns weren't protection. They were just her real skin.

But real was a subjective word because Penny, of course, wasn't real.

Penny was a lie. She wasn't even herself. The real Penny had been kidnapped seventeen years ago; replaced by a squealing infant with the limbs like rose stems and vanishing issues.

So her mother signed the waiver, to get something in return. "You're going to be famous, honey."

And she signed the contract, forming the letters of her namesake in the ink from the pointed nib. Because, what else was there?

"Sound check!"

The orderly stepped away. She watched him lift his soft shoes high enough to cross over the salt mound ringing the chair—her marker. Most everyone had tape or chalk, but not her. The salt haunted her feet in every scene. A precaution. Like the orderly's outside seams and candy-red laces. Her thorns grew back on the regular, despite the shaving. Prickly legs were unseemly in stockings, and she couldn't hold the glamour well, not anymore. They'd taken that part out of her. They'd made her visible. As easy as a chip in an ice block. One, two, three.

Still...They kept salting the stage. As if someday her mind might grow back too and they needed to be ready.

But they didn't need to worry, she wouldn't harm anyone. No, she'd just vanish forever.

No more movies.

No more magazines calling her "magical" and "enchanting."

No more him.

Maybe that's what they were afraid of, her escape.

A hand brushed her cheek. She couldn't turn to see, the straps kept her neck rigid, but she knew his voice. He coated her in it, late at night in hotel rooms and backlot trailers.

The man who'd fixed her for free. He said she was special, that he liked her green fingernails and her sanded stems—but only in private. Mostly, he liked her glamour. She could be anyone he wanted: Jean Harlow, Betty Grable,

Veronica Lake.

Even if only for a brief moment, since he'd paid someone to chisel it out. Well, not that part of her, but the two went together like Broadway and Cole Porter.

"Okay, darling. Now, for this scene I just need you to be scared," he fingered one of her bleached-blonde curls, "something visceral, real. Let us see that fear. Can you do that, honey?"

"Yes," she whispered. She'd said the same thing the day they read her the agreement. "Do you hereby understand that the practice of medicine and surgery is not an exact science..." She didn't. But N-O-R-M-A-L was now spelled L-O-B-O-T-O-M-Y, and what she thought didn't matter.

The lights dimmed for a softer appeal. This was a close up.

The director retreated behind the camera. Another man scuttled in and took his place. He wore a long white coat and a doctor's mask. But he wasn't one. Not for real. Not like the first one—the one who read her the fine print.

He picked up the long silver spike on the tray and placed the tip in the bruised hollow of her eye.

"Quiet on the set!" a distant voice called. "Cameras roll."

Electricity hummed in the silence.

"And action!"

The doctor breathed out behind his mask, crinkling the paper. "Don't worry, you'll be fine. This will help make you better."

He raised the hammer.

But scripted or not, she knew it was a lie.

Just like the first time.

♛ A/N: Inspired by Metric's new song Lie, Lie, Lie. This short is dedicated to ViridianHues. Dearie writes beautiful words and stories of intrigue and space—go and read them!