Читать книгу How Things Disappear: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff - Anna James, Anna James - Страница 7

SHE WAS NINETEEN WHEN she started to disappear, although there had been signs when she was a child.

When she was six her parents took her to hospital, sure that her fingers had not formed properly, only to find they were entirely as expected by the time they reached the waiting room. When she was eight one of her teachers thought, just for a moment, that they had seen her freckles flicker on and off. She herself once thought she caught a glimpse of the colour in her irises fading away, but these things were only in the corner of someone’s eye or just as she turned away from the mirror.

When she was fifteen she was convinced, temporarily, that her ribs were vanishing. She was sitting in an exam hall full of copy-and-paste rows of wooden desks and chairs, and copy-and-paste rows of students who were scared or confident or distracted or brave-faced. Just as the invigilator told them to turn over their papers she absent-mindedly scratched her side to discover a gap where her eleventh rib should have been. She dug her fingers deep between her tenth and twelfth without them meeting bone. She tried straightening her back, then curving it over, but however she sat, her eleventh rib proved elusive. Explore the way Bertha Rochester is presented to the reader in