Pictures of You: Cynthia Hawkins

“Disembodied,” by Cynthia Hawkins

This is me, age seven, pretending to be a disembodied head.  I imagined the camera couldn’t see the rest of me behind the sofa.  I’d taken pains to arrange the pillow just so.  If I’d known the gag was ruined, I wouldn’t be smiling.

Sometimes I was a disembodied head on an armrest.  Sometimes I was a sideways disembodied head appearing to float up and down a doorframe while the rest of me was upright behind the wall.  Sometimes I was a disembodied head at a jaunty angle appearing to float from side to side atop the high back of mom’s upholstered chair while the rest of me was shuffling in a crouch on the shag rug puckered around the chair’s ball-and-claw feet.  Sometimes I’d slip my arms inside my sweater and let the loose sleeves flap as I asked every family member, “Hey! Where’d my arms go!”  

It was my dad’s fault.  At the dinner table, over a plate of meatloaf and potatoes, he’d once demonstrated his severed thumb trick.  Tuck the thumb of one hand between the knuckles.  Hide the thumb of the other hand in a balled-up fist.  Bring the hands together and apart so it appears the right-hand thumb is really the left-hand thumb sliding away from its joint.  “Dennis!” I can still hear my mother scold in low syllables.  But it was too late.  Before he even opened his hands and wiggled all ten fingers in apology, my mind had turned toward morbid vaudevillian slapstick.

Look at my little sister’s face, the face of a child who can eat a popsicle in the living room and get away with it, the face of a child who’s wise already to all the disembody tricks in the world.

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Cynthia Hawkins’ work has appeared in publications such as ESPN the Magazine, the Emerson Review, Crossborder, New World Writing, and the anthology The Way We Sleep.  She currently serves as Editor of Arts and Culture at The Nervous Breakdown and teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio.  More at cynthiahawkins.net.