Circle Circle Dot Dot

by Erin Williams

“I heard from my brother that if you wait too long to have your first kiss you can catch it.”

“I heard Missy Madison had it and that’s why her dad divorced her mom.”

“I heard it’s not so bad because you get to eat lots of Jell-O and play Bingo.”

“I think that’s just being old,” one girl said. She didn’t know if she believed in Ugly, or that it was as bad as everyone said.

Beware: There’s Ugly In Your Neighborhood, Your Schools, Your Community. So say the posters warning passersby of the present dangers of Ugly, the flyers and billboards and leaflets everywhere. No one could say what exactly Ugly was, but no one wanted to catch it because it was bad or else there wouldn’t be government warnings against it. Kids—of the snot-nosed variety mostly—whispered about it in their playgrounds, the mission control of bratty school rumors.

The Ugly was a parent’s worst nightmare for their most-loved children. (For only a moderately loved child, a parent might not care as much.)

At 3 o’clock (give or take a few, depending on whether she lingered by the bubbler to try and catch a hello from Matty Burgess), Susan Bogus opened the front door of her parents’ middle-class home, one of those brick ones with ionic columns in the front. Only once had she asked her father, for a school project, what kind of columns they had on their house, and only once had he lectured her on the differences between the three main column types used in Greek Revival architecture. The inside had a modest foyer that the Downings next door found actually quite garish (because who has a dedicated foyer in this day and age) with a beautiful old staircase made of very old wood. Susan tried to slip upstairs, in fact hoping no one would notice that she was home at all, but the staircase creaked in a way that reminded her of an old man laughing at a joke he just made in poor taste. It only creaked when she wanted to be alone so she thought the joke must have been about her.

“Suzy? Is that you sweetie? Don’t you want your snack?” her mom called out from the kitchen. The snack was three slim carrot sticks, three celery sticks, one glass of milk. It had not changed since she turned fourteen, when she was allowed one extra stick of each vegetable from the previous two-stick allotment. Her mother prepared it for her every day, citing that a growing girl needed to eat well and healthy (but not too much).

“No, mom. I actually don’t feel too great. I’m just going to go lie down until dinner,” she shouted back. Her back was edging slowly up the wall, pushed up by her tiptoes; the staircase croaked.

“Okay! Rest up sweetie. I want to hear all about that French test later.” 

Susan ran up the rest of the staircase and across the landing to her room, shut the door, and sat on the edge of her bed in the dark. Glowy green stars and moons littered her ceiling, a decoration technique of her older brother’s design: thirty-seven of them. She counted again. Thirty-eight. Was it thirty-seven or thirty-eight? She counted again. Thirty-seven again. Was she missing a star or had an extra always been there? Her heart beat again and again, growing louder and bigger in her chest, slamming itself into her ribcage and up into her throat.

Downstairs the front door opened and shut, and she heard her mother greet her father at the door with a “how was your day?” and a glass of tonic. Dinner would start in 15 minutes, just enough time for a gin cocktail and a half. Her heart was pounding against her eyes, screaming to be let out of her body, the corporeal prison.

“Susan? Dinner time. Come set the table, please,” her mother called up from the bottom of the stairs. Old houses have no noise insulation. She stood on reluctant, wobbly legs and willed them to move her toward her bedroom door. (“Please, legs?”)  They did, though slowly at first, then a little faster down the stairs.

“Susan? Susan, we need the table set,” her mom called again. Legs moved her to the silverware drawer where she collected a handful of knives and forks. “Not those,” her mom added. “We need steak knives. Those are for butter.” Her mom was pulling the roast out of the oven, hands stuffed into matching chicken and egg oven mitts that she had made for herself last Christmas.

“What’s wrong? There should be enough clean silverware. Sweetie?” For the first time, Mrs. Bogus looked at her daughter instead of the roast and saw the hunched shoulders, downcast eyes, and unset table. Susan was caught out, put on the spot by a woman who had raised her not to lie because that’s how bald men lost their hair. That and oversalted food.

“Mom…Mom, I think I have it. Like the kids at school were saying.”

“Have what, Sweetie?”

“I think. Maybe. I don’t know how I caught it. I think I caught Ugly.”

Mrs. Richard Bogus was speechless, the pot roast heavy and hot through the oven mitts, and then she screamed. Mr. Richard Bogus came to see what was keeping the roast, and also causing his wife such a terror. He found her bracing herself against the kitchen sink, one chicken-hand and one egg-hand doing their best to grip the counter through two layers of heat-resistant padding.

“I thought dinner was ready.” He eyed the glass dish full of fatty, browned meat, not even plated or carved yet, the thermometer inside still registering a nicely cooked 200 degrees. His favorite temperature for roasts. His wife seemed to have thrown the roast dish onto the counter very haphazardly, with no thought to the juices that might spill out, in an attempt to steady herself. Dinner was not normally such an event, or so he thought.

“Bertha. Susan? Someone tell me what’s going on. The roast looks fine, so what’s the matter here?” 

Mrs. Bogus’s neck snapped her head around to face them both. The sudden movement gave her a sharp pain, which she would have to treat later in bed with a glass of pinot, taken with two ice cubes.

“Our daughter has just told me she thinks she has Ugly. That the other school kids teased her for it today.”

“Oh, good God.” Mr. Bogus went to his wife and put a hand over hers. “How? How did this happen?” 

In the dish, the roast steamed less and less.

Susan tried to explain it to them. Tuesday morning, just days ago, she had woken up to get ready for school, and something wasn’t right. She looked the same, her eyes still brown and her lips still frowning. The same two freckles were right next to the left side of her nose, but when she studied her face in the mirror it looked all wrong when yesterday it hadn’t been. Some stolen mascara, some dabs of her mother’s foundation seemed to fix it. No one had noticed. 

A few days later Timothy Rogers teased her about catching Ugly. He told her she must have tripped and fell over an Ugly stick while she was getting her French book out of her locker, right in front of a bunch of junior girls. In front of her mirror again that night she examined her face as close as she could without bumping her nose up against it, because that would have left smudgy grease marks. Nothing by itself looked wrong, but when she looked at it all together it just didn’t look right. Timothy Rogers was right. She had caught Ugly. It had hit her, none too gently, like a sack of bricks.

“We’ll have to tell the neighbors she got pregnant and that we sent her upstate to have the baby,” Mr. Bogus said. He was talking to himself, not Mrs. Bogus (who was still weeping) and not Susan (also weeping). “Yes. There must be a home, or a facility, upstate for this sort of thing.” 

Indeed, there were plenty, dotted all over the state hidden by names that gave nothing away like “The Glaciers Home for Girls” and “Thornberry Estates for Young Ladies.”

A few phone calls later, Susan was in the backseat of her parents’ four-door, two hours into a two-and-a-half-hour drive to a facility that would help her adjust to a life lived with her affliction. No one had eaten the roast, with its potato and leafy green side dishes, now growing cold and congealing, hastily Tupperwared in the fridge. Meant to be eaten and enjoyed, it was now tomorrow’s leftovers and would be pushed around on this side and that in an effort to reach the bottles at the back of the shelf.

Finally, the car found its destination way up in the Adirondacks. Black iron lettering told Susan they had reached “The Sunrise Facility,” no doubt meant to inspire the optimism of a fresh start. Six months away would be about the right amount of time for a girl who had just found out about an impending baby to give birth, give up the baby to a nun, and be brought back into society, the way things were done proper. She had done the math on the drive, and her mother had packed her winter coat.

In the limbo between the car and The Sunrise, her father helped set her suitcases on the steps and half-hugged her, keeping one hand in his pocket while the other draped loosely around his daughter’s small shoulders.

“We’ll be back. Don’t worry too much, we’ll be back before you know it. Your mother will send you a care package once you get settled, maybe with some of those hot chocolate cookies you like, and we’ll try and call on Sundays. And in the meantime, the people here will help you get better.” Susan’s favorite was actually peanut butter fudge, and Mrs. Bogus had decided to stay in the car to fix her makeup and avoid the chilly mid-morning air, which was 67 out at least.

Brakes squealing on their paneled silver Roadmaster, the Boguses pulled back into their driveway just as Carl Carlson across the street was checking his mail.

“Afternoon, Carl!” Richard called, too loudly, across the street.

“Afternoon Richard. Afternoon Bertha. How are the kids?”

“Oh, Stuart is fine, just fine. Bad news about Susan, we just had to send her upstate. A home for pregnant girls. Such a shame. Yes, a shame. We feel so very ashamed.”

“Oh. Yes, that sounds shameful. I’ll have Mary-Ann send her a note or something.” Frowning, Carl went back inside with his stack of bills. Everybody in town found out that Susan Bogus had caught Ugly. The neighbors left Saran-wrapped casseroles at the end of the driveway, with notes saying not to worry about returning the cheap dishes they were baked in. Almost none of these were eaten, except, in a moment of self-pity, the one with a tater tot crust. One Sunday, their pastor asked the congregation to keep the Boguses in their thoughts while their daughter was upstate getting well.

“Let us pray for them,” he said. The pastor tried to catch Mrs. Bogus’s eye so he could show her a solitary tear, a quiver, but she was buried deeply in the hymnal and refused to look up.

“Beware,” he said. “They say, beware of Ugly before it enters into us. People can have ugly faces. They can have ugly bodies. Of course, people can have ugly souls. The Bible asks us to live pure lives in service to the Lord, says that our souls may be free of sin, of ugliness. When one of our own strays, finds themselves caught in Ugly, we pray for their safe return to righteousness. Beware, and try not to catch it. No one wants to have Ugly. So if you see someone who caught it—pray for them and ask God to forgive them.”

“Amen,” the congregation echoed.

“Amen,” said Mr. Bogus.

“Amen,” whispered his wife. No one in the church shook hands with Mr. Bogus when the service let out, and Marjorie Florentine didn’t rush to give Mrs. Bogus a kiss on the cheek or the latest gossip.

The thing about Ugly is there’s no cure. Just a hefty amount of palliative care and a lifetime of managing symptoms.

Before going out to greet them, Susan took a little tube of mascara and brushed some on her eyelashes but did nothing else to try and change her face. Acceptance was one of the five As of managing Ugly (Avoid Avoidance, Accept, Aspire, Avon).

“Hi, sweetie.”

“Hi Dad. Mom.”

“How do you feel?” they wanted to know. 

Susan felt like Susan, the same as she had six months ago.“I feel healthy. Good, I guess.” Without really meaning to, her jaw clenched tight, throbbing. It did that a lot, lately.

Mrs. Bogus sighed. “We told the neighbors you were pregnant. So they wouldn’t know you have Ugly. They found out anyway.”

“I’m still glad to be going home.”

Mrs. Bogus sighed again, turning to go back to the car.

“When am I going back to school?” Susan asked. Maybe Matty Burgess had missed her. She was rusty on her algebra but had kept up with her French practice.

“You aren’t. We found you a new school. You start after the break.”

“Oh. Okay.” Susan looked at herself, reflected off the side of the waxed station wagon. Her mascara was clumping from the sudden wetness bubbling in her eyes. She thought it looked ugly, or like a crazed racoon, and all her acceptance fell off of her like a sheet, or a shed skin, or maybe in the way that snow crashes down from a slick roof on a warm day in the dead of winter, burying everything underneath until spring.

Erin Williams (she/her) is an editor at a science-based non-profit. She has two degrees in religion that she doesn’t use, but she knows a little bit about parapsychology and religion as part of world-building in video games, which makes family dinners more fun. Her fiction has appeared in The Occult Digest and Contemplit Magazine, and she co-wrote a book chapter on The Witcher 3 and philosophy. Her only social media is Instagram (@erinelizabethyo), or find her at erinelizabethwilliams.com.