ninanevermore

Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about the face of my friend, the Cajun Queen, and how I wish I had one like it. It's not that I want to look like her. Though she's pretty enough, her beauty is not the thing that I covet about her face. I love her face because it does tricks. I've always wanted a face that could do tricks.

I learned about her face's talents the day that I said something that made her skeptical, and she raised one eyebrow in my direction.

"Wow," I said, duly impressed, "When I look skeptical, I only look a little skeptical because both my brows go up. See, you look twice as skeptical I as ever could. It's weird how twice the eyebrows equal half the effect, huh?"

"I can do the other side, too, " the Queen told me, and proceeded to raise and lower each brow, one at a time, over and over.

"Stop it! You're freaking me out," I said. "But that is so cool." I felt genuinely jealous.

The Cajun Queen beamed. She likes to be told that she is special as much as anyone does.

"Ah, but I bet you can't wiggle your nose like Elizabeth Montgomery on Bewitched." I had never seen anyone besides Elizabeth Montgomery who could do that trick. That is, until the Cajun Queen wiggled her nose (without touching it) to show me that she, too, possessed this power.

My mouth dropped opened and I looked down to make sure I had not been transformed into a rabbit or changed into Little Bo Peep, like I often saw happened when Elizabeth Montgomery wiggled her nose on TV. To my relief, I still looked the same. The Cajun Queen's face is powerful, but it isn't all powerful.

"All right, if you can wiggle your ears, too, that means you are a mutant freak."

The Queen's smile faded and her expression darkened. She told me that she could wiggle her ears, but that she didn't want to show me. The Queen hated her ears. She thought they stuck out too much, and she always wore her long dark hair down over them to hide them. To tell the truth, her ears weren't that bad. They did stick out a little bit, but I've seen much worse.

"Pleeeeeeease?" I asked. "With sugar on top?"

The queen sighed and held her hair up behind her head. Her expression was mournful, and while her ears wiggled, it was obvious they were not wiggling for joy. I found it hard to even concentrate on her wiggling ears because her big sad brown eyes distracted me so much. Finally I begged her to stop because, as entertained as I was by her ears, her eyes were bringing me down.

"With talents like yours, I could rule the world," I whispered in awe.

She shrugged her shoulders and told me again that she hated her ears. That fact that her ears stuck out was so damaging to her self esteem that it put world domination out of her reach; she just couldn't muster any passion for it.

"But they move," I told her, pulling my hair back to expose my own ears. "See what my ears are doing right now? Nothing. The same as they always to."

"But at least they look normal," the Queen said. She blamed her mother. She thought something should have been done about her ears when she was a baby.

"What did you want her to do? Duck tape them to your head?"

The Queen said at the very least her mother could have done that, and that she would have, too, if she had loved her daughter more.

The last time I talked to the Cajun Queen, she called me from her new home in Austin. She sounded excited.

"Guess what I did?" she asked.

I told her I had no idea.

"I got my ears fixed!"

I congratulated her. It's not often that you talk to someone who has just obtained a life-long held dream.

"Do you know how they do it?" she asked.

I told her that if she had asked me to do it for her, I would have taken an Exacto knife and cut a wedge of cartilage out of the back of each ear, then sewn them back down in their less prominent position.

"That's pretty much what they do, except they cauterize it with a laser so it doesn't bleed so much."

"I don't have a laser, so I would have just put a lot of gauze on your head. Aren't you glad you used a real surgeon instead of me?"

She agreed it was worth the money to go to a professional.

A few days later, she emailed me pictures of herself. For the first time in her adult life, she has cut her hair short and spiky, to showcase the ears that now look just like anyone else's ears. Now that she no longer naturally resembles a pixie, she has cut her hair to make herself look more like one.

Seeing her enormous smile between her two average ears, I wondered if she still could wiggle them the way she could before. I guess when it comes down to it, it's none of my business. As she pointed out to me, no one has ever made fun of my ears, and I can wear my hair up as much as I like and not feel self conscious about them.

Still, it seemed a waste to throw away a God-given talent like that for vanity's sake. If I could, I would show her how I feel by raising one eyebrow in her direction. Then, assuming I had the gift, I might even wiggle my nose and make her ears just the way they were before – back when they were not only beautiful, but they could also do tricks.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ # ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *