by Paul Negri
Hazel had been in a train wreck when she was sixteen. Because her father owned the railroad, she was allowed certain privileges, including sitting up front with the engineer and watching the world rush forward to meet her as they flew swiftly along the rails, gracefully bending around a curve, and approaching the jagged edge of a tunnel which seemed somehow out of place, as if the mountain it penetrated had suddenly and inexplicably moved.
She had no memory of the actual crash except for a beautiful crystalline song of tinkling glass and light and a rapturous sense of coming apart and flying, bits and pieces, in all directions like an exploding star. While her body had survived more or less intact, her face had not. A team of plastic surgeons—the best that money could buy—did what they could with what was left and assured Hazel’s father that things could be better in a year. After a year, Hazel’s father—who was an extraordinarily wealthy man—looked at Hazel and lost faith in the power of money. Her face eventually settled into a set of hard-edged lines and ridges, odd angles and parti-colored planes, her features precisely askew, attaining a living geometry imagined only by Euclid and Albert Albertini in his fever dreams.
Albert’s passion was geometry, which he considered a living thing, and was known throughout the scholarly community as a man bordering on genius and something else. His world teemed with things of two, three, four dimensions and more; conical sections, oblate spheroids, hyperbolic star-tilings. He first encountered Hazel at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was standing before Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. She looked like she had stepped out of the painting or was just about to step into it and take her rightful place among the more splinter-faced girls of the group. People who saw Hazel walked quickly away. She was soon left alone with Picasso and Albertini. After a long moment, she turned her head, training her one working eye on Albert, and through her pseudo-teeth garbled, “What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a train wreck before?”
Albert couldn’t take his eyes off her. He was in love.
Paul Negri is the editor of a dozen anthologies of poetry and fiction published by Dover Publications, Inc. His stories have appeared in more than 50 publications, including The Penn Review, Reflex Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Jellyfish Review, and Pif Magazine. He lives in Clifton, New Jersey, USA.
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