io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Caesura” by Ashlee Lhamon. You can also listen to the story here. Enjoy!
Caesura
by Ashlee Lhamon
When a human head hits a road at the right speed and the wrong angle, the asphalt will take off an ear like a belt
sander. Dogs and bears and chimpanzees rip ears off during attacks. People rip off ears during attacks; in
domestic disputes, drunken brawls, and reason-defying misadventures, people relieve each other of their ears
like they’re tearing off stubborn pieces of bloomin’ onion. More prosaically, ears are subject to all the same
cancers that take eyes and noses.
When I tell people I’m a prosthetist, they fairly assume I make arms and legs, but no—I am a face man, which,
owing to the peculiarities of human anatomy and activity, means an ear man, principally. My workshop looks
like a Hollywood horror prop dream.
But aside from obvious sources like anotia and microtia, I typically know very little about my clients and their
lives, much less the details of what tragedy has brought them to me. It isn’t necessary for my work, and they are
often relieved when I express disinterest.
Enter Client X. Or rather, Client X’s caretakers. They had seen my work and were impressed, but they didn’t
need an ear, they said, and hedged on what they did need, exactly. After my insistence that I required some
information, they finally replied in an email that read like a whisper: Client X had put a shotgun into their
mouth and missed, sending only their lips, left cheek, jawbone, twenty-six teeth, and chin into oblivion. Could I
help them?
I could, I assured them. Absolutely.
****
Client X arrived with everything below their nose hidden by a gaiter, and when they pulled the fabric down,
they did so dramatically, as if daring me to flinch from the smooth quilt of mismatched skin grafts where their
mouth should have been, laid over top of quasi-jaw forged from bone stolen from their ribs and hips.
I didn’t flinch, of course. Painters seek out perfect canvases on which to impose their order. My art is the
reverse. Life presents me with its wreckage, and from it I create a nondescript whole.
Here specifically: cheeks, chin, lips, the last to be fashioned closed. Unfortunately, my prostheses aren’t
mechanical—medical science hasn’t advanced that far. But with this piece, Client X would be able to grocery
shop and go to movie theatres and sit in restaurants, and stranger’s eyes would skate over them without pausing.
Theirs would once again become a face that didn’t invite lingering stares or brazen ogles or muttered Don’t
looks or loudly gasped, What happeneds.
This is my most coveted and essential gift: anonymity.
****
I took measurements and impressions. Because so much of the underlying infrastructure was missing, I asked
the caretakers for photos of Client X before the event so I could freehand the sculpture that would be the
foundation for the prosthesis’ mold. While the mold set, Client X would undergo an additional surgery to sink a
lattice of pins into their cheekbones so my prothesis could attach magnetically and stay in place securely with
little, if any, adhesive.
Because of this, there shouldn’t have been any rush, but I was backed up with other cases. When I eventually
finished the sculpture of Client X’s new lower face, something in it didn’t feel quite right, but I made the mold
and cast the silicone anyway—I am an artist, after all, and my doubts about my own work are as valid as often
as they aren’t.
I don’t remember when, exactly, the sound started. At first, I thought it must be Rebecca’s radio. Rebecca is my
only employee, and between answering calls and battling insurance agencies she likes to listen to heavy metal at
low volume. I remember thinking that this sound was very different to the low cacophony of that, at nearly the
same time I remembered that Rebecca was gone on vacation for the week.
I hunted around, thinking then that maybe a client had left a phone in my workshop and it was ringing. But
when I passed Client X’s pressed-closed mold, the sound grew almost imperceptibly louder.
I had heard urban legends of old tooth fillings picking up radio transmissions, and in the void of logic that the
moment presented, I thought the prosthesis’ magnetic strips must be doing something similar. Which wouldn’t
do, of course. Anonymity is no use if your facial hardware is broadcasting garbled NPR.
In the process of opening the mold, I accidentally broke it. I will never forgive myself for that.
Inside, the prosthesis was perfectly formed, though not yet tinted, so the flesh was as single-toned as a doll’s.
The sound was louder now though not, as expected, like a radio broadcast being poorly received but, strangely,
like someone trying to speak with a hand over their mouth.
Half-believing I was in a dream, I picked up a scalpel from my desk and separated the prosthesis’ lips.
Cut, they parted, and puckered, and bowed. That half-mask began to sing to me, beautifully. It sang me an aria
in a language I had never heard before, and never since.
****
I suppose my immediate reaction should have been disbelief. The mouth and cheeks were only silicone. There
was no throat, no vocal cords.
Instead, I sat for a long time on the floor of my workshop, and I listened.
Eventually I tried to speak to it, to ask it questions, and when it didn’t answer I realized that it was only a mouth, after all. So I ran to each of the finished and half-finished ears strewn throughout my shop and whispered to them, “Who are you?” and, “Where are you singing from?” and “Are you an angel, or a spirit, or something else?” But these ears either didn’t belong to the mouth, or whatever owned the ears and the mouth found my questions disinteresting. The mouth sang on, undisturbed.
When I locked up the workshop that night, I imagined I could still hear the faintest echo of its crystalline siren call.
When I returned in the morning and found the mask still singing—confirming that I was in fact sane, and that I
hadn’t dreamed it—I sent Client X and their caregivers an apologetic email: the prosthesis had been damaged
and there would be a few weeks’ delay. They were understanding and graceful.
I set upon making another sculpture for a new mold. This one resembled Client X better, anyway. I cast the
mold and filled it. Thankfully, this one came open in silence.
But the other mask continued on, its songs and timbre changing at random, these melodies sometimes light and
joyful, other times angry, bellowing. When Rebecca returned from vacation, I took to shutting my workshop
door so I could take the mask from its drawer and listen as I worked. When I wasn’t working on client projects,
I carved and cast new ears and noses and eyes by the dozens, trying to complete the singer’s face, so it could
know me as well as I felt I knew it. But nothing matched—the noses didn’t flare their nostrils; the glass eyes
didn’t roll in their silicone sockets. My whispered questions to errant ears continued to go unanswered. Every
effort seemed a blind, failed dash in the dark.
****
In the meantime, Client X arrived for their fitting appointment. The new, silent mouth clipped perfectly into
place. I handed them a mirror, and in an instant they and their caretakers were weeping. I assured them all I
would hand paint the flesh to match their skin’s natural hue exactly. No one would be able to tell. They were
happy. I was happy. The singing mask stayed concealed in its drawer. That one was antithetical to the very
purpose of my art, after all—to disappear a disaster, to erase a tragedy.
But when Client X returned for the finished prosthesis and its storage case, I nevertheless asked them if they
might come to one side with me, alone. They agreed.
“This is yours, too,” I said, and I gave them a second case. They looked at me, confused. Even with the case’s
lid closed, you could hear the singing from inside.
I confess: I wanted to keep it. That is the most natural thing, isn’t it? To want to hold onto something absurd and
beautiful, to fear that, once surrendered, it would be mistreated, or abused, or put on tawdry display, or made
mockery of.
But the beautiful things we bring into the world aren’t ours, not truly.
Client X opened the case. I had tinted this mask to match their flesh, just like the other. They held it in their hands and pressed it against the place of their greatest mistake with great wonder.
Perhaps it was just by coincidence, or it happened differently and I only remember it this way, but it seemed to me that the singing was at its most beautiful, then.
About the Author
Ashlee Lhamon lives in the Bay Area with an impressive lunchbox collection, a tuxedo cat named Gumshoe,
and a brand new tiny human. Her other work appears in Nightmare, Hunger Mountain, MetaStellar,
Salamander Magazine, Radon Journal, and more. Find her at ashleelhamon.com.
Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first
appeared in the October 2024 issue, which also features work by Patrick Hurley, Ai Jiang, Kenneth Schneyer,
P.A. Cornell, Russell Nichols, Philip Gelatt, JT Petty, Lyndsie Manusos, and more. You can wait for this
month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format
for just $3.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
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