Counterpoint
Part 1

It was the first day of Tria Murphy’s life. And not in that silly figurative sense. Her mom was in the hospital, huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf trying to blow down a gorilla. Her dad was standing at the side of the hospital bed, holding his wife’s hand, rubbing the top of it, not because he was trying to comfort her, but because he thought the softness would get her to release her Vulcan death grip. The doctor stood at the end of the hospital bed, arms outstretched, waiting for Tria to be born.

And out she came: a soft, wet head, swelling and folding like a beating heart. Next came the piles of baby flesh in the form of arms, legs, and a torso. The doctor flipped her slightly to get a good look at her face. It was perfect. Two eyes, a nose, a smiling mouth, a horn, a chin, and two round ears.

‘Fuck,’ thought the doctor, ‘She’s got a horn.’

Some doctors are unlucky and have delivered children with mental or physical disabilities several times. This doctor was notoriously unlucky. He’d delivered Siamese twins, a child with a second head starting to grow out of his neck, a little girl with webbed feet, and a baby whose cries sounded eerily like Jimmy Durante. But this was his first horned child. And, maybe it was the angle, but he definitely did not remember seeing a horn on the ultrasounds.

“It’s a girl!” said the doctor, immediately trying to hand the baby to the nearest nurse. “We’ll just go and have her cleaned up…”

“Can I see her?” Tria’s mom asked, as Tria’s dad nodded along, his bright red hand nearly dismembered.

“In a few minutes,” said the doctor, as a nurse scooped the baby out of his arms.

“I want to see my baby!” Tria’s mom, a former marine, said.

The nurse holding the baby smiled awkwardly and looked to the doctor. The doctor sighed and shrugged toward Tria’s mom.

The nurse set the baby into her mother’s arms. Tria’s mom smiled at her husband. “This
is Tria,” she said. And she looked down where the baby cooed and she froze. She just froze.

Tria’s dad reached forward and touched Tria’s baby face. “Honey?” He looked at his wife. “She seems to have a horn.” He looked at the doctor. “She seems to have a horn.”

The doctor nodded. “It appears so.”

Tria’s dad began to stare at the horn. It was a little thing, almost like a thumb coming out of her forehead. It had a sharp point, like a rhino’s horn, but it was also short and fat, like a tiny tree stump. It was nearly flesh colored and stood out mostly from depth perception rather than texture or size. It was equidistant from her eyes and, in a strange way, complimented her cheeks.

Tria’s dad touched his daughter’s face again. “What do we do about the horn?”

The doctor shrugged. “It’s not like it’s harmful or extending into her. You pretty much have your options.”

“Like keeping it?”

“If you’d like,” said the doctor. “Normally we’d just remove it right now.”

“Could that hurt her?”

“I suppose,” said the doctor. “She’ll have a scar, but there shouldn’t be any other complications.”

Tria’s mom continued to stare blankly at her child. Slowly, and with deliberation, she reached up and touched the baby’s horn. She smiled. “My baby,” she said.

“Honey?” asked Tria’s dad.

“We’re not going to cut up my baby,” said Tria’s mom, who held Tria closer and looked at the doctor and then her husband. The doctor and Tria’s dad looked at each other. What else could they really do?

* * * * * * * *

The kids at school didn’t really make fun of Tria growing up. In first grade, the bully in front of her stole her pencil and when the teacher made him give it back, he turned around too fast while Tria’s head was down and pierced his forearm on Tria’s horn. He almost bled into her beautiful blonde hair, but Tria only cared to look at him and smile, like she just flopped a Full House against his Pair of Twos.

* * * * * * * *

More tragically, she popped a kickball in the third grade. Not that her horn had grown to be long or dangerous, but its sudden sharpness was a danger to a flimsy piece or rubber flying toward her head at thirty miles an hour. It was funnier than anything and the game just continued with a ragged old volleyball.

* * * * * * * *

When she concentrated really hard, coloring or adding or singing or taking her first ice skating lesson, the horn moved in the slightest backwards ways. Sometimes it would practically circle up her forehead and the point would jut sideways with her raised eyebrows. Other times it would breathe in and out, when she was thinking especially hard. It almost became obvious when she knew the answer at her last spelling bee. The judges didn’t even need the bell.

* * * * * * * *

At the end of the fifth week of her fifth grade year, Tria’s teacher, Mr. Spyre, asked her to stick around after class. Everyone else in her grade was finishing up a quiz, but he spoke over the charring pencils and the sudden discipline made Tria’s horn twitch northwest, like it did if rain were approaching.

After the last fifth grader waddled back to the hallway with his rusty Smurfs lunch box swinging under his chubby reddish arm, Tria’s horn twitched northeast and she slowly rose to approach the teacher.

With a gentle nod, Mr. Spyre enticed Tria to his desk, where he leaned forward peeking back and forth between a graded paper and Tria. His eyes began rising up Tria slowly and eventually landed on her eyes.

“You did good on your last test, Tria,” he said. “Very, very good.”

A smile began, but Tria couldn’t hold it. Mr. Spyre just stared awkwardly and patting her own back would’ve just made her look crazy. “Uh, thanks,” she responded.

Mr. Spyre nodded three times again, looked down at his paper, and rose along Tria once more. However, instead of stopping in her eyes, he surpassed her face to her head. His gaze was locked onto the horn. His sweaty hands dripped pencil shavings onto the clean white paper on his desk. “Does it…” he began to ask, the horn throbbing gently in front of his eyes. “Does it…does it do this?” He pointed at the paper. “I mean, does it give you powers?”

“What?”

“Like, I don’t know,” he said, “Make you good at sports. Does it make you run faster?

Does it make you…smarter?”

Tria raised an eyebrow and a horn. “Um…no. Not really. When it gets wet, it dries really, really quick,” she said. “Is that a power?”

Mr. Spyre chuckled and handed Tria her graded paper from his desk. He tapped down the outer poof of his jet black hair and winked at the girl. “Sorry,” he said, his hands returning instantly to his pockets. “Congratulations on the test. Great job.”

Tria smiled and, if you looked extra-closely, so did her horn.

She turned to walk away, but she could hear Mr. Spyre stand up behind her. “Have you ever considered, you know, not having the horn anymore?”

Tria shrugged. “Something wrong with it?”

Now Mr. Spyre smiled and quickly sat back down. “When I was young, Tria, I had a birthmark. Shaped like Natalie Wood. And not just a little bit. As you walked around it, it almost looked like she was doing a ‘West Side Story’ number. I mean, it’s no horn, and you probably don’t know who Natalie Wood is, but people would stare at it and then ask me to show it to them and I always would, even though I never really wanted to.”

“Does my horn look like someone?”

“No, no, that’s not it,” said Mr. Spyre. “I just, well, I wanted to get rid of the birthmark.”

Tria’s horn nearly glowed on that one. “But, isn’t Natalie Wood really, really, really pretty?”

“Yeeeeeeah,” said Mr. Spyre, drawing out the vowels as if every vowel was its own question. “But who would want her on their arm day in and day out?”

“So you got it removed?”

“Um,” Mr. Spyre said. “Um, no. First, I wore nothing but long-sleeved shirts and then, finally, I embraced it and did impressions with it and soon nobody cared anymore to see it.”

Tria dusted her hands off the sides of her dirty gray pants and a little along her silver belt. “Is my horn shaped like anything?”

Mr. Spyre leaned forward, in that trustworthy, yet sleazy, way. “It’s shaped like a horn, Tria. If you don’t want it, I’m sure they could…”

Tria smiled, her horn glowed again slightly, and she readjusted the backpack she was carrying. “Then I’ll never find out if it has powers.”

* * * * * * * *

The following Monday, Tria didn’t look Mr. Spyre in the eye. She didn’t answer any questions in class and sat quietly and patiently. She kept touching her face and sometimes her horn, as if checking to see if it fell off. At lunch, she didn’t eat a bite of her banana sandwich, nor did she question the fact that her mother packed her a banana sandwich. Sometimes she would trade her lunch with the one kid in her class who was a little slow and didn’t seem to mind a meal consisting of two slices of Wonder bread and a hunk of fruit. Plus, he usually had things like tuna fish or potato chips, Tria’s favorites, separately.

* * * * * * * *

She wrote in her dream notebook the next morning. During the night, she had visions of Mr. Spyre. But not all of Mr. Spyre, just his head floating toward her like a stray bubble. He babbled on and on in some incomprehensible dream language and then kissed her on the forehead. When he kissed her, rather than being impaled, nothing happened—there was no more horn, but a small zit. The zit popped followed by Mr. Spyre’s bubble head.

* * * * * * * *

On Wednesday the 24th, the day when the streaming white tracks of a crashing plane painted the air above Tria’s hometown, Mr. Spyre asked Tria to stay after class again. Her arm hairs stood at attention, lined up execution-style in between her rocky, mole-laden skin. He didn’t ask her until half the class had already walked out, and the students Tria talked to the most were long gone. One little girl with glasses scurried out last, with the cover of her favorite copy of Black Beauty peeking out from between her chest-folded arms.

Tria’s horn pulsed with increasing strength as if a surrogate to her heart, as she approached the teacher’s desk. Mr. Spyre was leaning back against the desk, arms folded, legs outstretched, so much khaki.

“I,” he said. And only that, for a moment. Then he went on in a tone of resignation tied in with curiosity and a sprinkle of Barry White. “I am sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel…self-conscious about…”

He waved his arm in the direction of the horn, as if shooing away a fly in front of Tria’s face. “And for asking if it gave you powers. Superpowers,” Mr. Spyre continued. “I was out of line. It must have been all the comic books. Do you read comic books?”

Tria shook her head and patted the empty pockets of her long-form flower-print spring dress that she wore even though it was autumn. She smirked, coughed and glanced at the doorway.

Mr. Spyre nodded and rested his arms at his side, holding himself up by pressing his palms against the desk. “You’re a very smart girl.” He leaned back further. “Don’t let any physical…deformity reflect your character.” After another lean, Mr. Spyre’s crotch was outstretched from the front of the desk, and a horn-like bump had formed under his fake crocodile leather belt with the broken buckle. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Thank you,” Tria said. “Why do you think I’m ashamed?”

“Because,” he said, as a declaration. And then he stood up straight and turned his back to Tria, facing the chalkboard to fix his hair. “Because you have a horn.”

“You have a Natalie Wood birthmark.”

He turned back. “That’s a birthmark, Tria. That is nothing special. That’s as crippling a deformity as, as, as green eyes.”

“I like green eyes,” Tria said in a tone of resignation tied in with confusion and sprinkled with exhaustion. “Excuse me.”

Tria’s horn made a move for the door and Tria followed. Mr. Spyre shot to the side in front of her path, slammed the door shut, and grabbed Tria’s shoulders. “We aren’t finished,” he said, squeezing his hands tighter and tighter on her Twizzler arms.

Tria backed away, but Mr. Spyre lowered his grip to her elbows where he assumed control of her arms.

“You’re not a freak,” he whispered.

Her horn flashed and Tria pulled back as hard as she could. Mr. Spyre reflexively pulled her forward, jerking her close into him, into his arms, pressed against his body, before she could even turn away. She just dropped her head down and closed her eyes. “Stop,” she said, too softly to hear.

After a few seconds of Tria’s heavy breathing, there was silence, a void, a nothingness.

Mr. Spyre’s grip began loosening. Tria opened her eyes.

As she looked down she saw a small red puddle on the floor in front of her, a perfect circle with some backsplash dribbling on the sides. Another slow red droplet plummeted into it with a smack. Tria quickly stepped back and looked up.

Mr. Spyre was holding the right side of his stomach, his hand clenching his white cotton shirt just off center of the sixth button from the top. His eyes were closed, drawn shut in pain, and three more red droplets dripped from behind his hand onto the puddle. Tria reached up, felt the tip of her horn and brought her hand back down. The tips of her fingers were rolled with blood.

Shaking, she felt her horn’s tip once more and could feel a crack in the side, the very end of the horn bending slightly more than usual, like a miniature lumberjack started into it but had to go to the bathroom 20 seconds in. As she touched it, the shaking slowly subsided and she firmly put her arm back at her side.

She watched Mr. Spyre fall back to lean on his desk. “Could you get some help, you little bitch?!” he yelled, through locked teeth and eyes shut too hard to see that Tria already left.

* * * * * * * *

That night was cathartic. It wasn’t quite self-mutilation, but an extension of the fate that Tria had already been subjected to without completion. Staring in her bathroom mirror with a hand mirror resting on the sink so she could see from any angle, Tria took hold of the sharpest knife her mother owned and sawed swiftly into the tip of her horn, chopping it clean off at the tip, where it was already beginning to hang off from the incident with Mr. Spyre.

She gritted her teeth as she cut, but there was no pain, like removing an already-dried scab. When the tip of the horn plopped into the sink, there was no blood, no pus, just the tip of a pre-severed horn. Tria held it up and stared from it to her horn, noting the minimal difference caused by losing a piece of herself. She could feel something was missing, like the ghost appendages she read about military men feeling after they’ve had their arms blown off, but other than that the process was straightforward. Rather than subjecting herself to staring at a piece of her body resting on top of the bathroom garbage pile, she flushed the tip of her horn down the toilet.