“Daisy…”
She clasped her photo to my hand. Her eyes sat in cavernous hollows, and there were unhealthy lavender smudges to her skin that made me pull back a little. She didn’t let me go, however, her hands on my wrists.
“Of course you can,” she said, and even without her beauty and charm, I nodded jerkily and took a firmer grip on the photograph and the shears. Daisy was beautiful, and Daisy was charming, but her beauty and charm were cheap, offered to everyone who came near, from the maid to President Wilson the time he came to Louisville on the campaign trail. This was a rare thing, and as far as I knew, she had only offered it to me.
I started to cut, the sharp shears snicking through the thick dry paper like they were hungry.
The judge once told me that there was a class at Yale called the Paper Cutter Cults of Indochina. It was taught by a leathery strip of a man who called his Cambodian maid his wife when he thought he could get away with it, and the only time the class was ever full was when he presented the section on paper wives of the Lac Dragon Kings. Depending on the lecture, paper cutting was effigy magic, ancestor worship, and another sign of the barbarity of the region, where paper was given the same accord as human life, given rights, given property.
The judge did not tell me that paper-cutting had never been duplicated in the West, as of 1922, or it might have made me more nervous to try what we did next.
I sat on the floor with Daisy draped over my back like a heavy mink, one finger rubbing nervously up and down my bare arm. It was too hot, too close, and it felt like she was going to wear a raw patch on my arm, but it didn’t matter. I was too intent on shearing increasingly small bits from the paper.
Mrs. Fay rapped on the door, making Daisy flinch against my back.
“Just another few minutes, I’m just trying to make myself beautiful!” Daisy trilled, and that won us a little more time.
I didn’t actually trace around the Daisy in the picture. Instead, working free-handed, I snipped a figure that approximated Daisy’s own out of the card stock. With Daisy whispering encouragement in my ear, with my eyes half-closed and a kind of instinct guiding me that I usually preferred to ignore, I cut out her entire figure, her bob, her neat hands, her love of the water, and her quick clever dancing. I made sure to cut out her narrow hips, her full lips, the way Christmas lights sparkled in her eyes as soon as the first of December rolled around, and how summer left her nearly stunned with sweat and exhaustion.
Daisy’s soft voice in my ear sent shivers down my spine. She told me how good and clever I was, how absolutely sweet it was that I was doing this for her. She had absolute faith in me, she knew I could do it, so of course I could do it. With Daisy’s certainty, there was no room for my own doubt, so I simply packed it into a box and left it by the door for some other unfortunate person to pick up.
A few moments later, the scissors fell from my numb hands and I slouched back against her dresser. My fresh new bangs were plastered to my forehead with sweat, and I was grateful I had lost my thick braids for the occasion. My breath came hard, and at first, I could only stare at the violet-dyed slippers in front of me. They contained the feet of a whole new Daisy who hummed slightly, swinging her hips a little to see her hems swirl.
“Oh no,” I murmured, because it was very much a high-school Daisy. There was something slightly unformed about her, rounded and a little pallid. It was a difference of two years, perhaps even three, and it was obvious to me that this Daisy was someone else.
Daisy herself, however, only hummed with satisfaction as she circled the newcomer, reaching over to lift her chin and fluff her hair a little bit.
“Oh well done, Jordan,” she said. “Except for the hand, of course.”
I had gotten too hasty close to the end. With a single snip of the shears, I’d sliced away the three smallest fingers from her right hand. Daisy took her double’s hand in hers, inspecting the clean slice thoughtfully. Her double stood quiescent, smiling a little. I could smell something chemical about her, something that spoke of darkrooms and pigments that gave her cheeks their plumpness and their gleam. She had Daisy’s coloring at least, and not that of the silvery photograph, so that was fine.