Free Little Nothing by Marisa Silver Page A

sweeping Danilo’s meal onto the floor, he lay in front of the boy. The drawing showed a curious table that was split down the middle crosswise. Another drawing showed the table pulled into two.
    â€œMake it work,” the doctor said. “You have until tomorrow morning.”
    It was, Danilo was ashamed to admit to Pavla, an exciting assignment. The challenge of interpreting the doctor’s slapdash design and inventing solutions to the problems that arose gave Danilo a remarkable feeling, one he had never experienced before, not when he was a boy learning the shoe trade with his brother under the disapproving gaze of their father, certainly not when he prepared those idiotic potions for the doctor. For the first time in his life, he not only realized he had a brain but that he was putting it to use. The project took him into the night and the early hours of the morning. Mistakes were made. Hours of work had to be dismantled when the trusses on which each half of the table was meant to glide got stuck. But finally, he managed to get all the actions to work in concert: a crank turned, the rope navigated smoothly through the pulleys that he’d mountedon the underside of the table, the split plank opened and closed as smoothly as a jaw. He worked with such concentrated intensity and with such pride in his newly discovered abilities that he did not once stop to wonder what the doctor had in mind for this contraption. Instead, he began to imagine a life for himself where doctors would come from near and far to order medical appliances that only he could make. He would save the reputation of his family. His parents might even allow him to come back home. He would once again taste his mother’s eight-hour pork roast. He could feel his tongue swell with the memory of the succulent fat.
    The following day, the dwarf girl and her parents returned to the office. Wrapped in a blanket and carried in her father’s arms, she whimpered pathetically and seemed nearly dead. Danilo was terrified when, for the briefest moment, he caught her eyes and saw there not a look of misery or fear, but utter vacancy. He could not look at her again. Her loveliness that had so captivated him and everything that had made him unaccountably shy and say stupid things, were gone, not as if these qualities had disappeared but as if they had never existed in the first place and he had dreamed the whole thing up. She was no more inside her body than his brother was when he lay in his coffin and Danilo bent to kiss his forehead. Like him, she was only a container of emptiness. Her beautiful hair was matted. The skin of her neck and face was sallow. Her eyes were as milky and lifeless as the eyes of the blind woman in his village who had memorized the feel of various palms so that she could thank you by name if you were generous enough to give her a few haléřs or a piece of cheese.The petrified father looked at the doctor beseechingly, asking him if they had not understood the prescription correctly, for what the girl had endured the previous night had not made her taller, even by a centimeter. Danilo still did not understand what it was the old couple had done to her, but when the doctor ordered the father to take away the blanket, and before the mother demanded she be covered with a sheet, he saw the terrible burns that covered her naked body and the welts that were newly risen and filled with pus. His vision fogged and he broke out into a sweat. He lifted the girl onto the machine,
his
machine, as his mind, with which he had only recently become acquainted, finally grasped his invention’s purpose. Like the parents, though, he was too stunned by incomprehension and fear to question the doctor, and following orders like a dumb mule, he affixed the girl’s arms and legs to the straps that he had so carefully made using the leatherwork techniques his father had taught him. When he turned the crank, she made a wretched noise, but