Cut Content: Sandra's Elimination

Author's Note: Today's was a hefty chapters and some things had to be cut during editing. Originally there was a memory Andy would visit, showing Sandra's elimination, between the memory of the babies and the memory of Laura's birth.

Ultimately, I removed it because it was too similar to Katherine's elimination from the previous chapter, and because it felt like it was interrupting the flow of reliving moments of Laura's life backwards, with the birth scene creating a natural joint between the previous memories, and the memories of Greg's season afterwards. And it's not like Andy needed more reasons to resent Greg.

Still, for those who are interested, here's the original cut content (some paragraphs were re-adjusted as part of the finished chapter). Enjoy!

The woman in the wall had Riley’s face.

Andy saw it from three rooms off and didn’t believe it, and kept walking, and it didn’t stop being true. The seasons had gone on past the street, one after another, strangers in every one, and he had stopped reading them. Then Horun slowed beside an opening on the right, and there she was. Riley’s face, almost entirely, Riley’s mouth, short russet hair cut close to her head—on a woman standing upright, on two feet, in a plain human body, with her hands at her sides.

Andy had seen that face before, in the Hollow Garden, on a barrel-chested body with soft dog’s ears and paws where hands should have been. He had crouched down in front of her and said it was good to meet her, and she had made a sound through her nose that was half a laugh, as if nobody had said that to her in a very long time.

He stopped. “Sandra,” he said.

Horun said nothing. He stood beside the sill and let Andy look.

“She looks just like Riley.” Andy’s voice had gone quiet. “I mean—I knew that. I knew she did. I just never saw it on—” He stopped. “On her.”

The rest arrived on its own, as these things did now. Sandra in a human body meant before. Before meant a season, and there was only one season that face could have belonged to.

“This is Greg’s season,” Andy said.

“Yes,” Horun said.

Andy breathed out through his nose. “I know this one. She told it to us—Laura was sitting right next to me. And later I told it back to her myself. All of it.” He rubbed his palms down the front of the mantle. “I could tell it to you start to finish.”

He stepped in.

Arabella was standing in front of Sandra, close, and Sandra was looking back at her. Wherever the room was, its walls had gone soft, and the light came from somewhere on the left and didn’t matter. Only Sandra was sharp. Her chin was up. Her mouth was set. Her eyes were on Arabella’s and on nothing else.

The others were there too, behind Sandra against the soft wall: women, standing close enough that their shoulders touched. Arabella didn’t look at them. They stayed at the edge of the room, pale faces and a hand held over a mouth and the sound of too many people breathing short. Andy couldn’t have named most of them. He knew Marie, by her voice, which said “San—” and stopped, and by the woman beside her, who had taken hold of her sleeve. He knew Sarah, by her hair, long and black over one shoulder, and by the way she stood, arms wrapped around herself and her eyes shut.

A few steps off to one side, at the edge of everything, a man stood watching. Arabella’s eyes didn’t go to him, so he stayed where she had left him, at the soft edge of the room. Soft or not, there was no mistaking the shape of him. Andy had grown up next door to it. Big through the shoulders, starting to go heavy at the middle, reddish hair grown out shaggy over his ears and a beard he’d stopped bothering to trim. To a small boy he had been the biggest man on the street. Here he was twenty-five, younger than Andy was now, and he stood with his arms folded and his weight on one hip, watching.

Greg.

Arabella’s hands were closed at her sides. Andy felt her nails in her palms, pressing in, harder, and staying there. Her jaw was shut so tight her back teeth almost ached with it. The heat had started up the back of her neck, and none of it reached her face. Her face did nothing at all.

He engineered the eliminations of Nancy and Carol, she had told them, in her office, with the clock going on the wall. He did the same to Sandra, later. And each time, he came to me and offered to design their elimination transformations himself. As a kindness. And then: The Producer requested I accept.

It went out of her. It started where it had started with Katherine, in the middle of her chest, and went outward, steadily—not in a rush, but steadily, and it didn’t stop.

Her lips came apart on a word. She shut them on it, with Greg standing close enough to hear, and her eyes began to burn. She didn’t let them close. What she meant by it came through to Andy as far as it went: to keep them on Sandra’s until it was done.

Sandra’s breath went short first. Her body was lengthening. Her chest deepened and her ribs spread, and her back pulled long, and she tried to straighten against it and couldn’t. She tried again, and her breath caught and shook on the way in. Her eyes had gone wide, white all the way around. They stayed on Arabella’s.

Her ears came down. They came soft and heavy along the sides of her head, and her hand went up to one before she could stop it. Her fingers closed on fur and held, shaking. She snatched the hand down. Both ears flattened to her skull at once. Her face stayed hard, and the ears gave her away anyway. Behind her someone drew a breath and held it. She did not look away.

Then her hands.

Andy watched them go. Her fingers stopped closing. They drew in and thickened, and what was left of them rounded and darkened into pads, and the nails went blunt and black. Sandra looked down at them. It was the only time her eyes left Arabella’s. What came out of her then was one word, low and flat, said to her own hands. “No.” Then, as the last of the fingers went, it came again and broke. “No. No, no.” She shut her mouth on the rest of it. She dragged her eyes back up. They were swimming, and they went straight to Arabella’s and held there, as if hers were the one face in the room that had to see it. Behind Sandra, Marie said “San—” again, and the hand on her sleeve held.

Her legs bent back. She stayed up on them as long as she could. She stood shaking on legs that were no longer made for standing, her mouth shut, her jaw locked. Then she went down onto her front paws, slowly, because there was nowhere else to go.

Behind her someone had begun to cry into her own hand, trying not to be heard. Nobody went to Sandra. The hand was still on Marie’s sleeve.

Greg had not moved. He hadn’t looked away either.

Last, the tail. It came down heavy behind her and lay still on the floor, and she flinched from the sound of it, as if it were somebody else’s.

Sandra stood on four feet with a face like Riley looking out of the body Andy had met in the Hollow Garden, shaking from the ears to the tail. Her one word had gone to her own hands, and nothing since. Andy could see Greg at the edge of the room, his head tipped a little, listening for more. There wasn’t any.

Greg looked her over, slow, from the ears to the tail. “Look at that,” he said. “My hellhound.” Arabella didn’t turn her head. Her nails went in deeper. Sandra’s eyes were still on hers when the memory ended.

Andy stood in the corridor with his hands open at his sides. He shut them, hard, the way hers had been shut, and held them until his own nails bit. Then he made himself open them again.

Andy’s voice had gone flat. “He drew that. She told us. He offered to design them himself. As a kindness. And she said yes, because they told her to.” He swallowed. “She hated it. I felt it. Her jaw, her hands. She never once looked at him, and she never looked away from Sandra.”

Horun did not answer. Andy hadn’t asked him anything.

Andy stood a while longer, breathing. The memory beside him had gone still in its own light: Sandra on four feet, her eyes up, and the women behind her who hadn’t moved, and the shape at the edge of it with its arms folded.