A Wife Who Wants Beauty - Part 1

It was an eyelash curler that impaled Lisa Meunster's neck. The only thing metal in the car's cabin and it happened to be in her hand at the moment of impact. She wasn't using it, at least not for curling eyelashes. It was a prop for her story about Sylvia and Mary and an undercooked hamburger. Then it was a weapon.

When the Jaguar crushed the front quarter panel and snapped the from axle of the Meunster's Honda, Lisa was pushed forward and to the right against the passenger door, and the eyelash curler, one metal ring still looped around her finger, was jammed between the door handle and her neck. In the days that followed, doctors would explain to Lisa that the eyelash curler had pierced the sternocleidomasoid muscle and split the tiny gap between the internal and external jugular veins. She had been incredibly lucky, they would say. The eyelash curler had been inserted from the front and then levered to the right as if to pry her esophagus out the front of her neck. This prying motion had severed the third cervical nerve, and that was to be the source of Lisa's trouble, though she wouldn't know that for several days.

There were other lucky breaks, she would be told. It had been raining that evening and the car rolled into the median where soft soil slowed it more gradually than the freeway would have. Harold would be released from the hospital the same day. His fractured left tibia might never return to full strength; he would probably have a limp. But he was alive and he would be sitting by Lisa's ICU bed when she woke up.

"Thank God you had your seat belts on," they would say.
"Thank God the kids weren't with you."
"Thank God it wasn't worse."

When their car came to rest, Harold was unconscious and Lisa was hanging helplessly from her seat belt. Their Accord lay on its left side so that Lisa, in the passenger seat, was hoisted into the air. Getting ready for their third Christmas party that month, she had chosen a red dress with a lace hem that encircled her knees, and a white blazer. She felt a pain in her neck — she wasn't sure why — and realized, with surprising disgust given the circumstances, that her clothes were ruined. Bloody streaks of red made it look as if her dress was bleeding onto the white of her favorite blazer.

From her position there — in a ditch, hanging from a seat belt, looking at her unconscious husband, with an eyelash curler sticking out of her neck — Lisa could see through the moonroof toward the freeway they had just left and the city skyline behind. It twinkled. Broken glass was sprinkled with water and the lights blurred and pulsed. Lisa thought it looked exactly like one of the pre-loaded wallpapers on her smart phone, beautiful and out of focus.