Paper skin.Paper skin.Paper skin.

Under the pencil marks, it keeps a second expression. This one is for visitors.Under the pencil marks, it keeps a second expression. This one is for visitors.The eyes arrived first. The rest of the face is still deciding whether to follow.There was a mouth here a moment ago. It has gone somewhere quieter.It has something to tell you. The teeth keep getting in the way.Three eyes. Three slightly different versions of you. None of them agree.It was drawn waiting for someone. Nobody thought to give it a clock.It practised your greeting in an empty room. It got the silence right.Normal was a shape it tried once. There wasn't enough room for the eyes.The door was drawn on the wrong side of the paper. Something came in anyway.It is trying to remember your face. So far, it has remembered an extra eye.Its eyelids were never finished. It has been making do with the dark.The nose is convincing. The childhood is harder to explain.They fit perfectly. That is the part it finds difficult to talk about.There is no door in this drawing. It still hears someone at it.It comes from behind the smile. The smile says it hasn't heard a thing.It grew into the expression. The rest of its life happened around it.One ear listens. The other keeps things. Choose your words accordingly.The paper remembers the hand. The creature remembers something else.Some look out. One looks back. It won't say which one.That is simply where the face opens. It would prefer you didn't call it happy.It had a name before it had a face. The name refuses to come back.The teeth are easier to count than the years. Both seem to change overnight.A small chair. A very tall table. Someone asking it to stop growing that way.Under the pencil marks, it keeps a second expression. This one is for visitors.From here, the face almost makes sense. It has learned not to turn around.Just a drawing and an empty chair. The chair tells a different story.It has been saving it since childhood. It isn't certain whose childhood.It spent years becoming this particular shape. Introductions take a moment.Its voice sounds nothing like its face. The face seems relieved.It remembers the wallpaper. The house insists they have never met.The portrait looked more like it yesterday. Today, it looks more like the portrait.It wasn't in the sketch. Neither of them wants to be the first to mention it.It can explain the long neck. The halo is a much less comfortable subject.It grew another tooth each time somebody asked its name. Nobody asks now.One eye remembers a door. One remembers a wall. The third refuses to look.The question came first. The teeth gathered around it.The smallest eye is still waiting for its share of the childhood.The eyes were ready for school. The rest of Hepaticus was running late.Every thought has to travel down that neck. Some never make it back.Hepaticus counts the spots when it cannot sleep. There is always one more.It used to close one eye to rest the other. Neither accepted the arrangement.The halo arrived without instructions. StinjerAsh has been wearing it anyway.It says the ring belongs to someone taller. Nobody has come to collect it.The feather remembers a bird. StinjerAsh remembers the fall differently.As a child, it hung the halo on a nail at bedtime. The wall never slept.The glasses make everything clearer. That has not made anything easier.One lens shows the room. The other shows who was here before.Optical Guy could read every line. The letters kept asking him to stop.There are more eyes than lenses. Someone is always seeing the unedited version.Verdramatic folds the face away when it gets too loud inside.It kept a small worry there as a child. The worry has its own eye now.There is room for one more expression. It would rather keep that space empty.The visible eye is being polite. The hidden one is still deciding.Under the pencil marks, it keeps a second expression. This one is for visitors.Under the pencil marks, it keeps a second expression. This one is for visitors.