silly putty

When she went to the bathroom, someone replaced her with a stick of Silly Putty. The hands looked normal enough when they came back idle on the dinner table but were clearly unset clay when they tried to lift the bowl of beans. It was a darned good likeness. But they didn’t get the hair quite right, more scalp than I remembered, and overall, too much of everything, ears suddenly long and flat, eyelids not quite fit to the sockets, sour mouth that could swallow a table whole, and those eyes—smudged and red, imprinted backward with every word we’d said.