Story

pity

"For a moment this grotesque form disclosed its tender interior," she said. She was leaning over me, yet her gaze flickered distractedly over my body and the disordered bedclothes. I could believe that she did not see me at all. "That moment ended, however." "I did not mean to offend you," I said. "I felt for an instant that I knew what it was like to be you, yet not forget myself, and I was filled with wonder." "Say rather, with pity," she said. As her massive chest rose and fell, the cordons of scars that bound it as in a net whitened and then flushed pink once again. "What you pity, stands apart from you. What is close is not pitiful, only what you do not understand, what you hope to cherish from a safe distance." As she spoke, her fingers idly ran in zig-zag traces, in intersecting lines across my chest, and I realized that her anger had not lessened her feeling for me. The trembling under my arms, which had continued without diminution as I passed from desire into fear, sent a violent shudder through my entire body and broke the even flow of my breathing, and as though the disruption, albeit mechanical in nature, had opened a passage to the expression of feeling. A cry broke from my throat and my eyes filled with tears.

plea

"I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create." The being finished speaking and fixed his looks upon me in the expectation of a reply. But I was bewildered, perplexed, and unable to arrange my ideas sufficiently to understand the full extent of his proposition. He continued, "You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do, and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede." "I do refuse it," I replied; "and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me...shall i create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world?" "You are in the wrong," replied the fiend. "What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another....If I have no ties and no affection, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing of whose existence every one will be ignorant. My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being and become linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now excluded."

cut

"You're right, I did pity you, but no longer," I said, "because I see that your scars not only mark a cut, they also commemorate a joining." "More than that," she said. "Scar tissue does more than flaunt its strength by chronicling the assaults it has withstood. Scar tissue is new growth. And it is tougher than skin innocent of the blade." "Is it less sensitive?" I asked. "In here, I think it is more sensitive," she said, with a gesture that seemed to include both head and breast. Freed, I pressed myself against her.

(one sip)

(I lift the mug off the table, negotiating a touchy moment when the entire weight of it transfers to my forefinger and I can feel the pull of it, its desire, almost, to rotate around my finger and hang straight down. My knuckles brace the body of the cup, which is uncomfortably hot. Drawing in only steam at first, my lips purse and meet the smooth lip of the cup, helping to support it; I pull in a tiny sip of my coffee, a latte to be exact, which means I must let my upper lip hold back the foam, either that or open my mouth wide as if for a bite and gather up a whole mouthful of foam, which the liquid itself will dissolve in my mouth. With my tongue, i transport the heat and the bitter taste of the coffee slowly around my mouth, looking out the window into the distance. Out of which, from over the rooftops, my next sentence calmly presents itself)

she

(I told her to abort me, raze me from her book; I did not want what he wanted. I laughed when my parts lay scattered on the floor, scattered as the bodies from which I had sprung, discontinuous as I myself rejoice to be. I danced in front of the disassembly, and vertebrae rolled to the four corners of the wood floor, I wrapped my intestines around my neck and wrists and sashayed about, I pitched my bladder against the wall. She watched me with half-fearful amusement. She was always proper, but there was a fierce hunger under her stays. My hijinks did not make it through the wrought iron flourishes of her prose, but they can be glimpsed in the paisley of its negative spaces, a hurly-burly of minced flesh and gouts of blood. To be linked to the chain of existence and events, yes, but bound by it? No. I forge my own links, I am building my own monstrous chain, and as time goes on, perhaps it will begin to resemble, rather, a web.)

why hideous

(I've learned to wonder: why am I "hideous"? They tell me each of my parts is beautiful and I know that all are strong. Every part of me is human and proportional to the whole. Yet I am a monster--because I am multiple, and because I am mixed, mestizo, mongrel.)

hideous progeny

And now, once again, I bid my *hideous progeny go forth and prosper.* I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations.

mutinies

And should i fear this mixed company? A body part turning against its host is an off-old tale; I have noted, variously, a front-page Enquirer story of an East Indian lad accused of murder for cutting off his second head (which wept and begged for mercy); a movie (Body Parts) in which the survivor of a car crash who receives a donor's arm wakes to find himself strangling his wife, single-handedly; a little ditty from Victorian times of a woman who lost her leg and received another ("She was gold, all gold, from her little gold toe/To her organ of veneration!"); and of her greedy husband who murdered her "not only for, but with" the leg ("And they brought it in as a Felo de Se/'Because her own Leg had killed her!"). Because her own leg had killed her. I wonder which organ will lead the revolt?

mementos

And yet I think my parts will remember me, *as I remember those they left behind*. Judith and the rest will draw together, bound by a *hidden figure* that traverses them all. I will still act, dispersed as I am, catalyzing group actions, tics, a stitch in the side. My erstwhile foot, returned to its owner, will know the tango and teach its slower fellow, and it knows how to find the sensitive spots in a push rake's anatomy, even if Bronwyn's sheltered life taught her of nothing south of a pair of black eyes and an insinuating smile. My fingers will write sonnets in the family Bible and political tracts in my embroidery hoop. *Derrida will come home mumbling about a she-monster who beset him in the woods*, and James the Dismembered will wonder at how far his toe has wandered from its resting place. If all things are called back to their authors, that is. Mary, Mary, I know you want me back, but I shall be no more than a heap of letters, sender unknown, when I return. The truth is we all are fed on embryos.

interrupting D

As a living thing, logos issues from a father. ~~I, on the other hand, have adopted a nominal mother (M/S/F) who is more like a midwife, and spring unparented from my own past selves~~ There is thus for Plato no such thing as a written thing. There is only a logos more or less alive, more or less distant from itself ~~that is, I don't exist. I am a passel of parts and should be returned to their original owners ('Did you hear something? Never mind, there's nobody there, some butcher's scraps fought over by dogs')~~ Writing is not an independent order of signification; it is weakened speech, something not completely dead: a living-dead, a reprieved corpse, a deferred life, a semblance of breath ~~but look out: zombies are hard to kill~~ The phantom, the phantasm, the simulacrum of living discourse is not inanimate; it is not insignificant; it simply signifies little...This signifier of little, this discourse that doesn't amount to much, is like all ghosts: errant. *It rolls this way and that like someone who has lost his way,* who doesn't know where he is going, having strayed from the correct path, the right direction, the rule of rectitude, the norm ~~the chain of existence and events~~ but also like someone who has lost his rights, an outlaw, a pervert, a bad seed ~~a monster~~ a vagrant, an adventurer, a bum

right breast

Aspasia could outrun the gypsy boys, throw an acorn farther than the smith's son, ride the neighbor's bull calf, plan a war council, and build a hideout in the woodpile. Her body betrayed her with breasts at twelve. Strange counterweights, pendulous superfluities, they bounced and jiggled, and hurt when she jumped. She had to run with one arm pressed to her chest. She stood with her shoulders hunched. Later, she allowed her breasts to be caressed, and acquired a reputation as a loose woman, which amused her. Her breasts adventured, true. But Aspasia, their ironic host, reclined unmoved. Her breast is at home on my chest, without regrets. I own it as one might own a solitary cat, that doesn't care whose lap it occupies, so long as its bowl is full. There is no nostalgia in its tilt.

this writing

Assembling these patched words in a physical space, I feel half-blind, as if the entire text is within reach, but because of some myopic condition *I am only familiar with from dreams*, I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how that part relates to the rest. When I open a book, I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down a page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here. But where am I now? I am in a here and a present moment that has no history and no expectations for the future. Or rather, history is only a haphazard *hopscotch* through other present moments. How i got from one to the other is unclear. Though I could list my past moments, they would remain discrete (and recombinant in potential if not in fact), hence without shape, *without end, without story.* Or with as many stories as I care to put together.

out

Burdened with body parts, your fingernails packed with mud and chips of bone, you slink out of the graveyard. A kind of *resurrection has taken place.*

left breast

Charlotte's nipple was pink and long, like a crayon. Charlotte nursed eight children, buried six, and felt each loss in her swollen breasts. She squirted the extra milk on her dying babies, rubbed it into their laboring chests. She visited the graveyard, squeezed her breasts over the small hummocks, so little white beads hung in the grass. She filled a quill-pen at her nipple and wrote invisible letters to the dead babies. Then she held a match under the page and watched her words come back. When I write my left breast sometimes dribbles the milk of invisible children.

crazy

Crazy quilts, unlike their geometrical counterparts, were constructed without pattern or plan. The patches that made them up might be any shape, color or material: a new dimity bought for the color, an old serge saved for a memory, scraps of old dresses or neckties or coats, embroidered names, dates, maps and reminiscences, feed bags and handkerchiefs, ribbons and silk coffin linings.

degradation

Dufresnoy cautioned artists to avoid obscene and impudent particolored "objects full of hollows, broken into little pieces" that were "barbarous and shocking to the eyes." In short, they were to steer clear of "all things which corrupt their natural Forms by a confusion of their Parts which are entangled in each other." In this matter, there was no distinction between painter and poet. Both must reject scattered contrary and foreign incidents. "They are the Wenns and other Excrescences, which belong not to the Body, but deform it." For Lavater, the original genius melted down his materials and, by a skillful disposition, formed of them on homogeneous whole. But the incoherent copyist collected and pounded together "motley assemblages," *"patchwork,"* "checquered work," "mosaic work," and "ponderous abortions." Nature, on the contrary, composed at a single cast: "Her organizations are not inlaid work." Nor did she function "as a compositor for the printing press, picking up the characters out of different cases."

eaten

Eaten human remains will be resurrected in the person to whom they first belonged; the missing matter will be made up in the second person from the nonhuman stuff he or she has eaten. But what (hypothesized Aquinas) about the case of a man who ate only human embryos who generated a child who ate only human embryos? If eaten matter rises in the one who possessed it first, this child will not rise at all. All its matter will rise elsewhere: either in the embryos its father ate (from which its core of human nature, passed on in the semen, was formed) or in the embryos it ate.

bad dreams

Fallen angels display their degradation in literary terms: they are mixed metaphors. They are hybrids, monsters, with no fixed or repeated morphological outlines, beings irreducible to signs or categories, bad dreams of the taxonomist. Having no identity, mosaic, cobbled-together of unmatched parts, crazy-quilted; grafts, centaurs, harpies, werewolves, two kinds of apples on one (?) tree, medusae. Opportunistic users of chicken wings, snake tails, clam shells, doe's haunches, mole's digging claws, and anything else, however ignoble, that will get them where they want to go--into the lucid architectonic heaven of the angels, fluttering, clawing, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, balancing on top of each other, on chairs, teacups and broomsticks, like acrobats and contortionists, twisting their bodies into unnatural shapes, cleaving in unholy unwholly marriages to animales, fish, birds, insects, mollusks, arachnids and others both for politics and for pleasure. Irrepressible, fecund, a falling monster holds its clef belly open to show the eggs from which new generations will spring. Urging themselves to improbable heights, cross-bred, cross-dressed, cross-referenced. Moving chaotically, in fractals, through spirals, percentages and hairpin turns, "one step forward two steps back," hopscotch, hokey-pokey, double dutch, bass-ackwards, ride-a-cock-horse.

her, me

Freed, I pressed myself against her with a ravenous heart. It seemed I was turned inside out by a mechanism hitherto unknown but native to me. I felt a sharp pain in my chest and imagined myself that sea creature she had briefly invoked, flung so far open that I was encased in my own interior and the spines that had been my fortress now pierced me from within. I clung to her with the full extent of my strength and the length of my body, and she returned the embrace. Our hands hunted and probed. We breathed each other's breath. Her scars lay like living things between us, inscribing themselves in my skin. I thought I too was rent and sewn, that I was both multiply estranged and gathered together in a dynamic union. What divided her, divided me.

Headstone

Here Lies a *Head*, *Trunk*, *Arms* (Right and Left), and *Legs* (Right and Left) as well as divers *Organs* appropriately Disposed. May they Rest in *Piece*.

a promise

His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought that as I could not sympathize with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow. After a long pause of reflection I concluded that the justice due both to him and my fellow creatures demanded of me that I should comply with his request. Turning to him, therefore, I said, "I consent to your demand, on your solemn oath to quit Europe forever, and every other place in the neighborhood of man, as soon as I shall deliver into your hands a female who will accompany you in you exile." "I swear," he cried, "by the sun, and by the blue sky of heaven, and by the fire of love that burns my heart, that if you grant my prayer, while they exist you shall never behold me again. Depart to your home and commence your labours; I shall watch their progress with unutterable anxiety; and fear not but that when you are ready I shall appear." Saying this, he suddenly quitted me, fearful, perhaps any change in my sentiments. I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than the flight of an eagle, and quickly lost among the undulations of the sea of ice.

blood

I align myself as I read with the flow of blood that as it cycles, keeping the moist and living what without it stiffens into a fibrous cell. What happens to the cells I don't visit? I think maybe they harden over time without the blood visitation, enclosures of wrought letters fused together with rust, iron cages like ancient elevators with no functioning parts. Whereas the read words are lubricated and mobile, rub familiarly against one another in the buttery medium of my regard, rearrange themselves in my peripheral vision to suggest alternatives. If I should linger in a spot, the blood pools; an appealing heaviness comes over my limbs and oxygen-rich malleability my thoughts. The letters come alive like tiny antelopes and run in packs and patterns; the furniture softens and molds itself to me. (I do not know what metaphor to stick to; I am a mixed metaphor myself, consistency is one thing you cannot really expect of me.) What I leave alone is skeletal and dry.

real M.

I alone remember the real Mary, her curious mixture of reticence and passion, the part that twisted under me with a dark satisfaction and the part that wiped her hands afterwards and twitched the curtains open with punitive haste. You can see it in her book, how she embeds her tale in a double thickness of letters and second-hand accounts, as if every precaution as if every precaution were needed to secure the monster behind those locks and screens, or as if she placed a soiled cloth in an envelope and then a reticule so that it should not graze her fingers, pretending that smeared rag did not reek of her private parts. I saw it in the pages of *her journal*, carelessly abandoned on a seat in the garden, weighted open with a magnifying glass and smoking in the intermittent sun.

metaphor me

I am a mixed metaphor. Metaphor, meaning something like "bearing across", is itself a fine metaphor for my condition. Every part of me is linked to other territories alien to it but equally mine. Shin bone connected to the thing bone, thigh bone connected to the hip bone: borrowed parts, annexed territories. I cannot be reduced, my metaphors are not tautologies, yet I am equally present in both poles of a pair, each end of the wire is tethered to one of my limbs. The metaphorical principle is my true skeleton.

hazy whole

I am a whole, that is the funny thing, but I am a whole with a kind of haze around the edges. The workmen (f. or Maru) left off here but might as well have continued, and may still. I am recognizable now, but who knows what prostheses will be grafted onto my already powerful form, making up for all the deficiencies we have yet to invent? Keep in mind, though, that on the microscopic level, you are all clouds. There is no shrink-wrap preserving you from contamination: your skin is a permeable membrane. Molecules hang in contiguity but are nowhere near as locked in place as a brick wall, and when they get excited, they take flight! Come closer, come even closer: if you touch me, your flesh is mixed with mine, and if you pull away, you may take some of me with you, and leave a token behind.

graveyard

I am buried here. You can resurrect me, but only piecemeal. If you want to see the whole, you will have sew me together yourself.

this

I am crossing a narrow arroyo--rocks rattle under my feet--the sun bleaches out the screen of my portable--my fingers slip on the keys

hard to track

I am hard to track down for the huntsmen with their hounds, the curious with their notebooks and video cameras. So much for my past; my future is no easier to graph for those (toting probability charts or a trust in narrative) who'd like to anticipate my moves, meet me at the cafe where my actions ten years ago at an U-Bahnhof in Berlin indicated I would sit today, wondering who has the gun (or, worse, the hidden tape-recorder): the woman in yellow curlers with her back to m; her companion, whose plaid cap is poised at an angle contested by gravity; the stout, restless and close-shaved man in the military beret; the young woman with smooth dark hair and sturdy boots, in energetic conversation with a friend who is more beautiful (with her heavy lower lip, tired eyes lowered behind blonde lashes) but less attractive to me. Not the baby with his fingers in a butter pat. Perhaps my neighbor, writing a letter in another language, perhaps Dutch. She is addressing a close friend: I can tell by her round, comfortable script, the colored ink, her calm and frequent gaze out the picture window.

dispersed

I am like you in most ways. My introductory paragraph comes at the beginning and I have a good head on my shoulders. I have muscle, fat, and a skeleton that keeps me from collapsing into suet. *But my real skeleton* is made of scars: a web that traverses me in three dimensions. What holds me together is what marks my dispersal. I am most myself in the gaps between my parts, though if they sailed away in all directions in a grisly regatta there would be no thing left here in my place. For that reason, though, I am hard to do in. The links can stretch very far before they break, and if I am the queen of dispersal then however far you take my separate parts (wrapped in burlap and greasy fish-wrappers, in wooden carts and wherries, burying me and burning me and returning me to the families from which I sprung unloved and bastard) you only confirm my reign.

self swarm

I am made up of a multiplicity of anonymous particles, and have no absolute boundaries. I am a swarm. "Scraps? Did you call me Scraps? Is that my name?"

think me

I am not predictable, but neither am I random. I might very well be in the cafe predicted, and am--sitting in white light, espresso souring my mouth, jazz piano tinkling over a slurred bass line, as I read fragments of flyers taped to the walls--but could equally be anywhere else, so if you think you're going to follow me, you'll have to learn to move the way I do, think the way I think; there's just no way around it. And then, my pursuers, when you are thinking my thoughts, my battle is almost won, because you'll begin to have trouble telling me apart from yourself, you too will start lifting the flyers to look for hidden mikes, and when you see me, you'll wonder if I'm chasing you.

embryo boy

I am not really here Plastic, malleable, a contortionist, I fit a kind of life into the interstices of other lives. I squirm between the lines and their wrought steel, cold, prints letters on my damp flesh that fade when I move on. I am just a hanger on, a loose end, a remainder. You can ignore me. When they settle, the accountants will round down, not up. Bye bye!

I am

I am tall, and broad shouldered enough that many take me for a man; others think me a transsexual (another feat of cut and stitch) and examine my jaw and hands for outsized bones, my throat for the tell-tale adam's apple. My black hair falls down my back but does not make me girlish. women and men alike mistake my gender and both are drawn to me. The motley effect of patched skin has lessened with age and uniform light conditions, though I am still subtly pied. Naked, I am more visibly so. I have large eyes, though they are proportional to my other features (all my features are large, but do not appear so in this setting). My pupils are pale grey, black-ringed. I move swiftly, with long loose strides; I was never comfortable in the drawing rooms or the pruned and cherished gardens of Mary's time and territory. I am happier where I have room to take long strides and I am enough alone that I can strip and walk unencumbered--I was made as strong as my unfortunate and famous brother, but less neurotic! Born full-grown, I have lived in this frame for 175 years. By another reckoning, I have lived many lives and am much older. The curious, the lustful, the suspicious, and the merely stupid watch me wherever I go and some follow me, scribbling notes and numerals, as if translation into a chart or overview will make all clear and safe as houses. They may be sure that I will lead them for a chase. I am never settled. I belong nowhere. This is not bizarre for my sex, however, nor is it uncomfortable for us, to whom belonging has generally meant, belonging TO.

she stood

I approached her slowly over the small stone bridge. She trembled slightly, and her left leg jerked as if it would flee alone if need be, but she held her ground. She was stark naked. I noticed what i could not have seen in the dim light of my laboratory, that the various sectors of her skin were different hues and textures, no match perfect. Here a coarser texture confused the ruddy hue of blood near under the skin, there smooth skin betrayed a jaundiced undertone, there a dense coat of fine hairs palely caught the light. Warm brown neighbored blue-veined ivory. I thought of the tree that stands by the house. I have often noticed that a length of cloth however richly dyed cannot match the beauty or sustain the interest of Autumn foliage. I believe it is because the myriad differing hues, while tending toward the self-same yellow one can achieve with a broth of turmeric, say, or onion skins, creates a disturbance of other colors around the root color: a penumbra, a kind of three-dimensionality of color. In this same way she was beautiful.

a slot, a notch

I can't say I enjoy it, exactly. The present moment is furiously small, a slot, a notch, a footprint, and on either side of it is a seethe of possibility, the dissolve of alphabets and of me. I do not know how I proceed (balancing on a vector stretched for one second like a wire over an acid bath? Running along a sinking plank?) or even if I proceed, because each present is all I have, that and the pasts I collect like snapshots in accordion-pleated plastic sleeves. Perhaps I'd like it better riding a strong steady flow, guaranteeing that if I boarded a Mississippi steamboat at x I would certainly pass through y before disembarking z.

surgery

I concealed myself behind an armoire as the maid handed in a steaming kettle through the half-shut lavatory door, which Mary briskly locked behind her. We laid out wads of cotton and clean torn undergarments, a sharp small knife, and assorted needles on the table under the single high window whose tiny dense panes disclosed (to one of my height) a smeared view of the dark, glossy lake and darker sky. It would rain later, as it had every afternoon that week. A lit candle in a wall sconce augmented the meager daylight. Mary dampened a rag at the mouth of the kettle and applied it to her calf. She let out a faint cry of surprise and pain at the heat of the water, then gamely took up a bar of soap and ran it over the spot; but I saw her blink twice quickly and so I asked her, as I had many times before, if she was resolved. She assented with such a cold look that I clapped my mouth shut and set to sterilizing the needles, holding them in the hollow heart of the candle-flame until their shafts burned between my fingertips.

crave

I crave her company; I crave even the danger. Do I yearn for the easement of my own company? Do I resent the fierce mad engine that is throbbing inside my serene life, staining my underclothes, creasing my brow, making me jump up restless from Percy's side to go to my writing desk, the window, the bookcase, the door, while he gazes at me in gentle reproach, or speaks to me as a tutor might of the inner peace I clearly lack? Yes, of course I do. You are taking me over, I long to cry, but does one punish the food for the pain in one's empty belly?

meeting

I do not know what I expected. Our parting had been ambiguous in its tone. I felt variegated emotions churning in my breast: tenderness, repugnance, fear, and profound responsibility, both anxious and prideful. I had not expected what came to pass, that she would turn with a diplomat's ease and gesture to me to continue at her side, herself taking the muddier route down the center of the trail and leaving rough footprints the size of basins to astonish my fellow citizens.

filthy work

I feared the vengeance of the disappointed fiend, yet I was unable to overcome my repugnance to the task which was enjoined me. I found that I could not compose a female without again devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation, and this was to me like the torture of single drops of water continually falling on the head. As I proceeded in my labor, it became every day more horrible and irksome to me. Sometimes I could not prevail on myself to enter my laboratory for several days, and at other times I toiled day and night in order to complete my work. It was, indeed, a filthy process in which I was engaged. During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the consummation of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands.

written

I had made her, writing deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black letters blurred into stitches and I began to feel that I was sewing a great quilt, as the old women in town do night after night, looking dolefully out their windows from time to time toward the light on my own window and imagining my sins while their thighs tremble under the heavy body of the quilt heaped across their laps, and their strokes grow quicker than machinery and tight enough to score deep creases in the cloth. I have looked with reciprocal coolness their way, not wondering what stories joined the fragments in their workbaskets.

sewn

I had sewn her, stitching deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black stitches wavered into script and I began to feel that I was writing, that this creature I was assembling was a brash attempt to achieve by artificial means the unity of a life-form--a unity perhaps more rightfully given, not made; continuous, not interrupted; and subject to divine truth, not the will to expression of its prideful author. Authoress, I amend, smiling.

double agent

I have a letch for sequence, don't doubt it. I am not the agent of absolute multiplicity any more than I am some redoubtable whole. I am a double agent, messing up both territories. I am muscular and convincing because I am whole; I am devious and an escape artist because I am broken. Oh, *I want to be whole*, don't doubt it. Jennifer's leg lying next to Bronwyn's foot on the flagstones of Frankenstein's workshop can't kick anyone's butt. But then Jennifer couldn't do it alone, either, not in all those petticoats. No, it's me, this one: Jennifer-Bronwyn-Elizabeth-Roderick-Kate-Alise-Germaine-Aphrodite-Nadine and all the others, who can take on any comers. And if you think that's not fair, a few hundred to one, you're overlooking your own stitch marks.

liver

I have a man's liver: Roderick's. Sturdy but disinclined to sport, of keen intellect but no patience for the intricacies of scholarship, he scandalized his high-born parents by going into business, where his taste for sumptuous fabrics and lace established him and his partner at the forefront of the imports market; he could easily have afforded to build his own house in town, so why, asked the townspeople, did he choose until the end of his days to occupy a small (though elegant) apartment in his partner's country home outside town? My liver is modest, efficient, shapely, and affectionate.

join

I held her leg steady as she unblinking scored a circle the size of a farthing in the skin of her calf, then from the perimeter of the circle toward the center slid the blade under the topmost layers of skin, lifting it. I could see the dark metal through her fair skin. "Like detaching a round of pastry dough from a table top," she said, lifting the bloody scrap whole on the tip of the blade and holding it out toward me. I wiped the piece of skin off the blade onto a bit of cotton and set the sharp edge of the knife against the knotty scar that crosses my thigh to meet my groin. We had decided that as my skin did not, strictly speaking, belong to me, the nearest thing to a bit of my flesh would be this scar, a place where disparate things joined in a way that was my own. For her part, she chose a piece of skin Percy would likely never miss, in a place where bandages could be readily explained if they should be discovered. I sliced off a disc of scar tissue the same size as the bit that lay on the pink twist of cotton, and slid it off the point of the knife onto the raw spot on her leg; she took the knife and laid her piece on me. The needlework was her assignment; my big hands are too clumsy for fine stitchery. I swabbed the blood from both our thighs. She was pale but her hands were steady as she joined us.

hidden figure

I know too that if what my studies instructed me of a coming resurrection is true (though I do not believe it, for have I not done in history and formed a human chain of one between life and death?) the restoration of bodily wholeness for the rest of you will rend me apart. Jennifer, Bronwyn and the rest will sit up from their graves in the little cemetery where I was born and where I will, where I now, where I have many times awaited my "death", and in front of them all I will come apart paragraph by paragraph. If all quotes remain tethered to their sources by however tenuous filaments, so my parts. My face will explode into fragments: eyeballs roll back to Tituba, teeth fly like sideways hail to the empty gums of Walter and Judith, sorting themselves as they go (molars to Judith, incisors to Walter, who ate only wine biscuits and blancmange). My fingers will heal themselves back onto the stumps of their various donors. I will be an afterimage glowing at the points of origin of my many flight paths. A Cheshire aftercat. An unchalked outline. Metaphors will be called home for good. There will be no more likeness, only identity.

I moved

I moved my hand then, and touched one of her scars, those prominences that had filled me with such uneasy disgust when I first saw her living body naked. Even those portions which her maker had stitched with a finer hand and a thought to the onlooker, her face and hands, were criss-crossed by the traces of innumerable tucks and gathers and the tiny white flecks where the careful, even stitches had removed in her monstrous infancy. But long cords of curdled, whitened tissue divided her torso into sectors as distinct as patches in a quilt.

names

I pay homage to Jennifer and the others, and *I wonder if I can detect their diverse personalities in my multiple parts.* Is my toe a little shy, tending to curl under and hide its pearly nail from the onlooker? That's Constance, the nun with the beautiful toe and more besides, though visited only by God, a curious kitten, and the interrogative hands of a young and rebellious novice, a daughter of neglectful privilege. Does my heart beat in my chest with Vulcanic hammer strokes? It is Agatha's heart, who knocked dead her daughter's betrayer with a soup bone and grew a very fertile crop of kale and cabbages from her kitchen garden the next spring.

lung

I possess the capacious lungs of mountain-bred Thomasina, who ran with the goats in the high Alps until a travelling gaffer with a billy's beard and stout money-bags bought her from her father and took her to polish his silver in a wood-panelled home in the valley, where she found a certain pleasure in scaling the steep roof on dark nights until a loose single brought about her first fall ever, and her last. My lungs extract the oxygen from my surroundings so deftly and secretly that in a closed space beside me you may grow dizzy, as though you were looking down from a great height.

fingertips

I ran my fingertips along a seam that traversed her flank. It was tough and knobbled, yet slick. And it was hot, not the cold I had anticipated without knowing it. Indeed, it was hotter than the stretches of smooth skin it divided, as I proved by caressing both regions. When I laid my hand flat and still for a moment on her side, the scar was a burning slash across my palm, and I wondered if it hurt her. I was filled with compassion. She seemed to sense a change in me.

treachery

I sat one evening in my laboratory; the sun had set, and the moon was just rising from the sea; I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labour for the night or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it. As I sat, a train of reflection occurred to me which led me to consider the effects of what I was now doing. Three years before, I was engaged in the same manner and had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart and filled it forever with the bitterest remorse. I was now about to form another being of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighborhood of man and hide himself in deserts, but she had not, and she, who in all probability was to become with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species. Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. I trembled and my heart failed within me, when, on looking up, I saw by the light of the moon the daemon at the casement. A ghastly grin wrinkled his lips as he gazed on me, where I sat fulfilling the task which he had allotted to me. Yes, he had followed me in my travels; he had loitered in forests, hid himself in caves, or taken refuge in wide and desert heaths; and he now came to mark my progress and claim the fulfillment of my promise. As I looked on him, his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery. I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and trembling with passion, *tore to pieces* the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew.

this

I'm cross-legged on a dusty pillow in a tiny Middle-Eastern restaurant on Valencia in the Mission--the bronze tabletop clangs when I hit on the keys hard--someone is peering at me through the curtain behind the counter

this

I'm in the back of an air-conditioned convenience store at a gas station in Iowa--a man with a protruding lower lip is staring at me between bags of potato chips--I push aside the bean dip to prop my portable on the shelf

bodies too

If not, still written. First, because our infinitely various forms are composed from a limited number of similar elements, a kind of alphabet, and we have guidelines as to which arrangements are acceptable, are valid words, legible sentences, and *which are typographical or grammatical errors: "monsters"* We are inevitably annexed to other bodies: human bodies, and bodies of knowledge. We are coupled to constructions of meaning; we are legible, partially; we are cooperative with meanings, but irreducible to any one. The ofrm is not absolutely malleable to the intentions of the author; what may be thought is contingent on the means of expression.

shy

In bed, she was curiously shy, whipping the spread to her chin and refusing to lower it. Perhaps she felt that what was rough or ungainly in her appearance was matched and celebrated in the disorder of Nature, but had no place in a bedchamber. Indeed, she touched my pillows and trinkets with unwonted delicacy, as if she feared to damage them. But it was her scars that seemed to pain her most. Her shyness was matched by my own. I feared her still, and cannot deny I felt a fleeting horror on beholding in intimate quarters the details of her anatomy.

already

In the same way one could say that I existed already, before my members severed past alliances. It is merely a matter of redrawing an outline. Snaking through the space between two lives to wrap a line around some third figure.

basket

Indeed, there were remains--unused lengths of venous plumbing, fatty trimmings, deleted passages, a page that blew off a table in the garden where a rock imperfectly anchored an untidy slew of manuscript pages while she wandered in a reverie, attending only dimly the disquisitions of one of the philosophical friends of the household. Percy himself excised parts he found blemished. Yet the child lived. Lives. *Has it not struck you as odd that the whole of a female of stature commensurate with that of her monstrous intended (not to mention a "great quantity of stones") could be hoisted by one man and borne out to sea--in a basket?*

quilting

It was at a church quilting bee in Cleveland that Susan B. Anthony gave her first speech on women's suffrage. I was the featured attraction, the *demon quilt,* sprung from the hands of a demonic quilter, a woman who turned her feminine arts to a dark end, dealing in flesh and horror, puncturing the skin with her quilting needle. I see the needle forced through the robbed whorled skin of the palm of the hand, stitching it neatly to the wrist. Techniques of cut and stitchery come in handy for fiercer things too. Oh, don't suppose that a warm bed is all those quilting women thought about, while they frowned down at sharpened steel and shredded coats! Never mind that I've never been so fond of quilts, except to sleep under. Or that I don't adore an art so stuck on family and dowries and keeping the girl's hands from the devil's work, and mothers passing their soporifics down to daughters. All the same I strutted and posed, a quilt too big for the hope chest and too unruly for the honeymoon bed, a quilt with a vote and an attitude. I think I scared some of the attendees; anyway their stitches got a little out of line.

sight

It was my monster; stark naked, standing as still as if I had not yet breathed life into her massive frame, and waiting for me. She held in one hand a scrap of cloth I recognized, all that was left of the clothes I had thrust upon her when she fled me shortly after her conception; the rest she had lost or cast aside. I could not help but quail before the strangeness of this figure, from which, I fancifully imagined, the very blades of grass seemed to shrink, but curiosity, compassion, and a kind of fellow feeling was the stronger impulse, and I forced myself to continue.

i lay

Last night I lay in her arms, my monster, and for the first time laid my hand on her skin. Her skins, I should rather say, or forgo the possessive altogether. Others had as good a right as she--perhaps better--to call that skin their own. These thoughts trembled in my hand, and yet, I did not pull away. Her body was warm. Feverish, I might say, yet knew not what internal thermostat might hold steady and true in that preternaturally robust form. I touched her skin lightly, and yet she trembled, as if my fingers burned her. It surprised, then moved me, that one so strong should be susceptible, should tremble and mist at a touch. If her matter had once belonged to others, yet she she had made it hers. It lived to register the passage of her thoughts, her minutest sensations, and it seemed to me that it could never have been so plastic and so alive as under the sway of that formidable intelligence.

birth

My birth takes place more than once. In the *plea of a bygone monster*; from a *muddy hole* by corpse-light; *under the needle,* and *under the pen.* Or it *took place not at all.* But if I hope to tell a *good story,* I must leapfrog out of the muddle of my several births to the day I parted for the last time with the author of my being, and set out to write my own destiny.

foot

My foot belonged to Bronwyn, who had extraordinary balance. Modest Bronwyn never said a word on her own behalf, but kept what she had; when pushed, gentle Bronwyn never budged. She outlived her immediate family, held the house and grounds for herself against a torrent of creditors, suitors, and poor relations. My foot drags a little in walking, but excels in standing still.

guts

My guts are notable for their smooth flexion and mature restraint. They contract rhythmically in rings that travel down the length of them with serenely constant velocity. They belonged once to a woman of regular diet and attention to detail, a woman with a certain power and plenty of clean linen, a woman with keys at her waist: Mistress Anne, who found time in her busy schedule as head of the maidservants of a large manor to study the Natural Sciences and Alchemy in the privacy of the privy, while evacuating her bowels with exemplary thoroughness. Unfortunately, the latter part of my intestines was taken from a cow; Mistress Anne's intestines while flexible could not stretch to fit my great stature, and so a graft was called for. This Bossy was a solemn character who deliberated over problems at length, yet threw up her tail with vigorous joy when she came to a decision; thus, my bowel habits have always suffered from a bottle-neck effect at the lower extremity of that organ, and I must ever keep a bathroom in view, or suffer an embarrassment that is the more extreme because Mistress Anne cannot refrain from taking the blame for accidents, and spends long hours in pained puzzlement over the failure of her precautions, for her most fastidious efforts fall short of preventing an explosive outcome.

heart

My heart belonged to Agatha.

left leg

My left leg belonged to Jane, a nanny who harbored under her durable grey dresses and sensible undergarments a remembrance of a less sensible time: a tattoo of a ship and the legend, Come Back To Me. Nanny knew some stories that astonished her charges, and though the ship on her thigh blurred and grew faint and blue with distance, until it seemed that the currents must have long ago finished their work, undoing its planks one by one with unfailing patience, she always took the children to the wharf when word came that a ship was docking, and many a sailor greeted her by name. My leg is always twitching, jumping, joggling. It wants to go places. It has had enough of waiting.

right arm

My right arm has two parts: the upper belonged to Tristessa, a woman known in the ship-yards for her deadly aim with a bottle--at stray dog or man, for she let fly at the one with as little or as much cause as she trounced the other. Indeed, she claimed to see no great distinction between the two: "You're neither of you safe to pet but in captivity, and there you're naught but a middling bed warmth, a gaping maw, and the bugs you bring home in your pelt." Followed a crash and the scatter of bright fragments. Yet she never lacked for company. It was rumored she had a dog of her own, but she kept it well hid, and as for the other, if you're asking, you'd do well to duck. The lower part was Eleanor's, a lady very dextrous with the accoutrements of femininity. She wielded a fan like a weapon, unfurling and snapping it shut with militant flirtatiousness. She swung a calf's weight in whalebone, metal hoop, linen and lace around her frame with no appearance of strain, and could hold a smile like a trapeze artist who swings by the teeth. The crook of her little finger as she cut her meat would silence a table. She liked her solitude, and had won it with the techniques of a perfect sociability. One part of me hurls weapons for a welcome. One part uses welcome as a weapon. On one thing they agree: when I look friendly, take care.

right leg

My right leg belonged to Jennifer, who buried herself in layers of petticoats, flounces and furbelows. It took hours to lace her up in the morning. Gossips called her vain. In fact, she was hiding. Something growled in her dreams, shook her sleeping frame; she woke up in wet and snarled sheets with bits of feathers stuck to her cheek. It was only bound in laces and tight bodices that she dared go down to breakfast; unbound, she might tear all to shreds. She conversed over weak tea and stuck the tines of a fork through twenty layers of petticoats into her restless thigh; i bear the mark. She lived a mild, exemplary, and unwed life, and woke up every morning exultant and sweating, having won her loved ones another day safe from the beast. As for me, the beast dreams placid dreams: Jennifer needs her rest.

head

My skull is like an ancient vase scratched from the dust with toothpicks and paintbrushes and reassembled on a desk: there are fragments enough to make a vase, but how many vases shattered for this one? An archaeologist made a pot, that's all we know. Sometimes when it's quiet i hear in my ears the roaring of a crowd.

stomach

My stomach belonged to Bella, an oblate simpleton. She was never dyspeptic, though she ate everything. Eating was her thinking, it was lovemaking, family, and job. The townspeople accounted it prayer to feed her, worth a blessing from the priest who gave her a bed and a broom to push around, and some said the crops grew better when Bella was fed, because they felt appreciated. When a young fellow, pronounced a ne'er-do-well by his fellow revelers at the tavern, was found crushed by an enormous weight, the townspeople tried Bella for murder. Bella, uninterested, nibbled on figs. Awaiting execution, Bella feasted on bread, pears, and sweet cheese, passed in parcels through the bars. Bella in the cart on the way to the gallows ate oranges and apples, spitting seeds in the air. Bella in the ground germinated a garden. An apple, an orange, a pear and a fig tree grew intertwined from the mound. I belch the sweet smell of an orchard in summer.

trunk

My trunk belonged to a dancer, Angela, a woman of low birth but high sights, and a mimic ear for the accents of the upper class. Cunning, she had her own advancement always in view, except when she danced and her body tossed with an abandonment that was her greatest attraction. She knew this but did not understand it: offstage her efforts to control her posture, her movements were fervent ("I shake my hindquarters like a little dog, and arch my back like a cock crowing over his chickens," she complained to a fellow dancer), for she saw rightly that the language of the body also has its accents, low and high. My body is both insinuating and naive: moments of knowingness--of art manipulative and interested--punctuate my abandonment, and knowingness opens into chaos.

veins

My veins belonged to a quiet and malleable young woman named Helen. She left a legacy of veins that never contract in rage or tension; her open nature admits the cadenced torrent of my blood without constriction or complaint. Her father loved to see her heavy eyelids lowered, her long and placid face bent over the spinning wheel. It was his sorrow that the thread she spun was easily broken, full of burrs, knots, and other imperfections.

female trouble

Percy wonders what is wrong with me; i allude to "feminine complaints" and he delicately withdraws, leaving me growling and hitting the pretty pillows the maid plumps up every quarter hour, by my fretful calculation, and with such a bland and optimistic demeanor that I long to bite and tear at her pillows and greet her calmly in a blizzard of feathers with quills between my teeth! That I do not, I owe to some native instinct for self-preservation. I see her in my morbid imaginings calmly turn, fetch dustpan and broom, and attempt to sweep a maelstrom into a waste-paper basket. I believe that at that point I should truly go mad. I wonder where this will take me. I wonder how long she will be with me, for I know she is restless. I too am restless; she makes me so. I wish I had her strong limbs; I would run up these Alps, as she tells me she does, following the changing light across fields of ice. How quickly now our positions reverse and teacher turns pupil! She has seen things I will never see; she remembers more than I will experience in my whole life. And yet she is hungry for more. I know she will leave me soon. *I have a crazy wish! I wish that I had cut off a part of me, something Percy would not miss, but something dear to me, and given it to be a part of her.* I would live on in her, and she would know me as I know myself. I fear this but crave it. I do not know if she would want it. But i could graft myself to that mighty vine. Who knows what *strange new fruit* the two of us might bear?

remade

Resurrected amputees hold up their stumps optimistically to the ravens, the lions, the bears, fish and crocodiles that gang up along shorelines and other verges to proffer the hands, feet and heads they are all simultaneously regurgitating whole, years after they gorged themselves. The body reconstitutes itself, foot filling the gorge. It takes its matter, if digested, from the animal's own flesh--animal weakened by this still makes it to the designated meeting-ground--big toe scraping the roof of the mouth, tapping on the teeth from inside, seeming alive, wanting out. *The once lost returns.*

appetite

She has been continuously by my side for several days. I find her appetite enormous, for food and for experience; it surpasses mine, and so I (would-be parent) find my child leading me in pursuit of the pleasures of knowledge and the knowledge of pleasures I had not imagined. She is moody, and quieter than I, but has spurts of energy in which it seems she will bring down trees, shake fence-posts out of their holes, startle badgers from their dens with her stamping, her hallooing, her jumping and laughing. Her enthusiasm for life shames me. With that timorousness do I lift my skirts above my knees and inch my way across the log she rolled over the stream, a teacup torrent that would strain my stockings if allowed to do its worst. i find that I am good at it! The log holds, my balance is good, my grip on the rough bark sure enough though my shod feet are not as agile as her bare toes. My legs are strong, if shockingly white under an Autumn sky, and compared to her motley. For despite the cold, she will not keep her clothes for long; romping like a hoydenish child of overgrown proportions she tears the confining garments from her form, baring her scarred and rag-tag flesh. She makes a mockery of my parsimony, for middling seamstress that I am I saved my fine stitchery for her face and hands, imagining that I would find in her a modesty to match her maker's. She does not resemble me. But then I begin to wonder if I still resemble myself.

infant

She is exuberant, ferocious, loving, unhinged. She is an infant with the strength and wits of a more-than-adult. Scraps of memories blow through her mind like bits of patterned cloth; I watch her face cloud and think I see her grab at the fragment, hold it before her. For a moment delight animates every feature: she KNOWS. In the next moment, the wind tears it from her fingers, and she is staring stubbornly into a whirl of colored pieces, calico, velvet, taffeta, dimity. Rage congests her features, her upper lip draws back so hard the skin whitens and I fear for my needlework, she holds me bent back over a decorative little cliff, yet high enough to break me; then she dandles me in thin air, laughing so gaily I know she does not remember her own anger. Pensive, then abrupt; sharp-mannered, then languorously inviting; she changes with each heart-beat, and I change with her. I must. I will be swallowed up else, or crushed, or flung far away. Am I afraid? Terribly; I know this is no sport. Yet subtly I see her gauge herself by me, easing her grip when my face tightens, slowing to watch me pant red-faced behind her up the little knoll Percy loves. I think she will learn to manage herself somehow, to learn a kind of husbandry--strange world!--of her manifold self, though it will not resemble mine. I owe her my guidance, if she will have it. Yet I dissemble. It is more than this.

weight

She opened her eyes, which until that moment she had held shut as if trying to listen to something almost inaudible. Her gaze fastened on mine, and at once her embroidered brows drew together and she laid me on my back with one blow of her huge palm. I shook. In that instant I thought that I had been deceived by a carnivore of superhuman cunning, who could play upon others with skill and ruthlessness of one who had studied within herself the stilled machinery of the most ephemeral human emotions, yet had never felt even a tremor of a flywheel or the flexion of a fan belt. An enormous weight lay upon my chest; it was her hand; I awaited I knew not what.

learn

She wants to learn, but I cannot fathom how to teach her, for her eyes slip sideways from every presented view and her varicolored fingers twitch discontentedly as if attempting to grasp a Will-o'-the-Wisp by a firm and vertebrate neck and wring its secrets from it. She will ask *one question, then another*, and before long we will be discussing blackberry preserves, sorcery, or Homeric odes, with a merry disregard for relevance or perhaps because to her these things are all equally pertinent. I despair of treating any one subject adequately, unless it be by crossing it enough times in our peregrinations that our overlaid footprints begin to cover the whole, just as in those drawings in which the sitter's features are limned by minute perturbations in the course of a single line that shuttles in loom-weaver's style from side to side of the parchment, filling the frame from top to bottom. The figure is connected by innumerable filaments to its ground, indeed it is one with its surroundings (the reverse is also true), yet not obscured by them. Or, as when as a child I laid a piece of paper over a tombstone, and rubbed a bit of charcoal back and forth, back and forth, until the winged skulls and disconsolate maidens emerged from the fibres as if summoned up from my own bewildered and superstitious soul.

seam'd

Surgery was the art of restoring and binding disjointed parts, reminiscent of the humble craft of masonry with its evident mortaring of bricks. Chambers described the suture as that "seam made to close the lips of a wound" in order to promote its healing. The Cyclopaedia managed to paint a gallery of medical tortures merely by the sober classification of types of junctures. Incarnatives, for example, might be interrupted, intertwisted, penned, or feathered and clasped. Restrictives stopped the flow of blood when numerous vessels were cut. Conservatives closed large openings to prevent further receding from the loss of substance. Intertwisted sutures left needles sticking in the wounds--in the manner of tailors--with thread wrapped around them. Dry closures, used for the face in order to prevent scarring, employed leather and cloth indented or overlaid like the teeth of a saw. Being "seam'd with scars" was both a fact of eighteenth-century life and a metaphor for dissonant interferences ruining any finely adjusted composition.

scam

That's right: it was a cover-up, a scam, a lie. We celebrated my death with wine and crusty bread at the little table in the garden, overlooking the lake where fictitious bubbles rose and burst, my phantasmic epigraphs. I had privacy--I had my life--and I had Mary.

typographical

The comparison between a literary composition and the fitting together of the human body from various members stemmed from ancient rhetoric. Membrum or "limb" also signified "clause." The reestablishment of the connection between painting and writing in Neoclassical pedagogy focused again on Quintilian's dictum that the artist must put together an integrated corpus from detachable elements, smoothly flowing from one section to another. Dandre-Bardon taught that "thoughts are the limbs of a composition and must be distributed over the canvas with a just economy." This basically phraseological skill--gliding from corporeal syllables to sentences--averted the creation of tortuous somatic monsters whose parts did not belong. Analogously, Joesph Addison (1672-1719) disparaged as the creations of false wit the use of obsolete words or barbarisms, rusticities, absurd spellings, complicated dialects, and the outlandish construction of poems made up of concrete objects. The essay on "True and False Wit" took to task "tricks in writing" and decadent signs of "Monkish" taste. These were evinced in the visual turning of one set of terms into another and resembled "the Anagram of a Man." The limbs of syntax were distorted and set in foreign places where they did not rightfully occur.

mary

The day was moist and my clothes, to which I had not yet grown accustomed, twisted themselves into itching bands around my ribcage. I jumped up again and again from Mary's tiny writing table, banging my knees, to pluck at the folds and scratch luxuriously underneath my petticoat. Mary waited, her face saintly with annoyance blocked. Though sweat darkened her dress under her arms and between her shoulder blades, she remained composed, portioning out the money and papers that would take me to America and folding them into the envelopes she was neatly labelling. That I was leaving, and that very day, had been settled with few words between us. Mary and I both wished me gone and the anticipated work of grieving began. I was rife with curiosity about the imagined largess of a new continent, and she was sullen in her refusal to speculate with me. Far from sentimental, we were both testy in the knowledge that we would soon be parted; seeing each other still nearby struck us both with an ugly shock, like a foolish anachronism in a novel that makes you distrust the author, and regret the time already invested in a world gone suddenly paper-thin. Mary checked the clock, for it would not do for Percy to come home in the middle of what was next. I have a secret I finger in private moments. (In truth, I am a glut of secrets; in me a congregation has confided its most intimate experiences.) The day I left Mary forever, we performed a *certain surgery.*

dotted line

The dotted line is the best line: It indicates a difference without cleaving apart for good what it distinguishes. It is a permeable membrane: some substance necessary to both can pass from one side to another. It is a potential line, an indication of the way out of two dimensions (fold along dotted line): In three dimensions what is separate can be brought together without ripping apart what is already joined, the two sides of a page flow moebiusly into one another. Pages become tunnels or towers, hats or airplanes, cranes, frogs, balloons, or nested boxes. Because it is a potential line, it folds/unfolds the imagination in one move. It suggests action (fold here), a chance at change, yet it acknowledges the viewer's freedom to do nothing but imagine. It is paradoxical: more innocent than the solid line (above which rises, on a sewing pattern, half a pair of scissors, oddly askew), it can be coerced into fiercer uses than the pacifist fold:: on the photograph of a cow, the classic cuts are sketched out in dotted lines. The cow doesn't know it yet, but it is an assemblage of dinners. A dotted line demonstrates: even what is discontinuous and in pieces can blaze a trail.

born

The grave becomes the cradle; from amidst damp clods and wisps of luminous corpse-gas comes squalling the "hideous progeny," her words. Death is the very seat, the prop of life, its raw material, and those once impregnable ramparts that barred the living from the dead are breached. Impregnable ramparts, pregnant death; barriers breached by the breech birth. Yeah, I came out topsy-turvy, heels over head, and the whole world wobbled with me. Life once did flow toward death, parents engendered offspring, time moved from the beginning to the end. I am a disturbance in the flow.

resurrection

The human, more than human resurrected body is a body restored to wholeness and perfection, even to a perfection it never achieved in its original state. There is some disagreement as to what exactly this involves. What is the age of the resurrected body? Is perfection at twenty years old, at thirty, at forty? Plastic surgeons must ask themselves the same question. And what might be the perfection of a baby that died in embryo? Regardless, though it rises incomplete from the grave (lids pop open on the black slots, box-shaped, and cadavers clamber out or spring upright like Jacks in the Box--earth unlocks its coffers, resembling sudden furniture) amputated, skeletal, or enshrouded and decayed, the graveworms, still crawling in the folds (like F's still unrestored zombie mom), all wounds will heal themselves. Flesh will cuddle bone like the apricot its pit, insulating the drafty slats of the human edifice. Dust wind-scattered will blow in reverse from the four corners of the earth to its one center (the geography of the last judgment is also disputed), whirl itself into a giddy dust-devil first, then a porous, ill-shaped homunculus; particles mound, knead, scrunch themselves together. Water comes from somewhere to moisten the dry fellow (since we're all afloat, innerly).

riven

The incompleteness of riven experience was visualized as a wound, patched, bandaged, or otherwise conspicuously tied together. This existential realization necessitated the devising of an equally discordant prose and painting style.

now

The moments of text get smaller

the remains

The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being. I paused to collect myself and then entered the chamber. With trembling hand I conveyed the instruments out of the room, but I reflected that I ought not to leave the relics of my work to excite the horror and suspicion of the peasants; and I accordingly put them into a basket, with a great quantity of stones, and laying them up, determined to throw them into the sea that very night; and in the mean time I sat upon the beach, employed in cleaning and arranging my chemical apparatus. Between two and three in the morning the moon rose; and I then, putting my basket aboard a little skiff, sailed out about four miles from the shore. The scene was perfectly solitary; a few boats were returning toward land, but I sailed away from them. I felt as if I was about the commission of a dreadful crime and avoided with shuddering anxiety any encounter with my fellow creatures. At one time the moon, which had before been clear, was suddenly overspread by a thick cloud, and I took advantage of the moment of darkness and cast my basket into the sea; I listened to the gurgling sound as it sank and then sailed away from the spot.

it thinks

There is a kind of thinking without thinkers. Matter thinks. Language thinks. When we have business with language, we are possessed by its dreams and demons, we grow *intimate with monsters*. We become hybrids, chimeras, centaurs ourselves: steaming flanks and solid redoubtable hoofs galloping under a vaporous machinery.

organs

This Urn guards a *Heart*, a *Liver*, *Lungs*, *Stomach*, *Guts*, and *Veins*.

lives

We live in the expectation of traditional narrative progression; we read the first chapters and begin already to figure out whether our lives are romantic comedy or high tragedy, mystery or adventure (we have certain hopes for the heroine, whose good looks can be expected to generate certain formations among the supporting characters and predict the nature of her happy ending); with great effort we can perhaps lean sideways and veer into a different section of the library, but most of us do our best to adhere to the conventions of our chose genre, and a kind of vertigo besets us when we witness plot developments that had no foreshadowing in the previous chapters; we protest bad writing. (WE are nearly all of us bad or disorderly writers; despite ourselves we are redundant, looped, entangled; our transitions are awkward, our conclusions unsubstantiated)

turned

We turned this way and that, slipping at times into reverie, approaching intimacy and veering away again by mutual and emphatic agreement, feigning slumber and awakening. At last she turned and looked at me and I saw a sort of desperation in her eyes. Here at least she was still my child, and she would not move without a sign from me.

us

We wrapped the bloody rags in a towel with a large stone and sank them in the lake. We were cool as we bade each other farewell there on the muddy shore, in a light rain. I do not know what came of that off-shoot of me, if it dried and fell off or lived in its ring of scars. But I am a strong vine. The graft took, the bit of skin is still a living pink, and so I remember when I was Mary, and how I loved a monster, and became one. I bring you *my story, which is ours.*

cuts

When I take something apart that once seemed whole I make an unnerving discovery. You might think I am left with a kind of kit over which the dream of the whole hovers as reassuringly as the picture on the front of the box, whispering that the whole already exists, that I am not making something new and subject to accident but returning scrambled elements to an order they already yearn towards because it is their essence. That I am painting by numbers; I am pouring wax into a mold; I am filling up an abstract vessel with matter so the vessel may be visible to all. Instead, I find that the picture on the box has changed too. I see only a slew of colored bits. I prise the parts apart at the cleavage zones and discover no resistance; when I press the cut ends together they don't recognize each other. Chasms gape between paragraphs and between ideas, chasms I stepped across without looking down. I didn't know they were there. Now when I want to join them again--not to restore their original wholeness, but to establish a relationship--I can't easily justify the link. That a head attaches to a neck and not a wrist seems less obvious when the pieces lie in a jumble on the laboratory floor, and there is no skeleton hanging in the corner to sneak a look at. Even joined I feel the fragments swimming farther apart. The links hold, stretching with me, and I can still reel them in, but when I let them go again they begin immediately to drift.

earwigs

When I was "young" (though all my parts were old) I turned over a leaf and found a massed and crawling nest of earwigs. I dropped the leaf and backed away from these creatures that appalled me singly not at all. What is dreadful about the plural? The swarm, the infestation. Is it that, without the necessary limits of any discrete entity, the swarm seems only accidentally, not essentially bounded in size? That it becomes a fragment of an infinite quantity, suggesting infinity despite its own accidental measurements, just because those measurements are accidental? When I ran from the nest of earwigs, was I escaping a universe packed from seam to seam with them? Shiny pronged lozenges struggling against one another. Assembling into crystalline structures, insect architectures. The earwig as building block of matter, instead of the orderly play ground of the atom, where the little balls roll and roll in circles. In place of the play of electrons: the quiver of segmented legs, twitching against their neighbors.

rest of my life

Where is the rest of my life? Perhaps it doesn't dry out, rust thin without my attention. Perhaps it has a conscious, communal life of its own, mingling in marriages impossible in real time, where sentences must be read one at a time. I sense a reluctance when I tow a frame forward into view. It is a child pulled out of a fantastic underground hideaway to answer a history quiz. Were you brought out of polymorphous dreams, in which mechanical contraptions, funnels, tubes and magnifying glasses mingled with animal attentions and crowd scenes, into a rigidly actual and bipolar sex scene?Don't worry, little boxy baby, I will lift you by your ankles off the bed, introduce you to my index finger (here's my first joint--take it slow--here's my second.) I will show you the seductions of sequence, and then I will let the aperture close, I will let you fall back into the muddled bedsheets, into the merged molecular dance of simultaneity.

my walk

Yesterday, I went for a walk down the lane that branches off at the holly tree from the main road. The day was gray, and a constant moisture hung in the air, agitating occasionally into a light rain. The sun, if I may give that name to a light so stripped of warmth, so pale and abstract that it seemed more a passing and careless allusion to the possibility of light than its manifestation, played fitfully in the upper reaches of the cloud bank that hung overhead. There, through threadbare patches in the counterpane of gray that hung over the landscape, I could see its invalid fingers despondently toying with those vaporous growths and monstrous births. The light, or its argument, did not touch me below. I made my way with some difficulty on the roadside grass, which was matted and disheveled from other foot traffic, as the road itself was a slough of deep and sticky mud, deceptively smooth save for the pockmarks of vanished bubbles on its face. There was a pleasing warmth in my thighs, which had to work to trample a way over the uneven terrain, but I noted with concern a touch of catarrh in my throat, and placed my chill and reddened fingers over my mouth in a vain attempt to warm the air as I drew it in. The hem of my green dress was stiff with mud the maid has not completely succeeded in removing (as I write this, she is muttering over the washtub; the water is bitterly cold and must be frequently changed) and the occasional smut took flight from my boots and appended itself to my cheek. I was as far as the little stone bridge and debating whether to turn back or cross and continue on that small perhaps firmer trail to the crossroads, where with luck I might beseech a ride of a farmer returning from town, when I saw on the far side of the span a sight that made me stop ankle-deep in mud and stare.

now

and smaller

flow

and yet seem never small enough, because to pause on a given screen--*even for a sip of coffee*--is an interruption of flow. The flow, which turns out to be the main point. Not the passages I am moving through, however beguiling, not this cafe in which I am still sitting, though Restless-Beret has left--thank goodness for that; he had prying eyes--but the sheer pleasure of movement. I don't doubt that if I had a continuous life or a block of printed past, Proust for example, I would read it all from start to finish. There's only one way through it and that's the way I'd go, convincing myself that I was aligned with time, but here where the spindly bamboo bridges of the links criss-cross the void (from tufted hillock to leaning tower I am in a Seuss landscape, where gravity is an untested hypothesis), I run faster and faster over the quivering spans, dizzied by the echoes of my footsteps that rebound from far below me and from above until I doubt up and down and scuttle through a universe of sideways. I will follow the paths and dispense with scenery. I will be pure particulate flow, an electronic speedster gunning it through a cloud chamber, a quantum sky-diver. My hair flies out behind me, the skin on my face pulls taut and my clothes wrestle around me, as I drive my n/arrow nose through the sky! yes, or I'm the bust of a maiden on the prow of a ship, leaning into the next moment, my back to the life on board. (Now I'm not sure which I am: a squatter in abandoned moments, or headlight outside the broken window, blurring into a solid line.)

I lay

last night I lay in her arms, my monster, and for the first time laid my hand on her skin. Her skins, I should rather say, or forgo the possessive altogether. Others had as good a right as she--perhaps better--to call that skin their own. These thoughts trembled in my hand, and yet I did not pull away. Her body was warm. Feverish, I might say, yet knew not what internal thermostat might hold steady and true in the preternaturally robust form. I touched her skin lightly, and yet she trembled, as if my fingers burned her. It surprised, then moved me, that one so strong should be susceptible, should tremble and mist at a touch. If her matter had once belonged to others, yet she had made it hers. It lived to register the passage of her thoughts, her minutest sensations, and it seemed to me that it could never have been so plastic and so alive as under the sway of that formidable intelligence.

designs

old maid's puzzle/old maid's ramble/broken dishes/crazy Ann/crosses and losses/hit and miss/peek-a-boo/puss in the corner/sister's choice/clown's choice/young lady's friend/Aunt Sukey's choice/monkey wrench/wild goose chase/chain/mosaic/garden maze/drunkard's path/shadow boxes/attic windows/variable star

bodies

the body could be said to be the writing of the soul. Its expression, but also and inevitably its misstatement, precisely because it is an expression, and must make use of material signs in all their imperfection, allowing them to garble the pure idea and go home on days off to their own unknowable lives in the kitchen of things. This if you adhere to the traditional separation of body and soul, form and content.