The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories by Shelley Jackson Read Free Book Online

knocks their bald heads together. It carries pregnant women across busy streets. It helps with the groceries. These are the little ways it enters the daily life of its parishioners: it turns over the soil in an old woman’s garden. It lifts waitresses on tables to show off their legs. The fœtus has a formal appreciation for old-fashioned chivalry, and expects to be thanked for such gestures.
    The fœtus roved about the town until it found a resting place to its liking in the playground of the municipal park, among dogs and babies. The mothers and the professional loiterers appointed themselves guards and watched it sternly, heading off the youngsters who veered too near it, but they softened to it over time, began to bring sandwiches and lemonade along and make casual speculations about the fœtus’s life span, hopes, and origins. When the crowds of tourists pressed too close, theybecame the fœtus’s protectors, and formed a human chain to keep them out.
    Nobody’s enemy and nobody’s friend, it hides its heart in a locked box, a secret stash, maybe a hollow tree in the woods under a bees’ nest, maybe a tower room on a glass mountain on a wolf-run isle in a sea ringed by volcanoes and desert wastes. The fœtus always keeps its balance.
    Someone observed that the land seemed disarranged. Bent treetops, flattened grass, weeds dragged out of their seats, clods dislodged. Tedious speculations about crop circles and barrows and Andean landing strips made the rounds. Of course, we knew the fœtus’s little feet dragged when he walked. We had seen the marks in the sandbox at the park. We should have noticed the resemblance, but we resisted the idea that the fœtus was only a transient resident. We had grown accustomed to, even proud of it; the fœtus was a municipal landmark. It had put our town on the map and filled it with visitors, so that our children had a chance to envy the latest haircuts, and our adults the latest cars and sexual arrangements.
    Plus, the marks were disturbing. They were careless. They passed over (sometimes through) fences, even when the gate swung close at hand. Mrs. Sender’s oleanders were uprooted and dragged for miles. Even after we knew the fœtus caused the marks, a mystery clung to them. For everything the fœtus did, though, there was someone to praise it. Followers did their following on the paths it left. They said the paths proposed an aesthetic that could not at once be grasped. Some began dragging a foot behind them as they walked, scorning markless movementas noncommittal, therefore cowardly. But why was the fœtus so restless? Was it seeking something? We had all seen it peering through our curtains in the evening, and found the marks in our flowerbeds in the morning. Was it exercising, or aimlessly wandering? Or was it writing a kind of message on the earth? Was it driven from rest by some torment, a plague personal to it, or a plaguey thought it couldn’t shake: was the fœtus guilty?
    Since the fœtus arrived, none of us has loved without regret, fucked without apprehension, yearned without doubt. We break out in a rash when a loved one comes near because we know the fœtus is there too, waiting for us to prove to it everything it already knows.
    Was
the fœtus a fœtus? Indeed it resembled one. But if it was, the question had to be raised: when the fœtus grew up, as it must, what would it become? Perhaps we all breathed a sigh of relief when scientists concluded that the fœtus, like the famous axolotl, was a creature permanently immature. Hence its enormous susceptibility, its patience and its eagerness to please. Like the unicorn, it adored virgins, but it had a raging fascination with sexual doings, a fascination that drove April Tip and the rest of her gang, the bad girls and boys of our town, to cruel displays under the streetlights around the park.
    At first, though not for long, we believed our fœtus was unique. Of course we speculated about the home it must have had