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

somewhere else, about
others.
But here on earth it seemed a prodigy,
the
prodigy. Soon enough, however, more of them began to appear. Some dropped out of the sky, people said,slowly and beautifully, their light heads buoying them up. Commentators waxed eloquent and bade us imagine, on the blue, a dot that grew to a pink dot that grew to a kewpie doll that became the creature we know now. Many were found, like the first one, swaying gently in some warm and secret enclosure—warehouses, high school gyms, YMCA dressing rooms. Publicity seekers claimed to have come across fœtuses in infancy: tiny, playful, and virtually blind, like kittens, they bumbled around, falling on their oversized heads, and eagerly sucked on a baby finger, or indeed anything of like size and shape. One was reportedly discovered in a bird’s nest, opening its tiny translucent lips among the beaks. But fœtuses this small have never been held in captivity, or even captured on film. Whether that is because the susceptible creatures lose themselves in their surroundings, striving to become air, a patch of dirt, a falling leaf, or because they never existed in the first place, hardly matters, for the situation remains that none are found, except in stories that are already far from firsthand by the time they reach a credible authority. But we may pause for a minute to wonder whether, if such kittens do exist, they are the offspring of our original fœtus, who for all we know may be capable of fertilizing itself, like some plants, or if they grow from spores that have drifted here from some impersonally maternal comet, or—most mysterious thought of all—whether they spring up in our world self-generated, as sometimes new diseases appear to do, teaching us new pains, just because the world has left a place open for them.
    Behind one another’s eyes, it is the fœtus we love, floating in the pupil like a speck, like a spy. It’s looking over your shoulder, making cold drinks even colder, and it doesn’t care whatpromises you’ve made. We think we want affection, sympathy, fellow feeling, but it is the cold and absolute we love, and when we misplace that in one another we struggle for breath. Through the pupil’s little peephole, we look for it: the shapeless, the inhuman.
    Of course, with such a company of admirers, sycophants, interpreters, opportunists, advisers, prophets, and the like behind it, it wasn’t long before the fœtus was performing many of the offices once seen to by our local pastor: visiting the sick, hosting charitable functions, giving succor to troubled souls. One day Pastor Green simply left town, and no one was very sorry. It was the graceful thing to do, people agreed, and saw to it that the fœtus stood behind the pulpit the next Sunday. At first it held an honorary post; we couldn’t settle on a suitable title, but we did present it with a robe and a stiff white collar, which it seemed to admire. Higher-ups in church office were rumored to be uneasy about this unorthodox appointment, but public feeling was behind it. And there was no question that the fœtus would increase the church’s subscription thousandfold; no one had ever seen such a benefit potluck as the first one hosted by the fœtus. It wielded the ice cream scoop with tireless arm and paid personal attention to every dessert plate.
    Of course, the fœtus preferred to hold services in the sandbox, and the citizens appreciated this gesture as a call to simplicity and a sign of solidarity with regular folk. How the fœtus managed to lead us may be hard to understand. At first, its role was to inspire and chide. But it soon felt its way into the post, and began performing those gestures that mean so much to our town: choosing the new paint color for the courthouse (thefœtus preferred mauve), pouring the first bucket of cement for the new tennis courts. (We could afford it, for money was rolling in: tourists, visiting scholars, and zealots continued to come, prepared