do i dare to eat a peach?

In the months after the tape popped from the seams of her already poorly patched and clumsily reassembled heart, she lost ten pounds from sorrow.

"You're so thin," she heard like a mantra. Manna she couldn't quite choke down.

"Yeah, well, you know what they say about fat and happy, right?" A smirk-smile. "I'm not."

She could never work out why no one laughed. But then, she always liked the sound of nails on a chalkboard, too.

And when she'd call home to cry of Man's Great Imperfections, her mother would only sigh, "Oh, honey, we all have feet of clay."

She mm-hmmed in agreement, yet feared her own were, more likely, made of lead. And though every night she'd fall asleep with prayers for the gift of alchemy on her lips, each morning upon turning back the covers, she'd still find the same heavy grey lumps sinking resolutely into the mattress.

It made her cranky.

What man wants a lead-footed girl, she'd wonder. What job for a woman with immovable feet? How could God curse her with the desire for flight and at the same time such clearly effective anchors? All her hot air was ever for naught.

Her sleep marred by dreams of sharks and sandbags, sometimes she'd lie awake on her bed, cumbersome feet flopped outward, painfully twisting the tendons attached to her knees, and watch the ceiling fan spin, her eye never able to catch up with the whirl for more than a second.

And months begot years and she grew thinner and thinner.

. . . an egg under a heat lamp, albumen in clear relief . . .

. . . a tobacco leaf drying in the sun . . .

. . . a tooth or a white plastic spork . . .

. . . a jellyfish . . .

. . . Depression Glass in amber . . .

. . . a toenail . . .

. . . a smear of Vaseline . . .

And then one day all that was left were the feet, planted where she left them in the corner of my room. They make excellent doorstops.

I don't know her name and Fred, who knew her, can't remember it. But he says her epitaph read something like: She was remarkably well-grounded.

* * *

With Amy Hempel and Kate Atkinson in the back of my mind.
Title from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot.