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

I sank my hands into the dry sheaves and suffered the bugs to walk up my arms. The blue vacuum above me sucked at the back of my head and made me feel strangely elongated. In contrast everything before me, bugs like tiny brooches, pods and plumes and burrs, was dense and small. I folded a hank of grasses around my fist and looked at the waxy stems lined up across the back of my hand. This is the real world, I said to myself. Pay more attention to it.
    I dropped the grasses, and fell forward onto my hands. The earth was hard and deeply cracked. I strove my fingers into the earth. My fingertips grazed something smooth and the thought struck me, absurd as it sounds, that this was in some sense the jewel of the real, and would bestow on me everything I lacked: gravity, clarity, ruthless pragmatism. I started to dig, clawing at the sides of the crack. I lifted out the loosened dirt one handful at a time. The last revealed something red. I brushed the remaining dirt away. There in the cavity, twisting from the side into the cleared space, vital, acquisitive, was something I recognized. In the warm earth, coiling and humping in the darkness, the cancer had made its way to meet me.
    It has gone under the ground, I thought. It might come up anywhere now.
    Coddled tots will be given the root to suck. They’ll open wide: their innocence will drop out like a tooth. Their face will redden with concentration and grow older, tiny daddies in diapers and jumpers will suck a pipe, aunts suckle a cigar. Such sweets are not for kiddies, I shall warn, a hilarious oldster with a bee in my
bowler. We will clip the fine ends and teacup them. A new brew will sweeten the tongues of gossips, but what will they say in their new voices, so high and so surgical?
     
    The next morning I mused over my tea: possibly, I thought, I could make my peace with the cancer. I approached the door on stocking feet, opened it gently, smiling. The little girl had crawled into the cancer, and was sitting on one of the limbs like an owl, her knees drawn up. Her baggy stained underpants confronted me. She was staring at me with that fixed look, like a doll. I rushed to my room, and buried my burning face in my pillow. After a while, I fell asleep.
    When I woke up I found myself sucking on the broken end of a branch. Had someone slipped it into my hand while I slept? A sweet taste was in my mouth and there was some sediment on my tongue, granular and faintly chalky, which made my teeth feel unfamiliar. I was breathing peacefully through my nose. I took the branch out of my mouth. I had hollowed out the cut end with sucking. Crumbling and dissolving bits like tea-soaked sugar tumbled out of it. The smooth skin was shiny with my saliva.
    I set the branch down on the bedside table and carefully extricated myself from the bedcovers. In the bathroom I brushed and flossed, penitently, punitively, with a swollen heart. Then I went to the room the cancer was in, axe in hand. The little girl was still there. I hissed and darted at her. Reluctantly, she rose and went to the fireplace, parting the branches before her with her narrow white arms. The ash door stood open again. A healthy child her age could never have fit through the door, but she dropped to her stomach in the empty fireplace and went right through it like a boneless thing, rocking from side to side,humping along on her elbows once she was partway through. There was a glimpse of sunlight, her red shoe. Then the door clanged shut. The invisible ends played against my face.
    I reached in and caught up a hank, swung the ax at the taut strands. They did not part as easily as I had pictured; I had to worry at them, sawing, and when they broke the ends leaped like elastic. One snapped against my cheek and brought a tear to my eye. I stepped inside the cancer, hacking around me indiscriminately. The limbs shook only with my own movements.
    Branches fell around me, springing up again to clobber my knees and ankles. The insides