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

of the thicker branches, once I split the sheath of fibrous rhubarb stuff, were pulpy and pink. It fell out in chunks from the cut ends. Only the red corm was left, rearing up in the midst of the wreckage. It was my height. I swung. The axe bit into the body and stuck, a heavy bad feeling. When I pulled it out, gobs of the inside stuff spattered my shoes.
    I stood in a still heap of red lengths. There was silence in the room. A pink clot detached itself from the ceiling and dropped at my feet. I looked up at the dot of mucus that marked where it had been. Nearby, other clots trembled, unsticking themselves. They rained slowly down on the body, on the murderer. The clot at my feet was shrinking into a widening disk of clear liquid. There was no epochal shift, no grind of planets swerving in their spheres. I was still guilty, perhaps I had always been guilty, in advance, for this moment. I saw her face at the window, then it went.

NERVE
     
    Me—who am as a nerve o’er which do creep

The else unfelt oppressions of this earth.
     
—
Shelley
     
    Completely normal,
he wrote,
for man years completely normal,
then he took out
man
and put in
many.
    Maybe he had just spent too long working the nerves. Nerve fibers once had a reputation as aphrodisiacs, and were fashioned into amulets for daily wear, from simple rings and bracelets to elaborate knitted codpieces. In the town where George grew up locals believed to this day that a walk in the nerve fields made women ovulate and a handful of freshly cut nerve fibers under the pillow brought true dreams of love. A nap in the fields had more lasting consequences: George’s town, like every small town on the Great Plains, had one or two children known as
nervous.
They were said to be the offspring of the plains themselves, and their mothers were blamed for nothing more damning than carelessness. Skeptical outsiders might take note of the many flattened patches in the fields near town, and the well-trodden paths that led to them.
    Tender, susceptible fields! A careless boot sent a wave of consternation seven miles. A gunshot made the plains flinch totheir last hummock. But at night, when lovers lay in congress in the fields, the pale strands flexed contentedly against the black sky. Concentric rings spread from their several centers and collided in elaborate interference patterns that made the whole plains hum a particular note. In the village they heard the note. They recognized it, they smiled, they fell back asleep. Or they worked out the harmony on their creaking beds. George used to lie awake, listening.
    Completely normal,
wrote George, though he remembered going to his mother and saying, “Mom, am I nervous?”
    “No, of course not, what put that idea into your sick little head?” Mom had said, and what George remembered was that he was disappointed. So, a desire to be special, even then.
    Completely normal,
wrote George, then selected the phrase and rendered it in bold, as if to spite his own memory.
    Cut nerves left lying on threshing floors drift and roll and wind up all aligned with the earth’s magnetic field, like iron filings swayed by a magnet in a classroom experiment. (Bring a smaller magnet into the barn and watch them try to follow it!) But there are places where the magnetic field of the earth is disorganized, the ley lines tangled. Compass needles wag; carrier pigeons lose their way.
    It so happened that a big nerve supplier built a warehouse in one of these places, and that George worked there. Big signs were posted all over the building: CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELVES. ALL NERVES MUST BE BUNDLED . And simply, SWEEP . The workers were meticulous, by and large. All the same, it was bound to happen: a nerve slipped out of a bundle, slithered under a pallet, went unnoticed. In a few days, another one got away. Aftera while there were four, five, twenty-five scattered here and there around the warehouse: under tables, in cracks in the floor, snagged on splinters in