The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories (19 page)

Crawling, I have made a circular track around the house,
with built-up edges. My dressing gown smoothes it into a glossy, even surface, which is a never-ending pleasure to look upon, shining a short distance ahead of me to where the curve cuts it off from view. Though sometimes Cadbury trots after me and spoils it.

I have had to make a path from the house to the track and so I have just continued this radial line, in accordance with a rather geometrical sense of order, out to the mailbox. From this path I make irregular tracks outward to continue frosting the yard. I have not coated the mailbox, because I am afraid the mailman would not pick up the letters, but I’ve almost finished the fence and the tree, and of course all the smaller plants are done. I don’t expect congratulations, needless to say.

Even though I trowel out wheelbarrow loads of fat from the house, the space inside gets smaller and smaller. I crawl up a sloping tunnel to my cave in the center of the biggest room, the living room. It is a little round hollow like a stomach. Below me I see the vague shape of the couch (itself covered with roses, another bit of gaucherie, no?) and the coffee table. The bookshelves are no longer visible except when the sun shines through the fat. Then I can see everything, though foggily: the colored spines of the books, Cadbury’s turds, a pair of my underwear floating like a jellyfish, and a mouse who, like me, has made himself a little round cave with a tunnel leading up to it, and lined the bottom with part of the jacket of my collected Kafka (black and red shreds). It is almost like flying, to float here in the middle of the room, only it is more like being mummified, because my legs are trapped; in fact whenever I stop moving, I begin to melt a little way into the fat, making a cavity shaped precisely like me, as if it were a mold in which I’d hardened,
like a candle or a statue. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To be a statue, I mean. So definite, so martial. They might even melt you down for bullets!

Cadbury is in a worse state, for sinking in, because his body heat’s higher, though the fur insulates him; still, by morning he’s swimming. By morning, too, the tunnel has closed up, but so far it hasn’t been too hard to dig my way through again, though once—I was pretty groggy—I tunneled the wrong way and didn’t even know it until I hit the kitchen sink. I expect the mouse has the same problem. It’s a bond between us.

The windowpanes have popped out, forced from their frames by the fat, and are lying unbroken on the heaps outside, reflecting the sky.

I can no longer fit the Fatman into the house. It is too big a job digging the tunnel wide enough every evening to push him up it, not to mention the disturbing way he sticks to everything. If I’m not careful he might even grow into the house and vice versa, and I will have to dig him out in handfuls, or else there will be nothing left of him but two embalmed carrots and a slip of paper, somewhere in my living room, and only visible on sunny days!

Two carrots, you ask? Why, sir, I blush.

I have left him outside. I smoothed his body into three shining white spheres, so he will look his best. I’m not coming back.

Yes, I’m planning to stay in from now on. In the end, my skeleton will hang here, in the center of a block of lard, beautiful as a bug in amber. One day maybe you will come home. If you want to gather my adorable bones, you will have to eat your way to them. Yes, Mr. Nobody, that’s only fair: a second wedding most prodigious. At last, Boney-o, we will each have
what we crave, you a skeleton, and I (and this is my revenge) a fat man.

I fell asleep and dreamed I was a candle. A wick ran through me and out the top of my skull, and as it burned the fat level sank in the room. First the crown of my head was bared, with a flame standing above it; then my whole skull, blazing like a jack-o’-lantern. My shoulders freed themselves and my rib cage became a lampshade to the flame in my chest, but when the descending flame reached my pelvis, I woke up.

I was stuck fast! The fat cleaved to my forehead and cheeks, and fluttered against my nostrils. A thin, constant stream of warm oil was running into my mouth and down my throat. I forced my eyes open. It was morning, the sun was out, the window was closer than the door, and I began to swim, the hardest thing I’d ever done. I wasn’t sure I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t sure I was moving; was that my foot I felt? I thought I might be batting my feet, that was something I could do, they had called it the flutter kick when I was learning to swim as a girl, it didn’t seem very effective back then, plenty of splash but very little forward movement, much like everything else we do, and it seemed even less effective now, but I did it. My hands, if I could find them, I could pull in to my sides, and then slide them, very craftily, with a minimum of fuss, up along my body, past my ears, and then shoot them forward together. And as I pull them down, flutter kicking, I will inch forward.

Shoot forward, pull down, flutter kick. I think I am moving; I might not be. I’ll know by the mouse. That’s it, I’ll steer by the mouse, poor little carcass, it will be my North Star, I’ll set my astrolabe to it. Musculus the Mouse Star. Verminus?

Why does no one help me? Funny, that, when I think about
it. Shouldn’t there be a policeman around, at a time like this? Or a handsome policewoman, stretching the long arm of the law through the window to tow me out? Maybe nobody knows I’m here, nobody saw me, crawling through the roses in my rosy robe, ‘round and ‘round. A rose is a rose is a rose. I would accept a helping hand from the stalwart Miss Stein. Shoot forward, pull down … I close my eyes, so that when I open them again I will be amazed at how far I’ve gotten. Instead I’m amazed at how close I am to being exactly where I started.

How is it possible nobody saw me? Of course, I lied about the ties, nobody buys ties made of fat, nobody wants to look at fat, least of all my fat, if they want to look at fat they can look at their own.

I am inching past the sofa. The window is at 19 degrees off due Mouse. I will get there, after I swim through twenty-seven pancakes and a lake of syrup, and those tigers that turned into butter. I could eat my way out, but that would take too long.

If I could gather my resources for a really good fart, it might propel me some distance, but I am becalmed. Mouse to starboard. Somebody must have seen me, if I was there; of course I was there. Boney’s the one who’s missing, even if he does get all the mail. I used to throw it in the closet, when I could reach the closet, throw not being the right word,
poke
or
stuff
rather. Then after a while I just put the mail on the pile in the garden. I looked on it as a rustic touch, a sort of haycock of letters. I covered that with fat too, and each new letter, as it came. They saw me, I guess, and at the same time didn’t see me. Who notices the fat lady? In an hour I will reach the windowsill. Thank God the glass is gone.

Musculus before me. I will take him with me, to commemorate our voyage together. I carve out a ball around him and hug
it to my stomach like a football player. Now I must swim with just one arm and the after all much underrated flutter kick. I press my eyelids open and I can see green, blue, yellow light coming in from outside.

I touch the windowsill!

At last my head pops through.

I lie still for a while, poking out the window. Mostly I am breathing, and spitting clots of melting lard. Despite the fat plugging my ears, I hear the birds—the flying ones, and the sad ones that are stuck in my tower. Clouds are running across the sky. It is funny the way an accident happens, I am calling it an accident though we both know better, and for a while one has a purpose. I felt important for a little while, charged with the task of saving myself, inventing a system of navigation and brushing off my flutter kick. I will probably remember that as the best time of my life. But now that I’ve arrived at my destination (which a short time ago was precious and almost unattainable), how disappointing: I’m in an ordinary and slightly ridiculous position, halfway out of a window. It is worth philosophizing about, Boney.

So I won’t rest on my laurels. Now that my house is uninhabitable, I must build an igloo. The first thing I do, after I climb down, is trace a circle on the ground. The first block I lay must be the one that encases Musculus. I hew it into a brick and place it on the circumference. Now I have my plan, I am zealous. Of course, I cut blocks in which there are roses, beautifully embalmed. I am saddened to find Cadbury, too, buried in a deep bank, and I cut a large block around him and place him opposite Musculus, at the entrance. Near the tree I find fat full of ants and I cut a block of it, and of a batch into which a caterpillar has fallen. I lay my blocks systematically; I work in a circle,
creeping around my igloo, and when I have used all the blocks, I creep up to the roof of the house—not as difficult as it sounds, because the drifts come up to the eaves—and I push over the fat pole and cut blocks full of birds, and from these I make the ceiling, standing on Fatman’s lap. Did I forget to mention I built the igloo around him? I take off my robe, bundle it outside, and seal the door with one last block.

I am eating the Fatman. It is our marriage ceremony. But when I am done, I shall find myself married to nobody.

Jack, I must have eaten your signature without noticing it. Oops! I eat one of the carrots, but keep the other.

The day I finished dinner, spring came. It was an uncommonly hot day for March. I was single and exceedingly fat. The igloo had become a luminous dome. The animals sealed in every block stood out as clear as cameos. Cadbury was on his back, his muzzle pointing up. The ants were dotted elegantly through their block. Some of the birds were in attitudes of flight, some were hunched into the shape of endives. I could see where the sun stood over me: it blazed through the fat. The blaze climbed the dome, and the dome heated up, and when the shadow of the birds fell directly over me, I felt a hot drop hit my ankle.

It started to rain hot fat. I turned onto my stomach and let the molten drops hit my back, my thighs, my ass. Soon I lay in a warm bath of clear oil, on a bed of grass and pebbles. The level was rising, but as the oil poured down, fissures were forming at the base of the walls and between blocks, through which it was running away. The igloo grew brighter and more transparent, a thin, blazing shell, and then it wobbled and collapsed in on me. All the trapped oil ran off into the grass.

I sat up. All around me animals were struggling up, alive!
The birds staggered around, spreading out their gunky wings. The sun seemed to shine on us with the specific intention of licking us clean. We moved our limbs in wonder like cripples faith-healed. I lay back in the slick and smiled. There were roses everywhere. There went Musculus. Cadbury was prancing. The first birds tried their wings. I was shining like a gold medal.

Shelley Jackson is the author of the short story collection
The Melancholy of Anatomy
, the hypertext novel
Patchwork Girl
, several children’s books, and “Skin,” a story published in tattoos on the skin of more than two thousand volunteers. She lives Brooklyn, New York.

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