The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

child knows you don’t need an abacus to see how many one is—we say its name. Egg, two, three. This is not to say that
two
means two eggs. The egg is singular and sufficient. It is not a unit or a building block.
    I came back to San Francisco on a windy, blond day: cotton shirts, flags, dog walkers in shorts and mustaches. An old man stooped to pick up a hose as I walked past his yard. He had thinning yellow hair, and the rim of his ear was soft and red. He had a huge boil on the side of his neck by the collar of his turquoise shirt; it was so swollen it was almost spherical, and the wrinkled skin stretched over it until it was as tight and shiny as a child’s.
    I passed the playground, where a few kids were working in the sandbox with bright blue plastic buckets and spades. A little girl looked up at me: a little girl with no face. A smooth pink globe seemed to supplant her head. Then the bubble collapsed and she sucked it back into her mouth.
    I walked right past my house. I wasn’t quite ready.
    In the coffee shop, I noticed the chipmunk cheeks of the girl working there, and her breasts, which strained the vintage print she was wearing, and her upper arms—she had cut off the sleeves of the dress—which swung vigorously as she frotted the steamer wand with a yellow towel. She had the thin white scarsof a decorative cutting on her shoulder—a rough circle. Everyone is made of spheres, and the world is round.
R EADING N OTES, J ULY 15
     
    The egg might more properly be seen as the ambiguous zero, which sits at the center of the number line, but is scarcely a number itself. The List of Lists does not include itself, you will not find the Book of Books in its own bibliography, the King of Kings does not kowtow to the crown. When all matter is totted up, one thing remains: the egg itself.
    Cass opened the door. “Imogen,” she said.
    I went straight through the apartment and out the back. She followed me. “Things are a little different around here, if you’re interested,” she said. But the egg still lay in the tiny backyard, even bigger than before, wedged half under the shed roof, with the clothesline cutting through it like a cheese wire. It seemed the worse for wear, and there was pink oil all over the concrete near it. Three large, nearly bald cats were lapping at the puddle. They scattered over the fences when the door banged, kicking up their bare bottoms like impossibly nimble babies.
    A moment later I saw what I thought was a hurt mouse humping along the base of the fence and disappearing down a hole; after a moment I understood that what I had seen was a featherless bird, using its stubby, plucked wings like crutches.
    “They come into the kitchen,” said Cass. “They’ve actually scared away the rats. And check this out.” She stepped over to our failed vegetable garden. A pink mound like an exposed turnip broke the surface. She drummed her fingers on it and it contracted. Then a fleshy end as big as a woman’s heel pokedup through the dirt. “The neighbors complained, but it’s perfectly harmless.” She drew it gently out of the ground. “It’s huge,” she said. The worm butted against her wrists like a blind puppy.
    Cass was panting shallowly. Her cheeks were red and shiny and distended, her eyelids fat. Her eyebrows had gone pale, or maybe even fallen out. She had drawn in thin, brown, artful brows, but these, not perfectly symmetrical, did not work with her cartoon farmwife cheeks, her cherry lips.
    “What’s going on, Cass?” I said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “You look strange. I think you’ve been eating my egg.”
    “
Your
egg!”
    “I grew it. It grew on me,” I said.
    “You walked out on it. And on me. I had no idea where you were. Just because—” She paused. I thought she might not say it, but she did. “Just because it didn’t want you!”
    I threw myself on her. The worm writhed violently between us, then escaped. We struggled on the ground in the syrup. The