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

wheels rattling.
    When the light changed at Mission I stopped too suddenly. The egg bounced through the traffic and fetched up in the doorway of a doughnut shop. The whores that hung out there gathered around it, touching it, then tasting their fingers. Cass caught up with me and when the light changed we walked across the street together.
    The egg was torn. Things were stuck to it: pebbles, bottle caps, lottery stubs, a blue condom, an empty popper, a parking ticket. I brushed it off. The whores helped, dabbing it with napkins from the doughnut shop. The animals milled around our feet.
    Cass waited. I saw she had the worm slung around her neck.
    I crouched down with my back to the egg while it was trapped in the doorway and tried to stand up, forcing it up the wall. When they saw what I was doing, two guys came forward and lifted it for me. I started off down the street at what was almost a jog, heading south now, out of the city. My strange train bounced, slunk, hobbled after. Some of the whores came too. The shopping-cart man was there. Two kids carrying a huge boom box between them joined us.
    Cass fell in behind.

SPERM
     
    Nobody can remember when the sperm became large enough to see, but we agree on this: once that point was reached, every generation topped the last. They went from guppy to goldfish, and before long they could frighten a schnauzer, and not much later even Great Danes made way for them. And while it looks like at buffalo-heft they’ve stopped growing, it’s possible they’re just gathering their resources for another leap. We are afraid that the sperm will grow as big as rhinoceroses and hunt us down, but we are much more afraid that they will again grow tiny, that we will have to go back to the screens and meshes we remember from our grandmothers’ doors. What if they grow so small filters will not stop them? How will we protect ourselves?
    Sperm are ancient creatures, single-minded as coelacanths. They are drawn to the sun, the moon, and dots and disks of all descriptions, including periods, stop signs, and stars. They worship at nail heads, doorknobs and tennis balls. More than one life has been saved by a penny tossed in the air.
    …
     
    The sperm cabaret is coming to town, and Virginia and I are going to see them. The trained sperm are squeezed into specially made costumes, and they dance and flop about, she says, very comically! Can you picture a sperm in a little hat held on with suction cups (an ingenious device explained in the program)? And sporting a very large cravat-cum-cummerbund? They even utter some sort of sound, which I cannot imagine would be very musical, but Virginia says that although guttural, the cry of the spermatozoa is weirdly haunting, and the au courant are scrambling to acquire recordings.
    It is hard to believe that the great marble fountains of Brussels, which depict young spermatozoa disporting themselves in the spray, were once considered masterpieces. Few any longer take the time to decipher the complex symbolism that informs these mammoth atrocities. One wonders how a pest as common as pigeons could ever have been elevated, even in metaphor, to the status of gods. From time to time citizens’ groups petition for the demolition of the eyesores, but there is always some sentimentalist or self-appointed keeper of tradition who rallies the public around the monuments, which do at least provide the children of Brussels welcome places to play in hot weather.
    The Sperm Conservation Corps is lobbying to reserve a portion of the sperm’s natural habitat as a protected zone, off limits to sportswomen and the food industry. Opponents, from logging concerns to public safety watchdogs, point out that the natural habitat of pest and parasite is much too close to home, and that there is at any rate no shortage of sperm. Passenger pigeons once darkened the sky, the lobbyists reply; imagine a world without sperm!
    …
     
    Surely we have all gone for a stroll in a bucolic