TITLE: Limb
AUTHOR: Kita
RATING: PG

 
Limb


Her legs have scars, and she won't let you see them.

Burned by water when she was three, you have often pictured it: a chubby, helpless doll in some far away place you’ve never been, being puzzled back together by clinical hands.

The lines you feel under your hands are surprisingly soft. Deep and endless, round and round, tough as peach skin. You can trace them with your mouth in the dark, leave small bite marks and suture-kisses on the vines of flesh you can taste along with her sweat. But you can never see.

She wears long, cotton skirts in the summer, dark stockings under short woolen ones in the winter. You thought at first that it was just her style, like the low cut lacy shirts that show only the edges of her magnolia tatoo. You thought not showing her legs was just her way of being coquettish.

Then she told you, held out secrets in her palm, opening her fingers to a flash of something bright and precious.

"I cry at long distance phone commercials."
"I'm afraid of raisins."
"I never wear shorts."

Tiny mysteries.

So you've stopped asking her to leave the lights on when she changes. And you've grown used to the reflex flinch when you run a hand up over her ankle, past the curve of her calf, naked and unprotected beneath her Levi's. And you look for ways to say you don't care.

Some time in the early Spring, she starts training for a marathon. You eat your candy bar and you listen to her talk excitedly about miles and miracles. You sit in the wet grass, huddled inside your coat, and you wait for her to cross her first small finish line.

She practices on the school track, and she hates it. It just goes round and round, she says. It’s boring. But she goes nightly just the same.

You watch her stretch, and bend, flexing muscles you have laid your tongue against with your eyes closed. She laughs, at your laziness, at her speed, at the music in her ears.

And as she runs in circles around the endless track, you watch and you smile back, and you wait for the day when she will run past you.

Her blue sneakers blink and glow in the near dark as she finds her rhythm. The bicycle pants she wears hug her thighs so tightly, you can almost make out the scars. You watch her.

Her legs move, up and up, endless loops. They carry her forward, and you think: They are beautiful. They are sturdy and strong. They will take her wherever she needs to go.

-End


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