Anatomy Cont.

Legs

Stature is an illusion. I fool people with my height. They believe I am slightly taller because of a long stretch of lower limbs, but my stature is held in my torso. Sometimes I wish I had longer limbs, to balance out my proportions. But I like how my legs seem to paint the air when I walk, how I slide through space and if I were to turn around I’d find a path of color behind me. The amount of strength they must have. How they support the weight of my whole body on them.

My legs can run for miles through open fields in the rain, they outlast my lungs and keep going even when I can no longer breathe. Synchronized swimming molded the muscles into ellipses. In the water they held me buoyant, spinning like eggbeaters beneath me. I loved to lie on my back in the water and watch my leg stretch straight above me, see the water glide down my calf, drip off my pointed toe in a ballet leg.

Willowy and bowed they are powerful, store their fuel in my hips that I can feel seep down my muscles when I’m dancing, or when I have my thighs locked on either side of his hips.

“God I love it when you do that thing with your legs.”

“What thing?”

“This thing.” He pats sides of my thighs that wrap around his hips and squeezes my calves that cross over one another behind him, trapping him so I can keep him for myself. I grasp his waist with my legs.

“Yeah, watch out they are stronger than you think. Try to get away.” He makes a feeble attempt.

“Nope, Can’t.”

“You didn’t even try.”

“I don’t want to get away.”

*

They grew curled inward before I learned to walk. My father noticed how I sat on the floor with Bunny in my lap, toes pointed into each other, heels out. In my walker my knees butted together as I attempted to stand or shuffle a crossed the floor or grass. He never discussed details but there are photographs of me bound in casts from waist to foot to make my stubborn legs grow outwards. And now, sometimes I find myself standing with my big toes facing each other, knees butting against each other as I fidget. I like the way it feels, my own skin on skin, the nubs of my kneecaps smooth from baby oil and lotion.

But they are unreliable and stubborn, go weak at times I need them to support me, carry me away, hold me erect. They can’t keep balance on slick ice and send me back first slamming into the ground between classes. They aren’t friendly with stairs and instead of carrying my body up them they become confused, miscalculate the distance from on step to the next and I trip up then thump down a flight in front of faculty members.

My legs were never graceful enough to be a ballerina, couldn’t jump high enough for volleyball nor were quick enough for track. Sometimes I would hide them, became self-conscious about the circumference and jiggle of my thighs, the deep lines from skin stretched too far. The skin on my shins and outsides of my thighs is sensitive and supple, bruises easily like a peach or other too ripe fruit.

Torso and Stomach

Two lone freckles placed to the left of my belly button, and another just above it, make a constellation of birthmarks. When I am naked and bare I pivot in all directions in my reflection to scrutinize my torso below my chest, flat and smooth like someone ran their hand over a pile of sand to level it. Blocks and striations of sculpted muscle from years of early workouts make my muscles show through my skin like a piece of meat covered in cellophane when I lie on my back or toss and turn in bed.

It begs for fingers to prod at it when it is flexed, begs to have those same fingers trail down the length of my stomach in some near future bedroom encounter, his callused grip around my waist maneuvers me where he wants to blow a trail of breath down the curved and lines of my torso and into my bellybutton.

But I wont let him venture further because I hate the sack flesh that lies across my hips. I hate the mound that lies just below my belly button so when I sit down my arms automatically hug that space in case someone were to see it peeking over the waist of my jeans. It is impossible to get rid of even with 2 AM sit-ups when I can’t sleep. Something about it makes me pray his eyes are closed even if he says, “A little pudge is cute.”

Feet and Toes

Men find excuses to rub their thumbs across the permanent black silhouette. They ask me why, why there, what does it mean? I think I may enjoy their touch more than their interest. They are touching a part of me I’ve tried to hide. It is their touch that cultivates my acceptance to my ugly feet.

But I hate them, convinced they are abnormal and deformed, knotted and twisted, with toes shaped like suction cups, like I’m an amphibian. I burry them under sheets, pillows, blankets when others are in the room. I’ve meticulously shaped and paint my toenails cherry chocolate at an attempt to make my feet more attractive, but I fail and pick at my toenails when I’m nervous, so much that I am missing a few on each foot. My second toe is longer than my big toe, which has been pointed out to me numerous times, and I curl them into the sole of my foot to hide them.

I wish I could be the woman with beautiful feet who can wear silver bands around their her third toe. But the shape of my foot is blocky and rigid, as if I’m looking at an outline I may have traced of it. They are weak, flat and sore from an inherited arch defect. My classmates made fun of the plastic orthotics I had to wear in my shoes when I was first starting school. Even with the apparatus long since lost or stored away, my feet are no better.

The shades are pulled up in the room he leads me into. I can see out into the main room. The man behind the counter is peering into the cubbyhole. There are stars on his cheeks. My feet are ticklish. I forgot about that until he is rubbing my foot with liquid disinfectant the color of urine. I twitch and giggle. He looks at me and smiles, the mint colored snakes stretching on his neck. “Ticklish?”