My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me by KATE BERNHEIMER

child’s trundle bed. He turns down his linens and his thick, abrasive woolen blanket and hops to the bathroom.
    Half of Rumpelstiltskin moves from point to point—bed to bathroom, a to b —in one of two ways. Either he hops on one foot, his left, or he arches his body to walk from toe to palm and palm to toe. When he hops, Half of Rumpelstiltskin lands on the flat of his foot, leaning backward to counter his momentum, which for many years pitched him straight to the floor. When he walks, Half of Rumpelstiltskin looks as might a banana with feet at both ends. Through the years, he has learned to plod and pace and shuffle, to shamble and saunter and stride. Half of Rumpelstiltskin doesn’t own a car, and there’s never been anyone to carry him.
    In the shower, Half of Rumpelstiltskin scours himself with a bar of marbled green soap, a washcloth, and—for the skin at his extremities, as stubborn and scabrous as bark—a horsehair scrub brush. He lathers. He rinses. He dries himself with a plush cotton towel, sousing the water from his pancreas and his ligaments and the spongy marrow in the cavity of his sternum. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is the only man he knows whose forearm is a hard-to-reach place.
    Outside his window, the sky is a startled blue, from horizon to horizon interrupted only by a dissipating jet trail and a bespotment of soaring birds. The jet trail is of uniform thickness all along its length, and try as he might, Half of Rumpelstiltskin can spot a jet at neither end. He runs his forefinger along the window sash, then flattens his palm against the pane. Both are warm and dry. Although it’s only the beginning of March, Half of Rumpelstiltskin decides to dress lightly—a skullcap and a tawny brown slacks leg, a button-up shirt and a red canvas sneaker.
    Before leaving for work, Half of Rumpelstiltskin brews a pot of coffee. He drinks it with a lump of sugar and a dash of half-and-half. The coffee bores through him like a colony of chittering termites—gnawing down the trunk of him, devouring the wood of his dreams. As he drinks, Half of Rumpelstiltskin watches a children’s variety show on public television. The monster puppets are his favorite, with their blue fur, their ravenous appetites, and their whirling eyes. The children laugh at the monsters’ jokes and ask them about the alphabet, and the monsters hug the children with their two pendant arms.
     
    9:05 A.M. He goes to work.
    Half of Rumpelstiltskin works three hours every morning, until noon, standing in for missing or vandalized mannequins at a department store in a nearby strip mall. Until recently, he worked in the warehouse, processing orders, cataloging merchandise, and inspecting enormous cardboard boxes with rusted staples the size of his pinkie finger. Lately, however, a spate of mannequin thefts—the result, police suspect, of a gang initiation ritual—has left local shopping centers dispossessed of display models, and Half of Rumpelstiltskin has been transferred in to fill the void. He considers this ironic.
    —You’re five minutes late, his boss tells him when he arrives. Don’t let it happen again.
    Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s boss smells of cigar smoke and seafood.
    —And from now on, I expect to see you clean-shaven when you come in, he says gruffly. Nobody likes a hairy mannequin. Now get changed and get to work.
    Half of Rumpelstiltskin nods in reply. Cod, he thinks.
    Half of Rumpelstiltskin soon emerges from wardrobe wearing a junior-size vinyl jumpsuit with a zippered front and a designer label. Around his head is swathed a stocking cap several sizes too large for him. It rests heavy on his eyebrow and plunges to the small of his back in a series of broad, rambling folds. His jumpsuit, on its right side, is as flaccid as the inner tube of a flat tire. Half of Rumpelstiltskin takes his place between two cold, trendy mannequins—one slate gray with both arms halved at the elbow, its head severed as if by a huntsman’s ax