house turned up only a pair of nail scissors from my washbag. I hesitated, deploring the notion of sacrificing with hasty butchery what patience â in the form of a sewing kit perhaps borrowed from Pamela at some point in thefriendlier future I hoped for â promised to execute with precision and skill; but I was greedy now for shorts, and seeing in my mind the horrified face of my mother as I murdered a perfectly good pair of trousers, was provoked into action.
For some time I sawed away, not even pausing to stake out the line along which I intended to cut, and when both legs were off held up the amputated stumps to see how I had done. Predictably, the legs, though shorter, were now of drastically different lengths; and finding myself out of breath and awash with sweat, I resumed my cutting slowly and with rather more care. After some time, I had filed away so much of the cloth in pursuit of exactitude that I was left with very little. I tried them on before the wardrobe mirror, already regretting what I had done.
Considering that my alterations had been designed to subtract substance from my appearance rather than add anything to it, the transformation I had wrought with the nail scissors was quite beyond all understanding. I believed, standing there, that I had never looked so good, nor felt so abuzz with a curious power which I could only take to be that of sexual attractiveness. The shorts were very short, even if evenly and equally so, and while I have never been given to gratuitous displays of flesh I had to admit that there was something exciting in this revelation. It suddenly seemed that there was far more to me than I had imagined; that my body, which I had always believed to be immutable or finite in some way, possessed in fact a whole unmined tract of personality, a fresh range of potential to which I had, I now saw, the undeniable right.
I stood, transfixed by the mirror, for some time, accustoming myself to this stranger of whose desires and motives I was not entirely sure. Thoughts of Edward, as faint as the pop and drizzle of distant fireworks, flared sporadically in my mind. I could not match this version of myself with him. He would not, indeed, have recognized me; and my memories of himseemed all at once frustrating and unsatisfactory, as patchy and monochrome as those of childhood or drunkenness, as if the time we had spent together had not been fully lived. I had the brutal desire to be seen through new, less penetrating eyes, to experience a wanton exchange of surfaces. Fulminating with possibilities, my skin seemed all at once to possess a frightening autonomy, as if it could crave and consume, could overpower me with its appetites. The world outside my window pulsed with promise and invitation. I felt an inner fainting, a felling away of resistances: the desire for physical contact with another human being began to rage like a headache about my mind, drowning out the sound of other thoughts and finally gathering to itself such shape and purpose that it felt like a great horn protruding from my forehead. With so little about me that I knew, I was virtually unpoliced; and it was in this strange savagery that I began to touch myself in front of the mirror, while the dim protests of my more civilized self went unheeded.
For how long I remained in this curious state, which was half frenzy, half trance, I could not say. Perhaps it was a quarter of an hour, perhaps more; but eventually I came to my senses, and looking about my bedroom, which I had entirely forgotten, had a feeling of intense exposure and shame, as if the severe furniture and disapproving eye of the window had been observing my antics. I left the room quickly and went downstairs. In the kitchen, I set about making preparations to assuage my now quite fierce hunger. My body felt tremulous and weak. My hands shook as I struggled to tear the Cellophane packaging around the rolls, and once or twice I was forced to stop and lean against
For some time I sawed away, not even pausing to stake out the line along which I intended to cut, and when both legs were off held up the amputated stumps to see how I had done. Predictably, the legs, though shorter, were now of drastically different lengths; and finding myself out of breath and awash with sweat, I resumed my cutting slowly and with rather more care. After some time, I had filed away so much of the cloth in pursuit of exactitude that I was left with very little. I tried them on before the wardrobe mirror, already regretting what I had done.
Considering that my alterations had been designed to subtract substance from my appearance rather than add anything to it, the transformation I had wrought with the nail scissors was quite beyond all understanding. I believed, standing there, that I had never looked so good, nor felt so abuzz with a curious power which I could only take to be that of sexual attractiveness. The shorts were very short, even if evenly and equally so, and while I have never been given to gratuitous displays of flesh I had to admit that there was something exciting in this revelation. It suddenly seemed that there was far more to me than I had imagined; that my body, which I had always believed to be immutable or finite in some way, possessed in fact a whole unmined tract of personality, a fresh range of potential to which I had, I now saw, the undeniable right.
I stood, transfixed by the mirror, for some time, accustoming myself to this stranger of whose desires and motives I was not entirely sure. Thoughts of Edward, as faint as the pop and drizzle of distant fireworks, flared sporadically in my mind. I could not match this version of myself with him. He would not, indeed, have recognized me; and my memories of himseemed all at once frustrating and unsatisfactory, as patchy and monochrome as those of childhood or drunkenness, as if the time we had spent together had not been fully lived. I had the brutal desire to be seen through new, less penetrating eyes, to experience a wanton exchange of surfaces. Fulminating with possibilities, my skin seemed all at once to possess a frightening autonomy, as if it could crave and consume, could overpower me with its appetites. The world outside my window pulsed with promise and invitation. I felt an inner fainting, a felling away of resistances: the desire for physical contact with another human being began to rage like a headache about my mind, drowning out the sound of other thoughts and finally gathering to itself such shape and purpose that it felt like a great horn protruding from my forehead. With so little about me that I knew, I was virtually unpoliced; and it was in this strange savagery that I began to touch myself in front of the mirror, while the dim protests of my more civilized self went unheeded.
For how long I remained in this curious state, which was half frenzy, half trance, I could not say. Perhaps it was a quarter of an hour, perhaps more; but eventually I came to my senses, and looking about my bedroom, which I had entirely forgotten, had a feeling of intense exposure and shame, as if the severe furniture and disapproving eye of the window had been observing my antics. I left the room quickly and went downstairs. In the kitchen, I set about making preparations to assuage my now quite fierce hunger. My body felt tremulous and weak. My hands shook as I struggled to tear the Cellophane packaging around the rolls, and once or twice I was forced to stop and lean against
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