Married, Living in Italy by Misty Urban

Author:Misty Urban [Urban, Misty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: short stories
Publisher: Pearl City Press
Published: 2021-04-09T05:00:00+00:00

Saving Grace

Grace has discovered that she is shrinking.

She doesn’t know exactly when it began but she can see the effects now when she studies herself in the mirror, which she was never in the habit of doing, even when she was fuller and there was more to her to look at. Something is slowly wearing her away, shaving off little layers of flesh and tissue with a sedate and murderous persistence.

As a child she used to study the illustrations under the entry for ‘human’ in her parents’ encyclopedia. Dimly, through the overlay of glossy transparent pages, skin atop muscle and so on, she could see the colorful curving shapes of internal organs and behind that, the gleam of bone. She felt frightened for these people who had the softest and most tender parts of them exposed in graphic primary colors.

So it is with Grace. Her tendons stand out in bas-relief and her bones push at the underside of her skin. She can see the paths and highways of blood vessels through the few layers of epidermis that remain.

It disturbs her a little, this shape of her skeleton, the thrusting points of ribs and skull and spinal cord. It is indecent, this self-display. Soon other people will avert their eyes when she passes, embarrassed by her shamelessness. Cover thyself, woman, people will think at the sight of her arteries and muscles and bones, at the sight of her walking around with her insides showing.

She is becoming translucent. Soon one will be able to see light through her, like the sketch of a person on a glossy slide, like a smudge upon a chalkboard, the suggestion of a person who had once been there but had, without explanation, gone away.

*

Grace is meek at the doctor’s office. She knows firsthand that there are very ill people in the world. She is aware of the cost of health insurance, that high-stakes gamble, that effort to ensure that your body doesn’t get stolen from you like your furniture, your car stereo, your art.

The radio in the waiting room plays light rock. A woman croons about her broken heart.

Grace feels ridiculous sitting here on the blue couch, a young woman in a shabby spring jacket with a mud stain on the hem, the jacket she will throw away once all the snow has melted. She thinks about her own heart, her old heart, a heart made of tissues already worn out when it came to her. Her pants are too loose. Her sweater sags over the knobs of her shoulders.

The nurse crooks her arm around her clipboard and doesn’t make eye contact. Grace submits to the measurements and the scale. The nurse reads out a number one and one-quarter inch shorter than the number Grace put on her driver’s license when she moved to town.

How she can be shrinking? She shuffles down the carpeted hallways, carrying her shoes. She wants the poise, the presence of a tall woman, stature if not substance. She laments the passing of these inches.

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