Stupid Children by Lenore Zion

Author:Lenore Zion [Zion, Lenore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780988569447
Publisher: Emergency Press

16

MEDICAL ANOMALIES HAVE ALWAYS MANAGED TO capture my interest—I’m not sure why this is the case, as neither my father nor I were genetically unlucky. Perhaps, actually, my father was genetically unlucky in that he was born to a pedophile, but physically, my father had all his parts in working order. He had two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears, one nose, as did I, and, all in all, we looked like two individuals who had escaped any and all birth defects. When I was very young, probably three or four years old, I was taking an afternoon stroll with my father when a man with no legs happened by us. He was using his hands as feet and his arms as legs, and he was whistling. Due to the fact that he had no legs, he was no more than two feet tall, which put his eyes directly in line with mine. As he came closer to my father and myself, he looked at me, stopped whistling the fanciful tune he’d been whistling, and said: “Afternoon, ma’am,” as though I were a woman of thirty-two, and then he winked at me. “He probably lost his legs in the war,” my father said to me, but I didn’t know what he was talking about, because I wasn’t equipped with information about what exactly the hell a war was, and I didn’t know how a person could just lose his legs—mine, I’d noticed, were firmly affixed to my body; I couldn’t lose them if I tried.

I never forgot this man. I should have forgotten him, but he was, quite unfortunately, my very first memory in life. I spent hours pondering his existence for years after—I wondered if he had very calloused hands, or if he referred to his hands as his feet, or if he usually had prosthetic limbs but did not on that particular day. Were they in the shop? Do prosthetic limbs, like cars, need to go in for tune-ups? Did he prefer the method of transportation he was using when I crossed paths with him to a wheelchair? Did he tell his friends he was going for a “walk?” Was it significant that this man and I crossed paths, and then I was later assigned a foster father with only one leg?

And then there was the girl in my first grade class who was missing her scapulae—it took quite some time before I was able to identify what was askew with her. I continuously discussed her with my father—“She has more neck than she should, or maybe she just stands funny,” I’d say, but he was unable to shine any light on this girl’s situation, I suppose because he was unaware of the fact that some little girls are born without scapulae. This girl was later hit by a car when crossing the street, and I attributed the accident to her missing scapulae. She must have been unable to move quickly, I thought. After all, we humans are born with a certain number of bones for a reason.

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