Thrust: A Novel

On this particular day, she led me into her bedroom and pulled an apple from a pocket of her dress, a look of great seriousness in her eyes. I was mesmerized. When she held the apple up between us, her lips stitched and swollen and red, she said, “Don’t move a muscle, don’t tell anyone, or I will forget you ever existed.” Her words were almost swallowed up by her wounded mouth. “Hold as still as a statue,” she said. I did.

In that moment, I believed her more than I had ever believed anything in my entire short life. She was the only person in the world who gave me attention, the only person who did not find me odd or anemic or too preoccupied with things no one else cared about.

She stepped toward me, till she was only an apple’s distance away. I stared at her eyes as hard as I knew how. I could smell her skin. Lavender soap and the sweat of a girl and blood on her lips. The smell of the apple. The smell of a boy who has no idea what will happen next, a feeling I would long for the rest of my life.

She plunged her teeth into the apple, enough to hold it in her mouth without using her hands. Her stitches stretched and she bloodied her own lips further.

Then she waited for me to do what she had instructed me to do. My body felt like one human tremor. But there was nothing I would not do for Aurora — then or now, for the rest of my life — so I took my dumb little fist and pulled my dumb little arm back and socked the apple out of Aurora’s mouth.

Her head snapped to one side. She made not a sound.

Blood everywhere.

Stitches unsutured.

Mouth unholy in its wound.

She turned to face me. She smiled. Monstrous in her beauty. The laugh that came from that ragged hole of her clattered my little spine.

I was scared — but I was also drawn to her. So I smiled too.

Then she started to peel off her bloodied dress, right in front of me. For a moment, all I could see was her white slip and the form of her, a tiny drop of blood having made it to the crest of her breasts, then just beginning.

For the rest of my life, that image of Aurora would become my understanding of things. And I knew that moment would shape my life’s devotion to her.

My life, and possibly hers, were shaped in that childhood room.

—

Much later, when Aurora lost her leg in the war, my devotion took material form. I could not bear the weight of her lost leg. In my nightmares I watched her try to walk and fall, try to stand and fall, try to move at all and fall again, like a statue collapsing but infinitely worse.

So I set about to design and build her a new leg.

First, I studied the history. And there was history — which surprised me.

In ancient Egypt, the wholeness of the human form was important in the afterlife as well as the living realm. Some of these objects have survived to be rediscovered in our time. The Greville Chester Great Toe was made from linen, glue, and plaster.

The horse-hoofed prosthetic leg was popular in China.

The Middle Ages were filled with peg legs and iron legs.

Tezcatlipoca, the ancient Aztec god of creation, lost his foot in a battle with the Earth Monster. He is often depicted with an obsidian mirror where his flesh foot used to live.

In the mid-to-late 1500s, Ambroise Paré invented the modern prosthetic leg. He is also considered to be the father of modern surgery. He was a barber, a surgeon, and an anatomist for four different French kings. In addition to improving amputation techniques, and thus survival rates, he developed functional limbs for all parts of the body. The adjustable harness and hinge knee, with lock control, are still used today.

In the United States, the demand for prosthetic legs burgeoned during and after the Civil War. James Edward Hanger, a Confederate engineer — and, it is said, the first amputee of the Civil War — designed and patented a prosthetic leg while he was convalescing, a device known as the Hanger Limb. Hanger and other prosthetic pioneers, including the Salem Leg Company of Massachusetts, marketed a range of devices, extolling their comfort, strength, durability, convenience, and elegance. Their products were notable for the use of sockets and sheet metal and steel, enhancing their steadiness, smoothness, and silence; they were often lined with leather dyed to resemble flesh, and often included hair.

It would be no exaggeration to say that I became obsessed with the design and construction of Aurora’s leg.