Thrust: A Novel

Aurora’s Children (1885)

To Whom It May Concern:

Before I begin, two items of note. First: should you someday find me gone, please use the following as a mortality document: “Aurora Boréales, successful businesswoman, aged forty-three, mysteriously disappeared from her residence on the tenth of May while she was meant to be delivering canned goods to the less fortunate. A week ago, her body was found in the Narrows. The face was terribly mutilated, and the body indicated that a fearful outrage had been committed on her person. No clue of the circumstances of her death has yet been discovered.” You’ll know how to place the story.

A juicy murder mystery. I’d like that.

The second item of note. What I intend here to write is my anti-obituary. That is, I intend to write myself back to life. Let these letters, between myself and my cousin the genius sculptor, draw me back to life.

Should I disappear, watch out for an unexpected object. A gift.

And now the story.

—

They came to me first because of my leg. I think children were enchanted by the idea of a woman who existed in pieces. An adult like a doll, with a removable part!

The first child who came to me approached as I stepped into an alley to adjust a strap on my leg. The street clattered with the syncopated clop and rattle of hooves and carriage wheels, and as I turned back around, I was confronted with a mess of a boy, standing so near me I thought sure he meant to rob me. Not that he could have, mind you, but I thought he might try.

The alley smelled of piss, the boy not much better. He had the face of a creature unused to bathing. Instead of attempting to snatch my pocketbook, however, he watched me lower the curtain of my dress back over my knee, down below my shin to my ornamental shoe. His eye traced the path with an intensity that interested me. Under his gaze, I could almost feel a foot where none existed.

“Please, ma’am, may I see it again?”

I took a closer look at him, and that’s when I saw it: he was missing an arm. My cheeks flushed from the idiocy of my earlier thought. There hung a little lump of flesh, the right arm of his dingy shirt short enough for me to see it. His right side announcing an absence where an arm should be.

The look in his pale-blue eyes and his night-dark scruff of hair suggested that he was not originally from the city. “Where have you come from?”

“Ireland,” he said.

“By the belly of a steamer, I’d wager. Packed in with the cargo?”

“Yes, ma’am.” His eyes returned to my leg. “May I see it? Please?”

He removed his hat, or what passed for one, to further his plea.

Slowly — and I do know how to perform a task with seductive patience — I began to raise my skirt. His eyes moved me. His eyes reminded me of my beloved cousin Frédéric’s. The only gaze that has ever truly moved me, even when we were children.

Is it wrong to say that his stare meant everything to me? The way he gave my body his full attention as I pulled my skirt up over my prosthetic; the way I felt a leg, a foot, captured inside his stare? The way I imagined his absent arm and hand lifting my skirt to reveal my absent leg and foot?