The world is a strange place, thought Haupt, alone in the dark, almost unbearably so. And yet, it is the only place I have. And I'm not even entirely sure I have it.
But this is not that kind of story, the kind meant to explain things. It simply tells things as they are, and as you know there is no explanation for how things are, at least none that would make any difference and allow them to be something else.
And there's another one, where you look yourself in the mirror and keep looking until you can see through your skin, and then you draw your own heart and send the drawing in a letter to someone else."
"Why would you do that?" I couldn't stop myself from saying.
"So that they can control you," she said. "You are saying, 'I do not want myself and so I am giving you the gift of me.' Or something like that."
Caution: if you are afraid of amputees, please avoid this story. Caution: if you are an amputee, please trust that I did not intend to insult you or your ilk (probably an unfortunate choice of words, since ilk sounds like a part of a word rather than a whole word), and please do not feel obligated to read this story. But,
No matter which way we turned the girl, she didn’t have a face. There was hair in front and hair in the back—only saying which was the front and which was the back was impossible. I got Jim Slip to look on one side and I looked from the other and the other members of the lodge tried to hold her gently or not so gently in place, but no matter how we looked or held her, the face just wasn’t there.
We called it a tower, though it was not a tower. It was, so the few remaining scraps of records seem to indicate, a fragment of a skyscraper, the tallest structure still standing from a city that had once been here, before the collapse, long before any of us were born. The tower that was not a tower was the only thing rising to any height above the rubble. Like a beacon, it drew stragglers in.
A person was more like an apple than a banana. You couldn’t peel a person easily with your fingers. With a person, you needed a knife. With a person, like an apple, you could eat the skin.
Caution: psychiatrists. There are hundreds of psychiatrists in this story, and each of them has a catchphrase they repeat over and over. Reading this story will make you hate psychiatrists, even if you are a psychiatrist.
We did speak, occasionally, but gestured more often than moved our lips, and in general lived in that brusque and silent accord enjoyed, if enjoyed is the right word, by certain long-married couples.
