The street comes to an end a few blocks up.  I’m not so far from home yet that I don’t know what I‘m escaping from.  When I reach that end, I could turn right and end up in the parking lot of the high school.  But that’s hardly a dead end; I would simply have to walk around the side of the building and head straight west for the highway.  If I turn left, there will be a few more blocks of straight sidewalks and then another decision, left or right, unless I want to wade the brook that cuts the park from the town.  I doubt it’s iced by now.  It moves too fast.  Fleeing something that was never there.

            So maybe I didn’t have a plan when I walked out the front door of my parents home, hung at the end of the driveway for a moment, then pivoted left and started walking.  My fingers have already disappeared from me--wavered in their bony bases, detached--let themselves mix, atom by atom, with the air in the loose pockets of my stained blue jeans.  Then my body breathed them away.  I can feel my toes following the same path--slower, as they’re stockier, mostly, and it takes more time for the falling-away to reach through to the bone.

            I’ve driven past the brook dozens of times since the world turned to winter.  You can see the thin rush of water through the jagged wave of trees that lines the edge.  Slowly the brook is freezing, but only in chunks and bites.  Slowly, bits break away and catch themselves in the grass or bushes of the bank, tumble over rocks that reach up from the brook-bed and skip onto land, to melt and become nothing but a patch of damp on the grey earth.

            For myself, I think, the cold holds me together longer.  My body is a solid.  And while it wasn’t my intention to disappear--I’ve already told you that I had no intention in this passive escape--I have to curse the cold with what little soul presents itself in me.  If the clouds would open, if the sky would soften and warm, maybe the pieces of myself would be able to loose from their joints more easily as I walked.  By the time I found myself a few towns over, there would be nothing left to find.  What there is now--what there is left--is to keep walking.

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            There was this one time…

            A few towns over--that’s all it was, really, though the drive seemed longer than that. I was cushioned and crushed in the backseat, between a girl with pale thighs curtained in a loose black skirt, and the interior door of a ten-year-old sedan.  The girl in the driver’s seat swished and swung the car between lanes, accustomed to the movement, driving the sedan freely like the motion of her own hips in stride.

            It was night.  The rumble of the driver’s speech was lost within the sounds of the engine and the tires rolling away the road beneath them.  Beside me in the dark, a hand emerged to pull a few strands of my long hair from their neat bundle behind my back.  I watched the window for a reflection of my own face but saw only the strands of hair being wound like a clock, smoothed between thumb and forefinger, and then passed over and under the fingers of a hand that could as easily have been my own.

            When I stepped from the car I was rushed by the cold of the downtown evening and the white noise of the smokers talking and fighting in front of the buildings.  I pulled my skirt around my knees and bent into the wind.  I followed the swinging heels of the driver’s boots into a dark nightclub where I stepped in line to order a drink.  Jack and Coke.  I think I managed to shape my lips, suddenly crippled, into a smile, as the others laughed and called me butch.  They drank tonics and martinis and Long Island Iced Teas.  I sipped my second and third drinks as I watched my friends be led away to the dance floor.  I huddled over my own glass and tried to look damaged.  I hunched my back and let my sweater bunch around my overweight.

            When he finally did come over, he seemed to be talking to the barstool.  I was unsure if he had even seen me.  He asked me, or someone, or something on the floor perhaps, if we wanted to dance, and when he reached out his hand my knee was the first thing he touched.  I tried to shake my head but my neck refused, and I almost fell from my seat to the greasy-looking floor as he pulled on my arm--not from drink, but from surprise.  I’d had no intention of moving, and my legs didn’t understand what they needed to do until it was almost too late.

            I was crushed again then, on the dance floor, between an unfamiliar body and a deep-shadowed wall, my hands pirated and pressed against thighs in khaki pants, a stranger’s sweat on my arms and saliva on my neck.  I thought, this is what people do.  They come out Friday nights for this, dress for it, laugh about it later in the week over coffee.  They do this, and then they go home.  I felt my eye-shadow smeared across my face,  blacking me out against the dark paint of the wall.  Somehow I ran--no--I don’t remember--somehow I shrank through to the other side of the wall, into a bathroom stall where I crouched, hips against the white plaster wall, and shook.

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            My feet are down to the heels, and a little arch that‘s still holding on.  It’s not as difficult as it sounds, really, to keep moving with most of either foot gone.  As the balls of my feet lifted away to join the sewer-steam that drifted over the sidewalk, I simply shifted the responsibility of balance to my hips.  I didn’t even need to stop walking.  My boots help, too, taking a breath of the weight onto their leather toes.  You can bet that I never thought of this convenience when I bought them steel-toed.  I can almost lean forward, and the people I pass on the street only think I have a limp.  Or the reason why they look away from me could be that I’ve walked further than I thought.  My fingers, as I said, have long since left me, but I use my palms every now and then to check my head--nose, lips, teeth, and ears are still there.  I know my eyes remain because I see the pavement that lies waiting for my step--lies in front of my phantom toes and the phantom soul that propels my still-solid hips.  I waver.  The wind is at my face.  I am along the brook.

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            Because, there was this time--

            It was only a few days ago, I think, when I was dressed in a business suit for the first time in a hard year, and sat with my ankles properly crossed and my back straight, across from a man in a dark tie.  He was going to tell me if I was good enough. 

            The office was grey and white, with grey and white computers, grey and white printers, grey and white appliances.  Stacks of paper scratched heavily with pencil lead stood like defiant rats here and there across the office, in corners and on frail metal tables.  Cubicles with grey walls blocked the door from me, and I kept my gaze high as the man scanned some document that had nothing to do with me. 

            A single woman stood nearby searching through a stack of papers.  Her long graying hair was tied back tight behind her shoulders.  She used a thin black band of elastic decorated with a single large white flower.  The flower had turned inward and hidden itself against her dark grey suit jacket.  In a ceramic vase on a nearby metal cabinet, a few dull lilies teetered on weak stems.  The woman stopped her searching when she noticed them and went to turn the vase so that the flowers bent away from the window.  It was a useless gesture.  The sky was low and clouded, with little sunlight to tempt the flowers to stand again, and the stems were too thin to support any movement.

            The woman reached into her purse and pulled out a bottle of aspirin.  She popped the cap and shook a pill into her hand.  As a final gesture, she dropped the pill into the flowers’ vase water.  To keep them fresh.  Her stack of papers still half-investigated, she left the room empty-handed and empty-eyed, looking at no one.

            I was thinking then, ‘this is what people do.’  For food and clothing and the right to breathe. 

            My eyes blurred over with something like sadness, or a refusal to see.  After the man in the tie told me he didn’t think I fit what the company needed right then, I had to feel my way along the cubicle walls to the exit.  I’m certain I looked blind.  Blind or insane.

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            People can see it now, I’m sure.  Even with the sleeves of my sweater hanging at my sides, the empty sweeping motion must show these occasional passerby that my arms have gone, straight up to the empty shoulder sockets.  I can no longer check my face, so I try to toss some hair in front of it whenever someone is nearby.  If you see someone with no arms--that’s something you can at least work into your understanding of the world.  A birth defect.  A bad accident.  Maybe I was at war.  But someone with no face--that isn’t a person.  It’s a nightmare walking towards you, maybe on the street where you live.  I have no interest in that.  No one needs to know that anything was here but a human body, broken down and dissembled as it may be.

            I worry.  My knees are showing signs of going next.  I can feel it in the cartilage.  The tremble that comes before the first hole begins to dissolve through the meat and material of the body.  And if my knees go before the rest of me--before even my shins and ankles--how will I walk? 

            There is no need for it, I suppose.  There never was.  I could stop walking right now, sit down on the curb and never get any further from home.  But for some reason, all I can do is take one step and then another, gauging the weakness in each knee and estimating the time each one has left.

            The right one will go first.

                                                ------------------------

            There was this time…There was…

            There was this snowstorm.

            My grandmother says there were angels that night, watching my mother as she gave birth to her only child on the hard tile floor of the basement.  My father had wanted to leave for the hospital but at the last minute my mother had decided that they had to listen to what the TV told them.

            Stay indoors.  Do not try to drive.  Get away from any windows.

            My grandmother made figurines of the angels, as she saw them, in her Tuesday night ceramics class.  There were two of them, perfectly matched.  They had white wings, white hair, white hands clasped in prayer in front of white faces.  The angels were covered from the neck down by white robes.

            The angels had no feet.

            I entered the world in a snowstorm and I will leave a place just as cold.

                                                --------------------------

            The sun has come out.

            The day is old, and the light barely shines over the tops of the trees.  But the warmth is real and hits my face like the breaking of a window.

            I can feel it all there, nose, mouth, ears, long numb and assumed lost.  I am surprised that they have held on so long.  But I realize, now, standing under this unfamiliar yellow, that they didn’t.  They have simply come back.

            My knees are strong, my feet whole and decorated with ten whole toes.  I feel a movement in my shoulder sockets and watch as my left arm, then right, grows bone and flesh.

            My fingers come last, growing out long and thin as they were, and even painting their nails with the same chipped polish.

            I stop walking.  I am miles from where I began and without any reason to go further.  I am of the world, again, completely, inescapably.

            Standing, I cry, and the tears do not turn to ice.

            I turn on legs I will have for my whole, long life.

            There is nothing to do now.

            Nothing to do but go home.