Small Pox

Everything below the waist stopped growing when she reached eight years of age. Her feet were smaller than monkey’s feet, hammerhead toes, swayback arches that seemed to separate the bottom of her feet from whatever she walked on; legs tacked into her hip joints, skirted with nails and bailing wire, no bigger than tarn reeds. She stopped growing after tipple-toppling-tippling down the basement stairs, severing her spinal cord just below the crack in her bottom. The doctor diagnosed acromesomelia-malevolencia even though she hadn’t suffered from rubella or rickets before the age of five or had a history of smallness in the family. Her mother figured it was a curse from God for the drinking and carrying on she did while carrying her daughter. Her father, a doctrinaire Episcopalian with a weakness for Rye Whiskey and grapefruit juice felt it was just sorry luck and left it at that. When she turned eleven her legs bowed out so much they had to put a post between them fastened with screws and copper wire. She skipped and hut down the street, crutches striking the pavement like dud-matches, her mother hollering at her to be careful. The alms man knew her from outside the church, where she sat on a pillow with a picture of Nolan Falls stitched into the cushiony part.