Counting Backwards Without Pants

The legless man could count backwards to one-million 27 ½ without missing a beat. He did this by simply closing his eyes and counting, rhyming off each number in his head like the beads on an abacus. Once he’d reached five-hundred thousand 12 ½ he’d stop, take in a deep breath and continue on until the end. He took great pride in his savantism, and was nary a coward when it came to into’s and out-of’s and quadrant-angles. The one thing his da taught him (to repeat things until they stuck like flies to flypaper in his mind) other than to expect very little from life, was of no use when it came to feeding himself or finding new prosthetic-legs. (Like most people the legless man put on his pants one leg at a time. Unlike most people, however, he had no legs to put his pants on. It would seem, then, that pants require legs, and with no legs pants are not pants but something else, cotton or linen, gabardine or wool, something made of corduroy and thread, but not pants). The man with no legs, the legless man, wore legless trousers when he counted backwards to one-million 27 ½.