Body Language
Anna LundeHe could not help but watch her over the shoulder of his friend as she sat
and ate and laughed. He always thought that her mouth was deceptively large. Demure
lips seemed to pinch together around an oral cavity of tiny proportions, but when she
laughed, and when she ate, her smile became huge, filled with shiny teeth and pink
gums. When he passed her on the sidewalk, when she was withdrawn into herself,
he simply wanted to reach out and pull at the corners until her smile was forced to
surface.
The hairdresser liked to take a lot of time in washing her customer’s hair,
massaging products into the scalp. She knew that people responded well to such treatment,
and she liked happy customers. This customer’s hair was long and fine, and she
imagined making hair-and-suds sculptures like a child in a bath. When she did the
final rinse, she found her customer fast asleep.
She shifted her angle slightly, looking for that beautiful line that ran down
off the brow along the back of the cheek, revealing the structure of cheek, the tip of
the nose; the tight little corner of the mouth was lost by the odd angle.
The lecture was boring, the girl’s vision blurred. The teacher’s doppelganger
appeared, partly colliding with the original image. As the girl let her eyes un-focus
further, looking beyond the chalkboard, through the back of the classroom, the two
teachers slid farther and farther apart, both images taking on an unreliable quality.
One second she could see the writing on the chalkboard, then it was obscured by
the blue suit as the right-hand teacher gained strength and popped back into relative
clarity. But just as another section of the chalkboard was pushing its way through
the shoulder and neck of the left-hand teacher, the right-hand image lost its resolve.
Refocusing her eyes, she found nothing in the front of the classroom but a patchwork
of blue suit and chalk writing; the teacher’s features remained floating in disparate
locations behind the desk. She hid her face in her hands.
The man hated his feet. He thought they looked stunted and abnormal. Like
a word that grows uncomfortable from overuse, the more he stared at his feet the more
absurd and vulgar they looked. When he tripped down the stairs and broke his wrist,
he cried out in pain, but no one heard him, and he found he could not rise.