How good, she thinks, to have never been in an urgent rush to lose a limb. The thought feels absurd enough to nearly laugh,
but she suspects a hysteria at the edge of that that she ought not indulge. Says, instead, “A greater lead time can only be of benefit to Mssr Viktor’s work. Some, he has indicated, can only be done once the amputation itself is dealt with, but not all.”
For a moment, she lingers in a thought, pensive. Finally,
“Madame de Fonce had offered me her own, the first that she pressed me with these matters. I have never more strongly regretted foolish words spoken in haste than to have spoken to her of my own vanity on the matter. I’ve often fancied myself above it, you know; I have never been a devotee of fashion. I imagined,”
while they are being uncomfortably frank with one another,
“that you might understand how it is to be challenged in one’s self-perception.”
No, he doesn't imagine that went well. His head tips back, eye languid over shoulder, and from that angle it's easy to imagine: A time when wry looks might have cast some rakish charm.
But everyone grows up.
"I trust you've had it before." Birth changes the body, and while he knows little of the husband, he knows enough to guess at control. "Some will leap to it, keen to remind you how beautiful you are,"
(She is that.)
"Despite it all." A mark of power, however thoughtlessly exchanged, and their work doesn't draw the thoughtless. They'll use it. Call it vanity, or safety — "I don't think it a failing to wish to recognize oneself."
Only an impossibility. There's scant alike between age and the prospect before her, Isaac doesn't scar or stand a wound. Can't grow his teeth back either, or will hair and wrinkle to bend; returns time and again to the shape of a different man.
So she has fancied herself above it. She is not the woman who died so long ago. She's this one, and this one may cop to an affection of her limbs.
I expect her, still, in the mirror, she doesn’t say. In the light of day, those memories had and had not felt like her own— the lines blur, where she draws the separation. Birthed two children. A body that remembers only one. A body that is her own, to do with as she will, to live as she will,
to alter as she will. Well, and small wonder that she should have for so long found the idea of binding one’s sense of self to being a rifter distasteful. What, one might as well ask, exactly sense of self is that?
“I know myself in the thought that there will be halls in which it plays well for me,” she says, a touch more wry. “The ego, you understand,” he understands, “of the lengths to which I will go to have what is had here.”
All the ways in which she is underestimated and it terrifies her to risk making any of them real, but of course, it isn’t even difficult to envision the ways she can make this work for her if she wishes to. Only if she thinks on it, as she has done, beyond that first moment, where entirely unlike herself she had spoken wholly without thinking at all.
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no subject
but she suspects a hysteria at the edge of that that she ought not indulge. Says, instead, “A greater lead time can only be of benefit to Mssr Viktor’s work. Some, he has indicated, can only be done once the amputation itself is dealt with, but not all.”
For a moment, she lingers in a thought, pensive. Finally,
“Madame de Fonce had offered me her own, the first that she pressed me with these matters. I have never more strongly regretted foolish words spoken in haste than to have spoken to her of my own vanity on the matter. I’ve often fancied myself above it, you know; I have never been a devotee of fashion. I imagined,”
while they are being uncomfortably frank with one another,
“that you might understand how it is to be challenged in one’s self-perception.”
no subject
But everyone grows up.
"I trust you've had it before." Birth changes the body, and while he knows little of the husband, he knows enough to guess at control. "Some will leap to it, keen to remind you how beautiful you are,"
(She is that.)
"Despite it all." A mark of power, however thoughtlessly exchanged, and their work doesn't draw the thoughtless. They'll use it. Call it vanity, or safety — "I don't think it a failing to wish to recognize oneself."
Only an impossibility. There's scant alike between age and the prospect before her, Isaac doesn't scar or stand a wound. Can't grow his teeth back either, or will hair and wrinkle to bend; returns time and again to the shape of a different man.
So she has fancied herself above it. She is not the woman who died so long ago. She's this one, and this one may cop to an affection of her limbs.
no subject
to alter as she will. Well, and small wonder that she should have for so long found the idea of binding one’s sense of self to being a rifter distasteful. What, one might as well ask, exactly sense of self is that?
“I know myself in the thought that there will be halls in which it plays well for me,” she says, a touch more wry. “The ego, you understand,” he understands, “of the lengths to which I will go to have what is had here.”
All the ways in which she is underestimated and it terrifies her to risk making any of them real, but of course, it isn’t even difficult to envision the ways she can make this work for her if she wishes to. Only if she thinks on it, as she has done, beyond that first moment, where entirely unlike herself she had spoken wholly without thinking at all.