Grandmother and mother went to the next village over to try again.
When the daughter was grown and Grandmother dead, Father said her mother flogged herself with a whip of braided horsehair and dull nails. She put her jagged back on display in the square each morning, and the villagers wept at the sight. They made garlands of magnolia and lily of the valley for her hair. They commissioned a stronger whip of leather and glass. Madonna, they called her. Notre Dame. They bowed their heads and asked her blessings. They rolled loaded die to take her to their rooms each night and watch the vicious act with their belts undone. When she put on a child they gripped their hair and wailed and wondered how it could be. When her daughter was born her back convalesced to pink baby skin. The villagers could not look upon her without violent retching, so removed was their desire from her skin, and so she put on a shift of pale tulle and went into the woods alone.
Father said he took her into the swell of his own home because he was a kind man of means and because he did not like his own children, nor his wife’s narrowed eyes. He bounced her on his knees and lanced the round blisters on her hands from churning the daily butter. She grew quiet and beautiful and obedient, and he grew to love her.
When she asked, her father said it was the black-eyed devil come round to ask for her hand. Of course, her father did not give his favorite away. He gave his other daughters, the one with horse teeth, the one with the red birthmark, the one with a single eye, and tossed out his wife as well. Then he placed a heavy crucifix around his adopted daughter’s neck and on every wall so everywhere she looked there was suffering.
Father wept and said, “it’s because you’re tainted with your grandmother’s curse, your mother’s blight. It is on your hands and arms. Everyone who looks at you can see where you’ve come from. The devil has come to collect his own.” She cupped her hands to catch her father’s tears, and he used fresh soap and sandpaper to scrub her fingers and elbows raw. She raised the salt water over her head and poured it over her body to burn away the rest.
Father said he shut her away in his bedroom to safeguard her from the villagers, who would see her lineage in her arms. Roused by the devil, they would tear her apart. She was safest under covers. She was safest without candlelight. She was safest against the swell of father’s fat belly, big enough to hold her still and keep her warm.
When she asked, he told her not to ask anymore.
When she acted, she took the dull butter knife she hid in her skirts and put it to the place of elbow and bone. Slow she brought it down, slow she carved, low she moaned when it ripped muscles and fractured bone. Then the locked door shook and whined on its metal hinges and burst open. Behind it was the man her father called devil, all long hair and pale eyes. With her permission, he took the sharp axe on his belt and swiftly removed her other arm. He watched her arrange her arms with her toes on the pillows. One vertical. One horizontal. Meeting in the middle. She laughed when he took her in his arms and carried her down the stairs, out of the house, through the village, and into the dark woods.
There is a woman in my orchard. My first thought is to load my rifle and shoot her for trespassing, but I notice she has stumps where she should have elbow. Poor thing must have birthed weird, or been hurt before, and there is nothing my gun could do to her that hasn’t already been done, except end it, which might be a kindness.
She stares at my lemons for hours, and I understand her obsession. I’ve won awards all across the county for their plumpness, their shade and their sour bite. No one grows them better than I do because no one knows my secret: my wife and daughter shit into a bowl under the sink, and I save it until there is enough to spread with fish heads and mulch. There’s love in the process, and no one has yet been able to replicate it, because they haven’t got women who can discharge like I do.
When night falls, and she makes to leave, I go to her and tell her I’ll pick a lemon for her if she wants, free of charge, beautiful and bright and yellow. I pluck a fat one and hold it up to her mouth, but she only looks at me like I have offended, bares her teeth and walks away.
That, I think, is the end of armless women.
But she is there the next day, staring at the same tree, her mouth open like a split peach, tongue protruding from her lips. I go out to her and offer her another lemon, but she responds as she did the day before, and leaves.
My daughter, curious and eight, tells me that the woman reminds her of what sorrow must look like, and that should be her name. I tell her that’s a rude thing to call a person, and she makes to argue with me, but instead she grabs her belly and runs to the bathroom. Save every bit, I tell her, your output hasn’t been great lately.
When the armless woman is there in the morning, I tell her she better leave, after all she is on private property, and she ought to take what is kindly offered and be on her way. If she liked what she tasted she could buy her own in the market, only the first is freely offered. She looks at me like I am some unfathomable, rotten thing.
Then, she smiles.
Smiling stretches her neck, and it continues to lengthen far beyond what a human neck should, the skin moving and expanding but not tearing, lifting her head up towards my lemons. Her neck is as long as what is left of her arms, those odd stumps, and she stops her growing once her lips touch the skin of my lemon, and she bites into it with a little growl and rips it from the branch. She squeezes it between her teeth and sucks. Some lemon-wet dribbles down her chin, but her eyes are all daring. She spits the rind at my feet when she finishes, nothing left but yellow skin and bite.
At the window, my daughter peeks her head out and laughs at how wrong she was. That woman’s name was not sorrow, not at all, but she won’t tell me what the woman’s name is, like it’s a private joke she will not share.
Ihad my hands cut off as a child. That is, of course, half a lie, for one was cut off by another’s swift whack of an axe. But I did the first one myself. I would have done the second too, except my teeth were not strong enough then to hold the blade. They’re strong enough now, and sharp. They must be, for they serve all my purposes: biting, writing, eating, climbing. I’d walk with them too, but I’m too old to give up my feet.
My teeth have taken on so many other tasks that they have lost their original purpose: to shape the air in my mouth into words. Too long ago, in the night, after years of sharpening themselves on sticks and rocks and lemons, they hungered and bit off my tongue. That I swallowed like everything else, and thought nothing of it at the time: who would I speak to, with no hands? And who would speak to me, a woman who built fire with flint and molars?
Even if I could speak, I would have nothing to say. I am happy to no longer add to the world. Now, I only consume, and I discard. And I walk, so far I walk, on feet that must give out soon.
Before they do, I follow a light in the distance, and I think the light will be the last I see, as that is what I always heard in the stories when I was a girl: a light, brighter than fireflies swarming in your eyes, and then the great nothing. This light is no insect, but a house so lit it seems like it is burning from the inside. As I move closer I can see it is not on fire, as I first believed, but inside are two figures, a woman and her little daughter, and they are melting blocks of silver down in a great furnace. They take hammers to it and bend the silver into all sorts of beautiful things: wrist cuffs and chains for the neck, dainty rings, and even a bowl to collect something as precious as milk.
I thought of leaving them to their art, but the little girl saw me spying in the window and tugged her mother over to the door to open it.
“Grandmother,” the woman politely said. “You must be cold. Come inside for a time and warm up. You can pay us in stories of what you have seen and the wisdom you have learned from it.”
The daughter was not yet old enough to know her manners, and she gaped at my stumps. I went inside, for I was cold and very tired. I opened my mouth to show them
the rotting stump of what was my tongue and closed it when it seemed like the daughter would cry for the pity of it all. Foolish, foolish and kind thing.
“It matters little,” the mother said. “We will play you music instead.”
I watched them for a time and marveled at their skill, how they could make such beautiful noises, like birds and boulders, from just simple hammers and fine silver.
“Grandmother,” the daughter said to me, “let us make you a pair of silver hands. They’ll be so beautiful that a prince will cry when he sees them.”
I scoffed at that, but little noise came from my throat. What use had I of a prince’s tears, so near to the end as I was? With what was left of my arms, I directed the girl to put the silver in the fire and heat it. She did so willingly, but when she pulled it out I grasped it between my stumps and took it to my teeth. I bit and peeled away at the edges until it was the shape I desired. The girl watched in horror as the silver burned down my lips, but I’d cut off my own hand when I was her age, and so little could hurt me now.
As shaped as I could make it, I handed it back to her to put into the fire. She did so with shaking tongs, and when it came out I knelt down in front of her and opened my mouth wide. She knew, darling child, what I wanted, and burned the silver tongue onto the back of my throat.
Her mother crossed herself and called her daughter over, but the girl was too excited to obey.
“Speak now, Grandmother! Tell us who you are and what you have seen!”
I opened my mouth to tell her but found that I must have forgotten what the words should be, and how to make them. All that poured out of my mouth was laughter, a noise that reverberated off the silver and filled the whole house with its pleasure.
As a boy, Tarrare always ate more than his weight. His parents thought they were in some sort of messed up fairy tale the old women used to titter on about—the boy who ate his family out of house and home and did not gain a fat pound—and so they did the responsible thing: they kicked his bones and skin out. He cried and said it was cruel of them to do such a thing to their own blood. His mother almost took him back when she saw the water in his eyes, but her husband pointed out the boy was stuffing handfuls of dirt into his mouth, and so they shut and locked the door.
He walked and ate whatever he found—scraps of meat stolen from butchers and crusts of bread left on plates from the mid-day meal—but he was so hungry he ate the leather off his shoes, and then the cloth off his back. A group of wandering thieves and prostitutes found him with the cuff of his pants in his mouth, gnawing, and since they found this funny they asked him to join them. He made his coin putting all sorts of things into his mouth and swallowing: living snails and toads, the handle of a dagger, a virgin’s nightgown, tree bark, and, when he had a rich patron who wanted to test his limits, a meal large enough to feed a small army, which he dined on merrily in one sitting and then asked for more. The patron looked under the table to make sure the food was not hidden and it was all a magnificent trick, but there was no trace of it anywhere, except in the air when Tarrare belched.
“Your shit must be a sight to behold,” the patron admired, and promptly kicked Tarrare out, as he had started gumming the table.
The patron had ties to the military, and when he met with the General for drinks, he told him about the curious man he met who could eat anything. The General was intrigued and immediately snatched Tarrare up, saying he would feed him whatever he liked and as much as he liked so long as he swallowed a few sealed documents whole. Then, he was to take them across enemy lines and deliver them to his men in the thick of it. The General could have done this himself, but he mused that an expert of digestion would be better suited to this line of work. Tarrare was not sure he wanted this at first, but then the General offered him a bone, and he took the job with a patriotic flair.
Swallowing the letters was the easy part, but he had cramps in enemy territory. Their dirt was unlike the dirt from home, and when he shoved it into his mouth he rolled over in pain and immediately shat himself. That was how the enemy found him, digging through his own waste and trying to shove the letters back down. They laughed and took him to their General, and because Tarrare was a coward who offered state secrets for bread, the General rolled his eyes, aimed his rifle at him and pretended to fire until Tarrare cried.
“Go back home,” this General told him. “And don’t get involved in matters that don’t concern you.”
And so Tarrare returned, hungry and failing to live up to the goals of his nation, which he was not quite sure what they were setting out to accomplish, but he felt proud of it all the same. At least the dirt at home didn’t make him sick. He returned to his General with his head low.
“It’s a shame,” said the General, clipping off the ends of his fingernails until they were blunt points. “I knew you were talented, but a man of one talent is not much of a man at all, is he?”
Then Tarrare began to weep, and the General sighed. “Now, now. No reason to be sad about it. Not all of us can be fully formed men—why, that would make for a very sorry world indeed. No conflict, no confusion, no oddities. And you are an oddity. You should embrace that.”
The General was overcome by his own magnanimity and thought he might share this later with his wife, and definitely his mistress, so that they too could know what sort of man he was. Then he noticed that Tarrare was popping the nail clippings into his mouth and decided that it was a bit all too much and sent him to hospital.
The nurses were kind to him. They saw a poor hungry thing and gave him their lunches and bathed all the dirt from his body. They turned their heads away when he lapped up the bathwater, and gently scolded him when he tried to chew on the bathtub. They assigned him to Dr. Boyle, who was the expert on all mad things. The doctor took one look at him, took a longer look at his pen as it disappeared down Tarrare’s throat, and then an even longer look at Tarrare’s feces, which appeared normal.
“Remarkable,” he said.
Tarrare shook his head. “I don’t want to be like this. I just want to be normal.”
“I’ll do my best to help you,” Dr. Boyle said.
Dr. Boyle decided on an extreme form of treatment: starve the man until his appetite corrected itself. Dr. Boyle locked him in a room and only put water through the door, and no matter how much Tarrare cried and how much he howled, the nurses were under strict orders not to let him out, but every time they passed by the door they had to put their hands to their eyes, lest they create their own water for him. When Dr. Boyle checked on him later, Tarrare was little but skin and bones.
“Now that the madness is starved out, we’ll put you on a proper diet.”
They fed him three practical meals of fruit and honey, soft boiled eggs, bread and cheese and a vegetable soup, and a little salad with a pastry for dessert. These he ate with all the manners he had garnered from watching others consume, and they all applauded his recovery. Never mind that at night the nurses found him sucking on the wounds of old Mr. Abel, who had sores from an infection on his right leg. They didn’t like Mr. Abel much, as he was always putting his hands where they shouldn’t be or yelling for better bread. Never mind that once they found Tarrare drinking blood from the collection vials, because it was just a little liquid, and recovery is a process, not instantaneous. Never mind that once they found him chewing on an arm in the morgue—the arm was dead and couldn’t feel anymore anyway. As long as there were long sleeves at the funeral, who would mind?
But they had to mind when the baby went missing. Mrs. Lamar was inconsolable after her child disappeared from the nursery. Wasn’t it enough that she had suffered to push it out and then to have the hospital lose it? It was all a bit too much. The nurses scrambled and checked every corner that they could but found no trace of the babe, until one of them found a rattle in Tarrare’s stool and beat him with it.
“How could you!” she cried. “A baby is an ange
l and has done nothing to deserve your cruelty, you selfish man.”
Tarrare denied ever being cruel but said he was so hungry he didn’t even know what he was eating anymore, only that he felt he had a great hole inside of him that he had to keep filling and filling and filling up, and nothing ever seemed to make his want fade. How could anyone know what it was like to never be satisfied, to have people talk of being full, of being in a state when there was nothing more they desired to taste, even for a moment? How could they understand, when inside him he felt only a great emptiness, a gulf that stretched from his core and seemed to swallow all of him, and no thing on earth could plug it, not rocks nor bread nor even the gentle caress of a woman. He was a great mystery to himself, and he had no idea how to solve it.
“Get out,” she said, beating him again for good measure. “I hope someone eats you. See how you like it.”
And so poor Tarrare found himself all alone on the streets again. He made well enough for a time eating rocks and flowers, but no book he encountered (before he swallowed each page) had any answers for him, and no wise man or woman could tell him what he could eat to sate, and they were furious when he chewed the hems of their robes. He then did the only decent thing he could think of to do. He put up a sign that said, “Free Meal to a Hungry Mouth” and laid down beside it. Eventually, he hoped, someone would come across it and swallow him whole, and then perhaps he would know satisfaction.
For Tarrare, satisfaction did not come. He died there, finally ending his hunger, and soon even his little sign abandoned him, blown away in a particularly strong gust. His body was taken to the hospital for dissection, and Dr. Boyd was particularly pleased, for cutting him open had been his first inclination for curing, though he knew the procedure had a small chance of survival. Now he could do as he pleased, and he chopped Tarrare in two to see what was wrong. At first, he noticed the man’s throat was a bit larger than it should be, and his lungs a bit too heavy, though that did not explain much. Yet, where the stomach should be, there was only a great emptiness: not that it was missing, but that it was never there at all. Curious, Dr. Boyd stuck his finger into that emptiness, and it gulped and gargled and swallowed the good doctor whole.
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