Legend of the Vanishing Body

She looked down but couldn’t see her feet. They’d both been swallowed up. She tried to move her toes but there were no toes there to answer anymore.

She was a little sad: she’d been fond of her feet, and people had admired them. Slim, graceful feet with high arches and long toes, whose nails she loved to paint in startling crimsons and vibrant pinks. Her ankles, and with them her gold ankle chain vanished too.

Her calves went next, and then little by little her kneecaps. She’d never really liked them. Alien, knobbly things, strangely at variance with the feminine curves of her legs. Still, she supposed that they had been necessary.

Her thighs began to vanish, but she felt no pain at all - or perhaps just a very slight tickle. And then the part of herself that she’d once thought the most precious and important. The part that she had confused with her heart, and blamed for all the troubles it led her into. Perhaps it was better that it was gone.

Her stomach, recalcitrantly rounded despite the odd attempt to bully it into shape with punishing sit-ups, went too. She wouldn‘t miss it.

But as her body slipped from her, she felt a pang of sadness for her breasts. Although they wouldn’t pass the pencil test now, she loved their warmth and softness, the shy pink nipples and the rosy circles around them. She cupped them for one last time feeling their weight like ripened fruit in the market, before they too slipped away from her. It didn’t do to become too attached to body parts.

Her fingers vanished too, the ink stains and the two rings from her husband with them and the length of her freckled arms. The shoulders too were finally gone.

And then the nothingness rose towards her head. Her neck was swallowed up and with it all the tension that it held.

But whatever force had made her disappear in the first place had spent itself by now. Her head refused to follow the rest, and floated stubbornly above the ground where her body would have supported it.

She closed her eyes, and there behind her lids, she saw a complete world. Mountains, rivers, meadows and trees. There was bright sun, but no shadows where a fear could hide. And when she looked really closely, there was her headless body bathing in a clear mountain stream. Her hand waved to her as if to say, come on in, it’s fine. Then it lifted a rock to show her all the tiny stories hiding beneath. They shone with all the colours of the rainbow as the sun caught them. Some darted away in the water. Others floated up into the air. Another lay quietly curled in the palm of her hand.

She breathed deeply, and as the air flowed into her nostrils, she followed it inside, realising at last that the way into your deepest soul is a trick of turning yourself inside out.