Her arm rests at her feet on the platform. She wears the remains of tiny leather boots. She is naked except for her boots. For a hundred years she wore a Russian dancer’s dress. Like dolls, she and her child were embalmed and stuffed. Stuffing kept their hirsute bodies lifelike. Her child, a boy, lived thirty-five hours. She died four days later. Four-feet-six, a marvelous hybrid of human and Orang Outan. Her skin is tea-colored, parchmentlike, mostly hairless now. There is still some hair on her forehead, patches of beard on her cheeks. The side of her face is torn and a glass eye is missing. Her child is missing. Vandals ripped open her dress and broke her baby’s jaw, snapped off his arms, and pried up the nails that fixed his feet to a pedestal. He was found in a nearby ditch. Soon after, he was eaten by mice.

Noria Jablonski author of the story collection Human Oddities, grew up in a commune in Petaluma, California—a town once known as the “Egg Basket of the World.” She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She currently lives in Northern California, where she is at work on a novel.

Human Oddities

Human Oddities : Stories by Noria Jablonski