![]() ![]() ![]() How, after all, is one supposed to have faith in something that claims to protect you if it chooses to withhold information of a potentially dangerous breach? It is a feature of broader mistrust, this sense that our physical bodies cannot be relied upon if they will keep secrets from us. ![]() ![]() We are made to understand that the body, unchecked, will happily go about its business, playing host to things that ought not to be there. In both cases, the image unfolds from the fact of the body as site, or even as habitat, and a markedly opaque entity in either instance. It is an image which informed a fleeting passage in my own novel, Our Wives Under The Sea (2022): a scene in which two characters read a newspaper report about a woman who eats improperly prepared seafood and unwittingly winds up with a dozen squid paralarvae incubating inside her cheek. When they open him up, however, they instead find a six-inch fir tree embedded and growing inside his left lung. In Alexandra Kleeman’s 2015 novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, we are presented with the image of a man who, coughing up blood, is suspected of having cancer when an X-ray shows a spreading, rag-edged shadow on his chest. ![]()
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