Lucene. 
Lucene had fat ankles. No, that’s wrong. To say she had fat ankles implies she had ankles at all. She didn’t. Her legs ended in feet. Lucene first realized she had no ankles when she was small, and read Anne of Green Gables. Anne had nice ankles. All of the heroines in L.M. Montgomery’s novels had nice ankles, come to think of it. They were usually commented on in the first chapter, and by a knight in shining armor. Lucene sighed, and despaired of ever finding someone to love her and her non-existent ankles. She was more influenced by Lucy Maud than she knew. In all of the many books she read, when ankles were mentioned at all, they were always slender, aristocratic, with fine bones and high insteps thrown in for good measure. When she grew up and read other, more mature things, there it was again. Now fat ankles loomed at her from every page. Only awful people had lumpy ankles, and usually frizzy hair to boot. Lucene had beautiful hair, and she wasn’t an awful person. She was quite nice, actually. The injustice of it all made her sadly rage against those oft-mentioned slender bones, and the perversity that said you could only be beautiful and nice if you had them.
Lucene traveled every day to a job she hated, her non-ankles crossed beneath her as she rode. Secretly she wanted to be a writer. In all the pictures of authors in the backs of her novels, she had never once seen a shot that included ankles. Lucene found this deeply incouraging. She supposed there were some advantages to not having ankles. She had no bones down there to wack on table legs or be bitten by small dogs. She imagined that could be most painful. And her cat, Persus, didn’t seem to mind the lack of appendages, curling her fluffy tail around and bumping her head against Lucene’s leg-feet as she cried to be fed. But still, Lucene was always faintly sad. She wore thick socks and long pants, boots when she found ones that fit her legs. But she knew they weren’t there. She knew they weren’t there.
Copyright 2005 mrsatroxi.