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[[<img src="file:/Users/callieingram/Documents/Twine/Stories/imgs/patchwork/her.jpg">->title page]]

<center>(text-colour:red)[##P A T C H W O R K   G I R L ;] OR, (text-colour:red)[###A   M O D E R N   M O N S T E R] (text-colour:red)[________________] (text-size:0.9)[''BY MARY/SHELLEY, & HERSELF''] a [[graveyard->hercut4]], a [[journal->hercut2]], a [[quilt->hercut]], a [[story->hercut3]], & [[broken accents->phrenology]] ________________________ ([[sources]])

[[<img src="file:/Users/callieingram/Documents/Twine/Stories/imgs/patchwork/hercut4.jpg">->graveyard]]

[[<img src="file:/Users/callieingram/Documents/Twine/Stories/imgs/patchwork/hercut2.jpg">->my walk]]

[[<img src="file:/Users/callieingram/Documents/Twine/Stories/imgs/patchwork/hercut.jpg">->scrap bag]]

{=At certain places in this web I have lapsed without notice into another's voice, into direct quote or fudged restatement. My subject matter seemed to call for this very unceremonious appropriation. Those with a stronger sense of personal property may wish to know who is speaking when. Mary's journal is entirely apocryphal. The plea of a bygone monster (and the scientist's replies and recollections) are excised, with selective deletions, from Mary Shelley's own Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818 (mine is the Penguin edition, 1985). This book is linked to my web in other, more implicit ways, and though it is not necessary to read Frankenstein in order to read Patchwork Girl, Mary Shelley's work may enrich mine. "Interrupting Derrida" is an interrupted quote from Jacques Derrida's Disseminations; translated by Barbara Johnson. In its original context it concerns Plato's opinions on written as opposed to spoken language. "Mosaic Girls" is loosely quoted from Female Strategies, by Evelyn Shaw and Joan Darling (Simon and Schuster, 1985). Information on medieval speculations about the resurrection of the body is from Carolyn Walker Bynum's Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (Zone Books, 1991), where I also found the quote from Saint John the Dismembered. Facts concerning modern biology's understanding of the multiple nature of the living organism are taken from a book leafed through in a bookstore, title and author unknown. Information on the coincidence of quilting and early feminism is taken from an essay by Elaine Showalter called "Piecing and Writing", included in the book Poetics of Gender, edited by Nancy K. Miller (Columbia University Press, 1986). A much-quoted book is Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, by Barbara Maria Stafford (MIT 1991). Rather than annex the entire book to my web, I recommend you buy a copy for yourself. The "quilt" section of my web is made up entirely of quotes from other sources, pieced together in an intuitive, crazy-quilt style. Rather than using footnotes to indicate the sources for individual quotes, I am here listing my sources: L. Frank Baum,The Patchwork Girl of Oz, first published in 1913. Mine is the Ballantine edition. Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce, John B. Smith, and Mark Bernstein, Getting Started with Storyspace (Eastgate Systems, 1990-1993). Helene Cixous, "Coming to Writing" from "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays, translated by Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle, and Susan Sellers (Harvard University Press, 1991). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Elle Magazine (author and issue unknown). Donna J. Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991). Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, translated by R.C. Latham, as quoted in "The Chimera Herself", by Ginevra Bompiani, from Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One , edited by Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaf and Nadia Tazi (Zone Books, 1989). Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minnesota, 1984, 15 Hillel Schwartz, "Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century," included in Incorporations , edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (Zone Books,1992). Mary Shelley, Frankenstein,or, The Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818 (mine is the Penguin edition, edited by Maurice Hindle, 1985). Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (MIT Press, 1991). Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies Vol. 1: Women Floods Bodies History , trans. by Stephen Conway, in collaboration with Erica Carter and Chris Turner (University of Minnesota, 1987).

[[<img src="file:/Users/callieingram/Documents/Twine/Stories/imgs/patchwork/hercut3.jpg">->I am]]

[[I am buried here. You can resurrect me, but only piecemeal. If you want to see the whole, you will have to sew me together yourself.->headstone]]

<center> (text-size:1.5)[Here Lies a [[Head->head]], [[Trunk->trunk]], Arms ([[Right->right arm]] and [[Left->left arm]]), and Legs ([[Right->right leg]] and [[Left->left leg]]) as well as divers [[Organs->organs]] appropriately Disposed. May they Rest in Piece.] (click-goto:?page,"out")

My skull is like an ancient vase scratched from the dust with toothpicks and paintbrushes and reassembled on a desk: there are fragments enough to make a vase, but how many vases shattered for this one? An archeologist made a pot, that's all we know.Sometimes when it's quiet I hear in my ears the roaring of a crowd. (click-goto:?page,"eyeballs") (after:1s)[(open-url:"file:/Users/callieingram/Documents/Twine/Stories/imgs/patchwork/head.jpg")]

My trunk belonged to a dancer, Angela, a woman of low birth but high sights, and a mimic ear for the accents of the upper class. Cunning, she had her own advancement always in view, except when she danced and her body tossed with an abandonment that was her greatest attraction. She knew this but did not understand it: offstage her efforts to control her posture, her movements were fervent ("I shake my hindquarters like a little dog, and arch my back like a cock crowing over his chickens," she complained to a fellow dancer), for she saw rightly that the language of the body also has its accents, low and high.My body is both insinuating and naive: moments of knowingness—of art manipulative and interested—punctuate my abandonment, and knowingness opens into chaos. (click-goto:?page,"left breast") (after:1s)[(open-url:"file:/Users/callieingram/Documents/Twine/Stories/imgs/patchwork/trunk.jpg")]

(link-rerun:"My right arm")[(open-url:"file:/Users/callieingram/Documents/Twine/Stories/imgs/patchwork/rightarm.jpg")] has two parts: the upper belonged to Tristessa, a woman known in the ship-yards for her deadly aim with a bottle—at stray dog or man, for she let fly at the one with as little or as much cause as she trounced the other. Indeed, she claimed to see no great distinction between the two: "You're neither of you safe to pet but in captivity, and there you're naught but a middling bed warmth, a gaping maw, and the bugs you bring home in your pelt." Followed a crash and the scatter of bright fragments. Yet she never lacked for company. It was rumored she had a dog of her own, but she kept it well hid, and as for the other, if you're asking, you'd do well to duck.The lower part was Eleanor's, a lady very dextrous with the accoutrements of femininity. She wielded a fan like a weapon, unfurling and snapping it shut with militant flirtatiousness. She swung a calf's weight in whalebone, metal hoop, linen and lace around her frame with no appearance of strain, and could hold a smile like a trapeze artist who swings by the teeth. The crook of her little [[finger->mementos]] as she cut her meat would silence a table. She liked her solitude, and had won it with the techniques of a perfect sociability.One part of me hurls weapons for a welcome. One part uses welcome as a weapon. On one thing they agree: when I look friendly, take care. (click-goto:?page,"headstone")

[[<img src="file:/Users/callieingram/Documents/Twine/Stories/imgs/patchwork/leftarm.jpg">->hands]]

My right leg belonged to Jennifer, who buried herself in layers of petticoats, flounces and furbelows. It took hours to lace her up in the morning. Gossips called her vain. In fact, she was hiding. Something growled in her dreams, shook her sleeping frame; she woke up in wet and snarled sheets with bits of feathers stuck to her cheek. It was only bound in laces and tight bodices that she dared go down to breakfast; unbound, she might tear all to shreds. She conversed over weak tea and stuck the tines of a fork through twenty layers of petticoats into her restless thigh; I bear the mark. She lived a mild, exemplary, and unwed life, and woke up every morning exultant and sweating, having won her loved ones another day safe from the beast.As for me, the beast dreams placid dreams: Jennifer needs her rest. (click-goto:?page,"foot") (after:1s)[(open-url:"file:/Users/callieingram/Documents/Twine/Stories/imgs/patchwork/rightleg.jpg")]

My (link-rerun:"left leg")[(open-url:"file:/Users/callieingram/Documents/Twine/Stories/imgs/patchwork/leftleg.jpg")] belonged to Jane, a nanny who harbored under her durable grey dresses and sensible undergarments a remembrance of a less sensible time: a tattoo of a ship and the legend, Come Back To Me. Nanny knew some stories that astonished her charges, and though the ship on her thigh blurred and grew faint and blue with distance, until it seemed that the currents must have long ago finished their work, undoing its planks one by one with unfailing patience, she always took the children to the wharf when word came that a ship was docking, and many a sailor greeted her by name. My leg is always twitching, jumping, joggling. It wants to go places. It has had enough of waiting. (click-goto:?page,"headstone")

(text-size:1.5)[This Urn guards a [[Heart->heart]], a [[Liver->liver]], [[Lungs->lung]], [[Stomach->stomach]], [[Guts->guts]], and [[Veins->veins]].]

Double-click this passage to edit it.

My hands are a cabal. A twitching finger, and I suspect my hands of thievery (Dominique, ambidextrous pickpocket, had already lost her right hand to punitive justice but later extracted a silk purse from the judge with her left.) The callous on the middle finger of my right bespeaks scholarship (a renowned essayist had an unknown collaborator: Livia, his wife, who wrote his books as well as dusted them.) One of my fingers is comfortable enough with a needle, another seems easier on the handle of a knife. (click-goto:?page,"headstone")

My eyeballs are wondrously firm and spherical, my vision clear and sharp, my gaze calmly speculative. I can peruse with equal clarity the finest of print and the faint script of smoke from a distant chimney; I owe this to Tituba, who loved to read. Born crippled, what else could she do? In her room at the top of her father's house on high ground at the head of a valley she pored over volumes of history, law, literature, and medicine, but shuffled among the pages as many careful readings of the scene outside her window. She knew who visited whom and surmised why and waited while other carriages, horses and foot travel printed other plot lines in the thick mud for her expectations to find fulfillment in the figure of a priest, and none too soon, because the dresses hung on the line outside the blue cottage were ever more capacious, and at the foot of the valley where the road forked she thought she saw the lead horse (a chestnut mare) of the doctor's team emerging from the mist.In her old age, she penned a history of the village, which astonished all; for what could a poor invalid, confined to a chair, know of their doings? (click-goto:?page,"lips")

They say they have proven in tests that if subjects are instructed to consciously contract certain facial muscles (notably risorius, a ring-shaped muscle that surrounds the mouth) until any onlooker would call them happy, they experience a corresponding lift in mood. If they frown, they feel sad.Margaret laughed so freely, shoulders shaking, stomach heaving, saliva bright on her lips, that the townspeople frowned on her. Caring for her aging father and her idiot brother as she did, tending her neglected garden when she could to coax forth its meager yield of cabbages and yams, what cause did she have for laughter? When a baby came and people whispered that her brother had to do with it, they waited for her smile to fade; it didn't. The baby came out screaming with laughter and even the midwife had to smile.I wake up laughing from a sound sleep and giggle when I'm solemn or irate, which damages my dignity; I laugh at pain, not because I'm strong, but because it's funny. My lips always get the joke. A little later, so do I. (click-goto:?page,"tongue")

My tongue belonged to Susannah, who talked more than she ate, and ate more than the baker and butcher combined. A mountainous woman, a scandal, dubiously housed with a succession of more retiring lady sponsors. At the pub she bartered talk for food and drink and you may adduce she did well enough by the fact, vouched for by the seamstress, that while her waistband was occasionally let out, it was never taken in.Pour her a pint and she'd talk all night. Her tongue (my tongue) stirred up a rich and fishy stew of folly, poetry, gossip, heresy, and the news, and she mixed up the real and the imagined, so you never knew where you stood with her and might imagine a dream to be the veritable state of things, and the reliable latest from Milan (gleaned from a gypsy tinker who overheard it from a working lady who got it off her gentleman visitor) to be a feckless fantasy. Stuck in the stocks for drunken licentiousness, she soliloquized all night and crowed the town awake at dawn, the most arrogant cock in the square.The insomniac girl-child of a well-to-do couple on vacation wrote down Susannah's words and made a wicked poem of them. The poem, published under a masculine pseudonym, became the talk of the continent, enthusiastically quoted and passed round by the young men in her set. They whisked the familiar pages out of sight when she approached, as unfit for the eyes of a lady. (click-goto:?page,"ears")

Flora's promising ears, which were large, lightly furred, saucer- shaped, and almost ornate with cartilaginous flourishes, might as well have been duds, for nothing they admitted between the ages of zero and twenty-five impressed on Flora an iota of wit or fancy. From a coddled, plump, quiescent child, to a young lady thick-waisted and reticent, to an idle wife, nearly mute, she passed without incident.In her twenty-sixth year she overheard a word or three, passed from the parlor-maid to the butler in hushed tones. The substance of the secret was not extraordinary, but Flora remembered it. She mulled it over as she nibbled on sugared violets and tinkled on the pianoforte. Somewhere between her ears she secreted a tiny parlor maid in cap and apron, her tiny hands busy with—what was it? a letter? and the addressee? a name she recognized? and who was that, knocking? on a tiny door, erected for the occasion, which though it lacked hinges, sported an enormous keyhole?—She didn't know. And so she hiked up her skirts and prowled on the stairs until she had her answers, but with them more questions, which took her to the marketplace, and from there to the bakery, and as the secrets tatted in her mind—(a pined for b who was trying to extricate himself from c who hated d who was the illegitimate child of e who owed money to f who had done an illegal favor for g whose unnatural inclinations she hid from h who was servicing i while taking money from j who had flown into a public rage at k whose ailing mother l had begged a bowl of rice from m who loved n with a passion deep and pure, while n loved the piano tuner o whose rich aunt would only marry him off to her vintner p who was making a tidy profit selling off the lady's presents to q whose business was only a front for his dealings with r, a scoundrel redeemed only by his affection for his simpleminded cousin s who had been embarrassed by t who backed out of the duel and persuaded his drinking companion u to put up the money to take the girl to v who was known to have dealings in the black arts but was protected by the patronage of w a rich lord for whom she had once done a priceless favor, rumored to have to do with the death of x, a rival of his half-brother y for z, who only had eyes, however, for the parlormaid)—her mind grew to accommodate it. The villagers, at first uneasy, lost their fear of the girl with the neat hair and big ears when they realized that what she heard she didn't tell. In time they took care to drop hints of their weddings and beddings in her vicinity; they felt more alive knowing someone was listening. (click-goto:?page,"nose")

My nose, large-nostrilled and discerning, would have been a mountain on any smaller face. Geneva, a woman of otherwise normal proportions, developed a pointed wit to match this Alpenhorn, and found it useful in turning away the unfriendly and the short-sighted. Her nose, possessing equal measures of logic and art, steered her to sublime creations in the kitchen of her roadhouse, and her lifelong companion Margaret found its fleshy knob both sturdy and inquisitive.If I follow my nose, as one is from time to time advised to do, I find myself in some rather tight situations. (click-goto:?page,"teeth")

My molars belonged to Judith, born the only child of a physician who loved her with all his heart and too much invention; a large woman and calm, who gave her hair one hundred strokes a night and chewed her food with scientific method: so many on one side, so many the other, and if aught remains in the mouth, swallow it and be damned. Her hands were as clean as her house and that was scrubbed 'til the grain of the wood stood out. She washed the cow and the goat; she would have washed her yard down to bedrock, if the neighbors had not complained that she was turning good grazing land into a slough. When the city took her to the asylum, they claimed her house for a hospital, and some said they had turned her craziness to good ends, and others that they had used her shamelessly.She died with good teeth, the front ones a bit chipped. I got my incisors from Walter, who was fond of pudding. (click-goto:?page,"headstone")

Charlotte's nipple was pink and long, like a crayon. Charlotte nursed eight children, buried six, and felt each loss in her swollen breasts. She squirted the extra milk on her dying babies, rubbed it into their laboring chests. She visited the graveyard, squeezed her breasts over the small hummocks, so little white beads hung in the grass. She filled a quill-pen at her nipple and wrote invisible letters to the dead babies. Then she held a match under the page and watched her words come back.When I write my left breast sometimes dribbles the milk of invisible children. (click-goto:?page,"right breast")

Aspasia could outrun the gypsy boys, throw an acorn farther than the smith's son, ride the neighbor's bull calf, plan a war council, and build a hideout in the woodpile. Her body betrayed her with breasts at twelve. Strange counterweights, pendulous superfluities, they bounced and jiggled, and hurt when she jumped. She had to run with one arm pressed to her chest. She stood with her shoulders hunched. Later, she allowed her breasts to be caressed, and acquired a reputation as a loose woman, which amused her. Her breasts adventured, true. But Aspasia, their ironic host, reclined unmoved.Her breast is at home on my chest, without regrets. I own it as one might own a solitary cat, that doesn't care whose lap it occupies, so long as its bowl is full. There is no nostalgia in its tilt. (click-goto:?page,"headstone")

My heart belonged to Agatha. |heartgoto)[(click-goto:?page,"liver")](show:?heartgoto) (if:(history: where its name contains "heart")'s length is >= 1)+(if:(history: where its name contains "liver")'s length is >= 1)+(if:(history: where its name contains "stomach")'s length is >= 1)+(if:(history: where its name contains "lung")'s length is >= 1)+(if:(history: where its name contains "guts")'s length is >= 1)+(if:(history: where its name contains "veins")'s length is >= 1)[(replace: ?heartgoto)[(click-goto:?page,"organs")](rerun: ?heartgoto)]

I have a man's liver: Roderick's. Sturdy but disinclined to sport, of keen intellect but no patience for the intricacies of scholarship, he scandalized his high-born parents by going into business, where his taste for sumptuous fabrics and lace established him and his partner at the forefront of the imports market; he could easily have afforded to build his own house in town, so why, asked the townspeople, did he choose until the end of his days to occupy a small (though elegant) apartment in his partner's country home outside town?My liver is modest, efficient, shapely, and affectionate. (click-goto:?page,"stomach")

I possess the capacious lungs of mountain-bred Thomasina, who ran with the goats in the high Alps until a travelling gaffer with a billy's beard and stout money-bags bought her from her father and took her to polish his silver in a wood-panelled home in the valley, where she found a certain pleasure in scaling the steep roof on dark nights until a loose shingle brought about her first fall ever, and her last.My lungs extract the oxygen from my surroundings so deftly and secretly that in a closed space beside me you may grow dizzy, as though you were looking down from a great height. (click-goto:?page,"guts")

My stomach belonged to Bella, an oblate simpleton. She was never dyspeptic, though she ate everything. Eating was her thinking, it was lovemaking, family, and job. The townspeople accounted it prayer to feed her, worth a blessing from the priest who gave her a bed and a broom to push around, and some said the crops grew better when Bella was fed, because they felt appreciated. When a young fellow, pronounced a ne'er-do-well by his fellow revelers at the tavern, was found crushed by an enormous weight, the townspeople tried Bella for murder. Bella, uninterested, nibbled on figs. Awaiting execution, Bella feasted on bread, pears, and sweet cheese, passed in parcels through the bars. Bella in the cart on the way to the gallows ate oranges and apples, spitting seeds in the air.Bella in the ground germinated a garden. An apple, an orange, a pear and a fig tree grew intertwined from the mound. I belch the sweet smell of an orchard in summer. (click-goto:?page,"lung")

My guts are notable for their smooth flexion and mature restraint. They contract rhythmically in rings that travel down the length of them with serenely constant velocity. They belonged once to a woman of regular diet and attention to detail, a woman with a certain power and plenty of clean linen, a woman with keys at her waist: Mistress Anne, who found time in her busy schedule as head of the maidservants of a large manor to study the Natural Sciences and Alchemy in the privacy of the privy, while evacuating her bowels with exemplary thoroughness.Unfortunately, the latter part of my intestines was taken from a cow; Mistress Anne's intestines while flexible could not stretch to fit my great stature, and so a graft was called for. This Bossy was a solemn character who deliberated over problems at length, yet threw up her tail with vigorous joy when she came to a decision; thus, my bowel habits have always suffered from a bottle-neck effect at the lower extremity of that organ, and I must ever keep a bathroom in view, or suffer an embarrassment that is the more extreme because Mistress Anne cannot refrain from taking the blame for accidents, and spends long hours in pained puzzlement over the failure of her precautions, for her most fastidious efforts fall short of preventing an explosive outcome. (click-goto:?page,"veins")

My veins belonged to a quiet and malleable young woman named Helen. She left a legacy of veins that never contract in rage or tension; her open nature admits the cadenced torrent of my blood without constriction or complaint. Her father loved to see her heavy eyelids lowered, her long and placid face bent over the spinning wheel. It was his sorrow that the thread she spun was easily broken, full of burrs, knots, and other imperfections. (click-goto:?page,"heart")

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My foot belonged to Bronwyn, who had extraordinary balance. Modest Bronwyn never said a word on her own behalf, but kept what she had; when pushed, gentle Bronwyn never budged. She outlived her immediate family, held the house and grounds for herself against a torrent of creditors, suitors, and poor relations.My foot drags a little in walking, but excels in standing still. (click-goto:?page,"headstone")

Yesterday, I went for a walk down the lane that branches off at the holly tree from the main road. The day was gray, and a constant moisture hung in the air, agitating occasionally into a light rain. The sun, if I may give that name to a light so stripped of warmth, so pale and abstract that it seemed more a passing and careless allusion to the possibility of light than its manifestation, played fitfully in the upper reaches of the cloud bank that hung overhead. There, through threadbare patches in the counterpane of gray that hung over the landscape, I could see its invalid fingers despondently toying with those vaporous growths and monstrous births. The light, or its argument, did not touch me below.I made my way with some difficulty on the roadside grass, which was matted and disheveled from other foot traffic, as the road itself was a slough of deep and sticky mud, deceptively smooth save for the pockmarks of vanished bubbles on its face. There was a pleasing warmth in my thighs, which had to work to trample a way over the uneven terrain, but I noted with concern a touch of catarrh in my throat, and placed my chill and reddened fingers over my mouth in a vain attempt to warm the air as I drew it in.The hem of my green dress was stiff with mud the maid has not completely succeeded in removing (as I write this, she is muttering over the washtub; the water is bitterly cold and must be frequently changed) and the occasional smut took flight from my boots and appended itself to my cheek. I was as far as the little stone bridge and debating whether to turn back or cross and continue on that small perhaps firmer trail to the crossroads, where with luck I might beseech a ride of a farmer returning from town, when I saw on the far side of the span a sight that made me stop ankle-deep in mud and stare. (click-goto:?page,"sight")

It was my monster, stark naked, standing as still as if I had not yet breathed life into her massive frame, and waiting for me. She held in one hand a scrap of cloth I recognized, all that was left of the clothes I had thrust upon her when she fled me shortly after her conception; the rest she had lost or cast aside. I could not help but quail before the strangeness of this figure, from which, I fancifully imagined, the very blades of grass seemed to shrink, but curiosity, compassion, and a kind of fellow feeling was the stronger impulse, and I forced myself to continue. <center>[[written]] | [[sewn]]

I had made her, writing deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black letters blurred into stitches and I began to feel that I was sewing a great quilt, as the old women in town do night after night, looking dolefully out their windows from time to time toward the light in my own window and imagining my sins while their thighs tremble under the heavy body of the quilt heaped across their laps, and their strokes grow quicker than machinery and tight enough to score deep creases in the cloth. I have looked with reciprocal coolness their way, not wondering what stories joined the fragments in their workbaskets. (click-goto:?page,"she stood")

I had sewn her, stitching deep into the night by candlelight, until the tiny black stitches wavered into script and I began to feel that I was writing, that this creature I was assembling was a brash attempt to achieve by artificial means the unity of a life-form—a unity perhaps more rightfully given, not made; continuous, not interrupted; and subject to divine truth, not the will to expression of its prideful author. //Authoress//, I amend, smiling. (click-goto:?page,"she stood")

I approached her slowly over the small stone bridge.She trembled slightly, and her left leg jerked as if it would flee alone if need be, but she held her ground. She was stark naked. I noticed what I could not have seen in the dim light of my laboratory, that the various sectors of her skin were different hues and textures, no match perfect. Here a coarser texture confused the ruddy hue of blood near under the skin, there smooth skin betrayed a jaundiced undertone, there a dense coat of fine hairs palely caught the light. Warm brown neighbored blue-veined ivory.I thought of the tree that stands by the house. I have often noticed that a length of cloth however richly dyed cannot match the beauty or sustain the interest of Autumn foliage. I believe it is because the myriad differing hues, while tending toward the self-same yellow one can achieve with a broth of turmeric, say, or onion skins, creates a disturbance of other colors around the root color: a penumbra, a kind of three-dimensionality of color.In this same way she was beautiful. (click-goto:?page,"meeting")

I do not know what I expected. Our parting had been ambiguous in its tone. I felt variegated emotions churning in my breast: tenderness, repugnance, fear, and profound responsibility, both anxious and prideful. I had not expected what came to pass, that she would turn with a diplomat's ease and gesture to me to continue at her side, herself taking the muddier route down the center of the trail and leaving rough footprints the size of basins to astonish my fellow citizens. (click-goto:?page,"appetite")

She has been continuously by my side for several days. I find her appetite enormous, for food and for experience; it surpasses mine, and so I (would-be parent) find my child leading me in pursuit of the pleasures of knowledge and the knowledge of pleasures I had not imagined.She is moody, and quieter than I, but has spurts of energy in which it seems she will bring down trees, shake fence-posts out of their holes, startle badgers from their dens with her stamping, her hallooing, her jumping and laughing. Her enthusiasm for life shames me. With what timorousness do I lift my skirts above my knees and inch my way across the log she rolled over the stream, &nbsp a teacup torrent that would stain my stockings if allowed to do &nbsp its worst.I find that I am good at it! The log holds, my balance is good, my grip on the rough bark sure enough though my shod feet are not as agile as her bare toes. My legs are strong, if shockingly white under an Autumn sky, and compared to her motley. For despite the cold, she will not keep her clothes for long; romping like a hoydenish child of overgrown proportions she tears the confining garments from her form, baring her scarred and rag-tag flesh. She makes a mockery of my parsimony, for middling seamstress that I am I saved my fine stitchery for her face and hands, imagining that I would find in her a modesty to match her maker's.She does not resemble me. &nbsp But then I begin to wonder if I still resemble myself. (click-goto:?page,"learn")

She wants to learn, but I cannot fathom how to teach her, for her eyes slip sideways from every presented view and her varicolored fingers twitch discontentedly as if attempting to grasp a Will-o'-the-Wisp by a firm and vertebrate neck and wring its secrets from it. She will ask [[one question, then another->hop]], and before long we will be discussing blackberry preserves, sorcery, or Homeric odes, with a merry disregard for relevance—or perhaps because to her these things are all equally pertinent. I despair of treating any one subject adequately, unless it be by crossing it enough times in our peregrinations that our overlaid footprints begin to cover the whole, just as in those drawings in which the sitter's features are limned by minute perturbations in the course of a single line that shuttles in loom-weaver's style from side to side of the parchment, filling the frame from top to bottom. The figure is connected by innumerable filaments to its ground, indeed it is one with its surroundings (the reverse is also true), yet not obscured by them.Or, as when as a child I laid a piece of paper over a tombstone, and rubbed a bit of charcoal back and forth, back and forth, until the winged skulls and disconsolate maidens emerged from the fibres as if summoned up from my own bewildered and superstitious soul. (click-goto:?page,"infant")

Double-click this passage to edit it.

She is exuberant, ferocious, loving, unhinged. She is an infant with the strength and wits of a more-than-adult. Scraps of memories blow through her mind like bits of patterned cloth; I watch her face cloud and think I see her grab at the fragment, hold it before her. For a moment delight animates every feature: she KNOWS. In the next moment, the wind tears it from her fingers, and she is staring stubbornly into a whirl of colored pieces, calico, velvet, taffeta, dimity.Rage congests her features, her upper lip draws back so hard the skin whitens and I fear for my needlework, she holds me bent back over a decorative little cliff, yet high enough to break me; then she dandles me in thin air, laughing so gaily I know she does not remember her own anger. Pensive, then abrupt; sharp-mannered, then languorously inviting; she changes with each heart-beat, and I change with her. I must. I will be swallowed up else, or crushed, or flung far away.Am I afraid? Terribly; I know this is no sport. Yet subtly I see her gauge herself by me, easing her grip when my face tightens, slowing to watch me pant red-faced behind her up the little knoll Percy loves. I think she will learn to manage herself somehow, to learn a kind of husbandry— strange word!—of her manifold self, though it will not resemble mine. I owe her my guidance, if she will have it.Yet I dissemble. It is more than this. (click-goto:?page,"crave")

I crave her company; I crave even the danger. Do I yearn for the easement of my own company? Do I resent the fierce mad engine that is throbbing inside my serene life, staining my underclothes, creasing my brow, making me jump up restless from Percy's side to go to my writing desk, the window, the bookcase, the door, while he gazes at me in gentle reproach, or speaks to me as a tutor might of the inner peace I clearly lack? Yes, of course I do. You are taking me over, I long to cry, but does one punish the food for the pain in one's empty belly? (click-goto:?page,"I lay")

Last night I lay in her arms, my monster, and for the first time laid my hand on her skin. Her skins, I should rather say, or forgo the possessive altogether. Others had as good a right as she—perhaps better—to call that skin their own. These thoughts trembled in my hand, and yet I did not pull away. Her body was warm. Feverish, I might say, yet knew not what internal thermostat might hold steady and true in that preternaturally robust form.I touched her skin lightly, and yet she trembled, as if my fingers burned her. It surprised, then moved me, that one so strong should be susceptible, should tremble and mist at a touch. If her matter had once belonged to others, yet she had made it hers. It lived to register the passage of her thoughts, her minutest sensations, and it seemed to me that it could never have been so plastic and so alive as under the sway of that formidable intelligence. (click-goto:?page,"shy")

In bed, she was curiously shy, whipping the spread to her chin and refusing to lower it. Perhaps she felt that what was rough or ungainly in her appearance was matched and celebrated in the disorder of Nature, but had no place in a bedchamber. Indeed, she touched my pillows and trinkets with unwonted delicacy, as if she feared to damage them. But it was her scars that seemed to pain her most.Her shyness was matched by my own. I feared her still, and cannot deny I felt a fleeting horror on beholding in intimate quarters the details of her anatomy. (click-goto:?page,"turned")

We turned this way and that, slipping at times into reverie, approaching intimacy and veering away again by mutual and emphatic agreement, feigning slumber and awakening. At last she turned and looked at me and I saw a sort of desperation in her eyes. Here at least she was still my child, and she would not move without a sign from me. (click-goto:?page,"I moved")

I moved my hand then, and touched one of her scars, those prominences that had filled me with such uneasy disgust when I first saw her living body naked. Even those portions which her maker had stitched with a finer hand and a thought to the onlooker, her face and hands, were criss-crossed by the traces of innumerable tucks and gathers and the tiny white flecks where the careful, even stitches had been removed in her monstrous infancy. But long cords of curdled, whitened tissue divided her torso into sectors as distinct as patches in a quilt. (click-goto:?page,"fingertips")

I ran my fingertips along a seam that traversed her flank. It was tough and knobbled, yet slick. And it was hot, not the cold I had anticipated without knowing it. Indeed, it was hotter than the stretches of smooth skin it divided, as I proved by caressing both regions. When I laid my hand flat and still for a moment on her side, the scar was a burning slash across my palm, and I wondered if it hurt her. I was filled with compassion.She seemed to sense a change in me. (click-goto:?page,"weight")

She opened her eyes, which until that moment she had held shut as if trying to listen to something almost inaudible. Her gaze fastened on mine, and at once her embroidered brows drew together and she laid me on my back with one blow of her huge palm.I shook. In that instant I thought that I had been deceived by a carnivore of superhuman cunning, who could play upon others with the skill and ruthlessness of one who had studied within herself the stilled machinery of the most ephemeral human emotions, yet had never felt even a tremor of a flywheel or the flexion of a fan belt. An enormous weight lay upon my chest; it was her hand; I awaited I knew not what. (click-goto:?page,"pity")

"For a moment this grotesque form disclosed its tender interior," she said. She was leaning over me, yet her gaze flickered distractedly over my body and the disordered bedclothes. I could believe that she did not see me at all. "That moment ended, however.""I did not mean to offend you," I said. "I felt for an instant that I knew what it was like to be you, yet not forget myself, and I was filled with wonder.""Say rather, with pity," she said. As her massive chest rose and fell, the cordons of scars that bound it as in a net whitened and then flushed pink once again. "What you pity, stands apart from you. What is close is not pitiful, only what you do not understand, what you hope to cherish from a safe distance." As she spoke, her fingers idly ran in zig-zag traces, in intersecting lines across my chest, and I realized that her anger had not lessened her feeling for me. The trembling under my arms, which had continued without diminution as I passed from desire into fear, sent a violent shudder through my entire body and broke the even flow of my breathing, and as though the disruption, albeit mechanical in nature, had opened a passage to the expression of feeling. A cry broke from my throat and my eyes filled with tears. (click-goto:?page,"cut")

"You're right, I did pity you, but no longer," I said, "because I see that your scars not only mark a cut, they also commemorate a joining.""More than that," she said. "Scar tissue does more than flaunt its strength by chronicling the assaults it has withstood. Scar tissue is new growth. And it is tougher than skin innocent of the blade.""Is it less sensitive?" I asked."In here, I think it is more sensitive," she said, with a gesture that seemed to include both head and breast. Freed, I pressed myself against her. (click-goto:?page,"her, me")

Freed, I pressed myself against her with a ravenous heart. It seemed I was turned inside out by a mechanism hitherto unknown but native to me. I felt a sharp pain in my chest and imagined myself that sea creature she had briefly invoked, flung so far open that I was encased in my own interior and the spines that had been my fortress now pierced me from within.I clung to her with the full extent of my strength and the length of my body, and she returned the embrace. Our hands hunted and probed. We breathed each other's breath. Her scars lay like living things between us, inscribing themselves in my skin. I thought I too was rent and sewn, that I was both multiply estranged and gathered together in a dynamic union.What divided her, divided me. (click-goto:?page,"female trouble")

Percy wonders what is wrong with me; I allude to "feminine complaints" and he delicately withdraws, leaving me growling and hitting the pretty pillows the maid plumps up every quarter hour, by my fretful calculation, and with such a bland and optimistic demeanor that I long to bite and tear at her pillows and greet her calmly in a blizzard of feathers with quills between my teeth! That I do not, I owe to some native instinct for self-preservation. I see her in my morbid imaginings calmly turn, fetch dustpan and broom, and attempt to sweep a maelstrom into a waste-paper basket. I believe at that point I should truly go mad.I wonder where this will take me. I wonder how long she will be with me, for I know she is restless. I too am restless; she makes me so.I wish I had her long strong limbs; I would run up these Alps, as she tells me she does, following the changing light across fields of ice. How quickly now our positions reverse and teacher turns pupil! She has seen things I will never see; she remembers more than I will experience in my whole life. And yet she is hungry for more. I know she will leave me soon.[[I have a crazy wish! I wish that I had cut off a part of me, something Percy would not miss, but something dear to me, and given it to be a part of her. I would live on in her, and she would know me as I know myself.->mary]] I fear this but crave it. I do not know if she would want it. But I could graft myself to that mighty vine. Who knows [[what strange new fruit->title page]] the two of us might bear?

The day was moist and my clothes, to which I had not yet grown accustomed, twisted themselves into itching bands around my ribcage. I jumped up again and again from Mary's tiny writing table, banging my knees, to pluck at the folds and scratch luxuriously underneath my petticoat. Mary waited, her face saintly with annoyance blocked. Though sweat darkened her dress under her arms and between her shoulder blades, she remained composed, portioning out the money and papers that would take me to America and folding them into the envelopes she was neatly labelling.That I was leaving, and that very day, had been settled with few words between us. Mary and I both wished me gone and the anticipated work of grieving began. I was rife with curiosity about the imagined largess of a new continent, and she was sullen in her refusal to speculate with me. Far from sentimental, we were both testy in the knowledge that we would soon be parted; seeing each other still nearby struck us both with an ugly shock, like a foolish anachronism in a novel that makes you distrust the author, and regret the time already invested in a world gone suddenly paper-thin.Mary checked the clock, for it would not do for Percy to come home in the middle of what was next.I have a secret I finger in private moments. (In truth, I am a glut of secrets; in me a congregation has confided its most intimate experiences.) The day I left Mary forever, we performed [[a certain surgery->surgery]].

I concealed myself behind an armoire as the maid handed in a steaming kettle through the half-shut lavatory door, which Mary briskly locked behind her. We laid out wads of cotton and clean torn undergarments, a sharp small knife, and assorted needles on the table under the single high window whose tiny dense panes disclosed (to one of my height) a smeared view of the dark, glossy lake and darker sky. It would rain later, as it had every afternoon that week. A lit candle in a wall sconce augmented the meager daylight.Mary dampened a rag at the mouth of the kettle and applied it to her calf. She let out a faint cry of surprise and pain at the heat of the water, then gamely took up a bar of soap and ran it over the spot; but I saw her blink twice quickly and so I asked her, as I had many times before, if she was resolved. She assented with such a cold look that I clapped my mouth shut and set to sterilizing the needles, holding them in the hollow heart of the candle-flame until their shafts burned between my fingertips. (click-goto:?page,"join")

I held her leg steady as she unblinking scored a circle the size of a farthing in the skin of her calf, then from the perimeter of the circle toward the center slid the blade under the topmost layers of skin, lifting it. I could see the dark metal through her fair skin. "Like detaching a round of pastry dough from a table top," she said, lifting the bloody scrap whole on the tip of the blade and holding it out toward me. I wiped the piece of skin off the blade onto a bit of cotton and set the sharp edge of the knife against the knotty scar that crosses my thigh to meet my groin. We had decided that as my skin did not, strictly speaking, belong to me, the nearest thing to a bit of my flesh would be this scar, a place where disparate things joined in a way that was my own. For her part, she chose a piece of skin Percy would likely never miss, in a place where bandages could be readily explained if they should be discovered.I sliced off a disc of scar tissue the same size as the bit that lay on the pink twist of cotton, and slid it off the point of the knife onto the raw spot on her leg; she took the knife and laid her piece on me.The needlework was her assignment; my big hands are too clumsy for fine stitchery. I swabbed the blood from both our thighs. She was pale but her hands were steady as she joined us. (click-goto:?page,"us")

We wrapped the bloody rags in a towel with a large stone and sank them in the lake. We were cool as we bade each other farewell there on the muddy shore, in a light rain. I do not know what came of that off-shoot of me, if it dried and fell off or lived in its ring of scars. But I am a strong vine. The graft took, the bit of skin is still a living pink, and so I remember when I was Mary, and how I loved a monster, and became one. I bring you [[my story, which is ours->hideous progeny]]. (click-goto:?page,"aftermath")

And now, once again, I bid my [[hideous progeny->why hideous?]] [[go forth and prosper->aftermath]]. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations.

AFTERMATH After Mary and I parted, I became depressed, suffering a kind of post-partum blues in reverse. But the loss of a parent is another sort of pregnancy, a reeling back into oneself of the lines of arrival, giving birth backwards. Mary shrank, and I took her in, I become her repository. It bloated me, the responsibility of carrying that life. For a time I couldn't be much more than a kind of shell for it, drawn on by it, using my resources more to keep it fat and thriving than for my own affairs. Only with time (it was more than nine months) would the parent manikin shrink back down to the size of an embryo. Then I could begin to reabsorb her. When I had digested my mother I bought passage on a ship to America, and at a dressmaker's shop outfitted myself in full mourning—what might be [[a monster's disguise->disguised]], or a resounding [[farewell to a monstrous life->revised]] left behind, my own.

Double-click this passage to edit it.

(I've learned to wonder: why am I "hideous"? They tell me each of my parts is beautiful and I know that all are strong. Every part of me is human and proportional to the whole. Yet I am a monster—because I am [[multiple->self swarm]], and because I am mixed, //mestizo//, mongrel.)

I am made up of a multiplicity of anonymous particles, and have no absolute boundaries. I am a swarm."Scraps? Did you call me Scraps? Is that my name?" (click-goto:?page,"earwigs")

Double-click this passage to edit it.

(cycling-link:"I have had plenty of time to make the girl. Yet the task was not so easy as you may suppose. I found that I could not compose a female without devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation: magic lanterns, peep show boxes, waking dreams, geometrical demonstrations, philosophical doctrines, fortifications and impediments, cartographic surveys, and engineering machines of all sorts. [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->research]]","(background:#f1f3f5)[I have had plenty of time to make the girl. Yet the task was not so easy as you may suppose.] (background:#fcc2d7)[I found that I could not compose a female without devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation:] (background:#d0bfff)[magic lanterns, peep show boxes,] (background:#a5d8ff)[waking dreams,] (background:#d0bfff)[geometrical demonstrations,] (background:#a5d8ff)[philosophical doctrines,] (background:#fcc2d7)[fortifications and impediments,] (background:#d0bfff)[cartographic surveys, and engineering machines of all sorts.] * (background:#f1f3f5)[L. Frank Baum, //The Patchwork Girl of Oz//, first published in 1913. Mine is the Ballantine edition, p. 15.] * (background:#fcc2d7)[Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818 (mine is the Penguin edition, 1985), p.191, p. 200, p. 82.] * (background:#a5d8ff)[Mary Shelley, Author's Introduction to the Standard Novels Edition [1831], included in the Penguin edition of Frankenstein cited above, p. 51, p. 54.] * (background:#d0bfff)[//Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine// (MIT 1991), p. 362, and snippets from other paragraphs, p. ?] ")

(cycling-link:"At first I couldn't think what to make her of. I collected bones from charnel houses, paragraphs from Heart of Darkness, and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame, but finally in searching through a chest in a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, I came across a fabric of relations, an old patchwork quilt, which my grandmother once made when she was young.","At first I couldn't think what to make her of. (text-colour:black)[I collected bones from charnel houses,] (text-colour:green)[paragraphs from Heart of Darkness,] (text-colour:black)[and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame,] but finally in searching through a chest (text-colour:black)[in a solitary chamber, or rather cell,] at the top of the house, I came across an old patchwork quilt, (text-colour:red)[a fabric of relations,] which my grandmother once made when she was young. * L. Frank Baum, //The Patchwork Girl of Oz//, first published in 1913. Mine is the Ballantine edition, p. 15. * (text-color:black)[Mary Shelley, //Frankenstein,or, The Modern Prometheus//, first published in 1818 (mine is the Penguin edition, edited by Maurice Hindle, 1985), p. 98.] * (text-color:green)[Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce, John B. Smith, and Mark Bernstein, //Getting Started with Storyspace// (Eastgate Systems, 1990-1993), p. 89.] * (text-color:red)[Jean-François Lyotard, //The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge//, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minnesota, 1984, p. 15.] ") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->conception]]

(cycling-link:"When I found the quilt, I became nervous to a most painful degree; the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime. Wasn't writing the realm of the Truth? Isn't the Truth clear, distinct, and one? But I said to myself that the quilt would do nicely for the girl, for when she was brought to life she would not be proud nor haughty, as the Glass Cat is, for such a dreadful mixture of colors would discourage her from trying to be dignified.","When I found the quilt, (text-colour:black)[I became nervous to a most painful degree; the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime.] (text-colour:orange)[Wasn't writing the realm of the Truth? Isn't the Truth clear, distinct, and one?] But I said to myself that \[the quilt\] would do nicely for the girl, for when she was brought to life she would not be proud nor haughty, as the Glass Cat is, for such a dreadful mixture of colors would discourage her from trying to be dignified. * L. Frank Baum, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, first published in 1913. Mine is the Ballantine edition, p. 16. * (text-color:black)[Mary Shelley, Frankenstein,or, The Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818 (mine is the Penguin edition, edited by Maurice Hindle, 1985), p. 100.] * (text-color:orange)[Helene Cixous, \"Coming to Writing\" from \"Coming to Writing\" and Other Essays, translated by Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle, and Susan Sellers (Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 29.] ") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->misconception]]

(cycling-link:"Now, I believed as one should in the principle of identity, of noncontradiction, of unity. All the people I caught myself being instead of me, my unnameables, my monsters, my hybrids, I exhorted them to silence. But the stubborn matter of the Foetus assumed the literal shape of concealed passions. If mothers imprudently yearned for pears or grapes, then identical fantasies coursed through the tiny body; these poor babies became like the things their mothers too ardently desired: blurry, several, simultaneous, impure.A hideous monster with calf's head and hooves, or that other dreadful person—the girl who is all patches—emerge from unsuitable sights and mixed fantasies. Through art, one could even breed misfits and transform them into a new species. \"Mosaic\" technique of the maternal imagination, mistress of errors; aren't you the very demon of multiplicity?","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->a single space]]

(cycling-link:"While a single space can contain a large amount of text, most authors will want to split large spaces into more manageable parts. Just add an unusual character where you want each writing space to end, and choose EXPLODE from the menu. I cut up the quilt, creating a new copy of each paragraph in its own writing space. The exploded spaces are all created inside a new writing space, a very well-shaped girl, which I stuffed with cotton-wadding.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->bottles]]

(cycling-link:"But Ojo was more interested just then in the Patchwork Girl's brains. Thinking it unkind to deprive her of any good qualities that were handy, the boy took down every bottle on the shelf and poured some of the contents in Margolotte's dish.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->labor]]

(cycling-link:"With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet, a personage known as \"a proper woman.\" It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, the Glass Cat was lying before the mirror and the Patchwork Girl lay limp and lifeless upon the bench. The Magician leaned over and shook from the bottle some grains of the wonderful Powder, and they fell directly on the Patchwork Girl's head and arms. My candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->birth]]

(cycling-link:"I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of free-floating miniature pieces of discourse. No distinct ideas occupied my mind; I felt light, and hunger, and thirst, and movement in phantom limbs; all was confused.\"You're crazy, girl. Better crawl into a rag-bag and hide there; or give yourself to some little girl to play with.\"","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->genetics]]

(cycling-link:"\"Did you see no girls as beautiful as I am in your own country?\" she inquired.\"None with the same variegated beauty,\" he confessed. \"It must not be supposed that atoms can be linked together into anagrams, chronograms, acrostics, figured grids and mazes. If that were so, you would see monsters coming into being everywhere. In America a girl stuffed with cotton wouldn't be alive, nor would anyone think of making a girl out of a patchwork quilt.\"\"What a queer country America must be!\" she exclaimed in great surprise.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->write?]]

(cycling-link:"\"This reading had puzzled me extremely at first, but I conjectured that he found on the paper signs for speech which he understood, and I ardently longed to comprehend these also. One night I found on the ground a leathern portmanteau containing several articles of dress and some books. The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight. I beat my books; I caressed them. Page after page, O beloved, licked, lacerated,\" said the Patchwork Girl.\"I perceived that, although I eagerly longed to discover myself to the cottagers, I ought not make the attempt until I had first become master of their language. Write? But if I wrote \"I,\" who would I be?\" Scraps laughed, and resuming her dance, she said:\"Whee but there's a gaudy dame!Makes a paint-box blush with shame!Razzle-dazzle, fizzle-fazzle!Howdy-do, Miss What's-your-name?\"The Magician looked at her thoughtfully.\"Poor Margolotte must have given you some of the quality of poesy, by mistake,\" he said.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->this bad writing]]

(cycling-link:"Tricks in writing resemble the Anagram of a Man.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->beauty patches]]

(cycling-link:"How delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? Her limbs were in proportion, and I had selected her features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! A perfectly beautiful woman must have the voluptuous buttocks and lovely breasts of the ladies of England, the fiery glance of the women of Poland, a German body, and a //podex// from Paris. But when my housework girl is brought to life she will find herself to be of so many unpopular colors that she'll never dare to be rebellious or impudent.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->beauty patches 2]]

(cycling-link:"The Frauenzimmerlexikon listed \"thirty components of complete beauty\", including:3. A gracious smile14. Small reddish ears not standing too far away from the head21. A delicate skin, underlaid with tiny blue veins22. A long, alabaster neck30. Tiny, narrow feet, well-proportioned and facing outward19. Lovely, agreeable speech\"That poor patched thing will hate herself, when she's once alive,\" continued the cat. \"If I were you, I'd use her for a mop, and make another servant that is prettier.\"","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->beauty patches 3]]

(cycling-link:"One of the first proposals for using computer graphics was to assemble a composite of the best features of various actresses--Garbo's eyes, Bardot's mouth, Welch's breasts.\"Razzle-dazzle, fizzle fazzle!Howdy-do, Miss What's-your-name?\"","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->not strictly]]

(cycling-link:"There were almost too many patches on the face of the girl for her to be considered strictly beautiful, for one cheek was yellow and the other red, her chin blue, her forehead purple and the center, where her nose had been formed and padded, a bright yellow. Texts became babel. The phonograph began to play a jerky jumble of sounds which proved so bewildering that after a moment Scraps stuffed her patchwork apron into the gold horn. At length I spoke, in broken accents: \"It's enough to drive a crazy lady mad.\" Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->scraps]]

(cycling-link:"\"I couldn't respect such a bundle of scraps under any circumstances.\"\"If you don't, there will be more scraps than you will like,\" cried Margolotte, angrily. Ripping the seam of the patch on the girl's forehead, she placed the powder within the head and then sewed up the seam as neatly and securely as before. And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->advice]]

(cycling-link:"\"The artist must create an integrated corpus out of detachable elements. Natural defects and imperfections need to be remedied as soon as possible, whether with cotton to fill out what is too flat, or to make one part the size of another, or by indented edges, a higher slipper, a corselet, and various remedies as needed. Try not to get ripped, or your stuffing may fall out. One of your eyes seems loose, and you may have to sew it on tighter.\" Then she wraps me from my ankles to my chin in clay-encrusted strips. Her parting words of advice: \"If you talk too much you'll wear out your scarlet plush tongue, which ought to have been hemmed on the edges.\"","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->cosmetics]]

(cycling-link:"\"If I get tired of looking at her patched face, I can whitewash it.\"","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->dignity]]

(cycling-link:"Suddenly the Patchwork girl threw up one arm (membrum or limb also signified \"clause\"), which knocked the bottle of powder from the crooked man's hand and set it flying across the room. Unc Nunkie and Margolotte were so startled that they both leaped backward and bumped together, and Unc's head joggled the shelf above them and upset the bottle containing the Liquid of Petrifaction. It fell upon the wife of the Magician and the uncle of Ojo. Their features acquire a precision which they had not when either asleep or awake.\"I hate dignity,\" cried Scraps, kicking a pebble high in the air and then trying to catch it as it fell. \"Half the fools and all the wise folks are dignified, and I'm neither the one nor the other.\"","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->composition]]

(cycling-link:"Lacking sense and loving fun, it is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. Biological parcels moved across and up and down as if they were endless lists without copulas. We will passical the classical. You organize writing spaces by grouping them together on the screen, and by placing writing spaces inside other spaces, and one thing so presupposes another that whichever way you turn your patchwork, the figures still seem ill-arranged. Who put noodles in the soup? A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me; I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->form]]

(cycling-link:"I had been calm during the day, but so soon as night obscured the shapes of objects, malformed positions are stamped onto the unsettled shapes. \"Roll me out, please; I've sagged down dreadfully from walking so much, and men like to see a shapely figure.\" She fell upon the ground, and the boy rolled her back and forth like a rolling-pin. When using a stand-alone hypertext, you cannot change the contents of the document. Instead, the swaddling clothes themselves are endowed with corrective power. The soft matter on which they act can only submit to that power, and the body lengthened to its fullest extent. Suddenly the broad disk of the moon arose and shone full upon the ghastly and distorted shape as she fled with more than mortal speed. \"Don't my colors run whenever I run?\" she asked.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->therapies]]

(cycling-link:"Scraps whispered: \"I've aspired to homogeneity. I was there with my big scissors, and as soon as I saw myself overlapping, snip, I cut, I adjusted, I reduced everything to a personage known as 'a proper woman.'\"\"Your goal is to get the connective tissue--the quilt that holds the fat cells--smooth to the muscle,\" says the maestro of bath, sea and clay therapies, as she dips twenty yards of elastic bandages in a heated cauldron. The body was seen as a still imprecise matter, waiting to receive a definitive shape. Feminine beauty was to be perfected by a system of bandages.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->phantom]]

(cycling-link:"Thoughts are the limbs of a composition, and must be surgically excised from their contexts. I was there with my big pair of scissors, and as soon as I saw myself overlapping, snip, I cut, I adjusted, I reduced everything to a personage known as \"a proper woman.\" But with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell's still-masterful report on phantom limbs, amputations could henceforth never be considered perfectly clean cuts. Willy-nilly, the body extended its lines of force toward the lost extremities, and movements in phantom limbs were often experienced as normal, requiring voluntary effort.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->the wrong way]]

(cycling-link:"\"Yoop-te-hoop-te-loop-te-goop!Who put noodles in the soup?\"\"Dear me! Aren't you feeling a little queer, just now?\" Dorothy asked the Patchwork Girl.\"Not queer, but crazy,\" said Ojo. \"When she says those things I'm sure her brains get mixed somehow and work the wrong way. There is neither horizon nor perspective nor limit nor outline or form nor center. This turns lack of direction into a constructive force.\"","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->many brains]]

(cycling-link:"\"I think I made a mistake in giving you so many sorts of brains,\" observed the boy. \"Perhaps, as the Magician said, you have an overdose, and they may not agree with you.\"\"If a few brains are good, many brains are better. And if we imagined the position of a fascinated Self, it was because the multiplicity towards which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation of another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside. In fact, the self is only a threshold, a door between two multiplicities. If you were all colors and many colors, as I am, you'd be too stuck up for anything!\"","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->seam'd]]

(cycling-link:"You may emphasize the presence of text links by using a special style, color or typeface. Or, if you prefer, you can leave needles sticking in the wounds—in the manner of tailors—with thread wrapped around them. Being seam'd with scars was both a fact of eighteenth-century life and a metaphor for dissonant interferences ruining any finely adjusted composition.\"The charm you need is a needle and thread,\" said the Shaggy Man.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->a good joke]]

(cycling-link:"\"Seems to me,\" said Scraps musingly, \"It would be better to make it all pretty--inside and out.\"\"Seems? Why, you're all seams, my girl!\" said the Chief; and then he laughed heartily at his latest joke.","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->no one's wife]]

(cycling-link:"Said the owl in a grumbling voice:\"Patchwork Girl has come to life;No one's sweetheart, no one's wife;Lacking sense and loving fun,She'll be snubbed by everyone.\"\"Quite a compliment! Quite a compliment, I declare,\" exclaimed the donkey. \"You are certainly a wonder, my dear, and I fancy you'd make a splendid pincushion. If you belonged to me, I'd wear smoked glasses when I looked at you.\"","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->at the mirror]]

(cycling-link:"The Patchwork Girl looked at herself and laughed. Noticing the mirror, she stood before it and examined her extraordinary features with amazement--her button eyes, pearl bead teeth and puffy nose. She bowed, and the reflection bowed. Then she laughed again, long and merrily, and the Glass Cat crept out from under the table and said: \"I don't blame you for laughing at yourself. Dufresnoy cautioned artists to avoid 'obscene and impudent particolored objects full of hollows, broken into little pieces' that were 'barbarous and shocking to the eyes.' The impious intermarriage of graphic symbol and letter bred teeming monsters of language. Old stories must not be blended promiscuously and without distinction, as east, west, south, and north in a //chaos-manner//. Aren't you horrid?\"","") [[— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —->but I'm glad]]

(cycling-link:"\"I expected this reception,\" she replied. \"The civilized Thebans enacted a law commanding idealization in art. Digressions toward outlandishness were legally punishable. But horrid?\" said the daemon. \"Why, I'm thoroughly delightful. I'm an original, if you please, and therefore incomparable. Of all the comic, absurd, rare and amusing creatures the world contains, I must be the supreme freak. Who but poor Margolotte could have managed to invent such an unreasonable being as I? At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror, but when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was glad--I'm awfully glad!--that I'm just what I am, and nothing else.\"","") — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —(click-goto:?page,"her")

I am tall, and broad-shouldered enough that many take me for a man; others think me a transsexual (another feat of cut and stitch) and examine my jaw and hands for outsized bones, my throat for the tell-tale Adam's Apple. My black hair falls down my back but does not make me girlish. Women and men alike mistake my gender and both are drawn to me.The motley effect of patched skin has lessened with age and uniform light conditions, though I am still subtly pied. Naked, I am more visibly so. I have large eyes, though they are proportional to my other features (all my features are large, but do not appear so in this setting). My pupils are pale grey, black-ringed.I move swiftly, with long loose strides; I was never comfortable in the drawing rooms or the pruned and cherished gardens of Mary's time and territory. I am happier where I have room to take long strides and I am enough alone that I can strip and walk unencumbered—I was made as strong as my unfortunate and famous brother, but less neurotic!Born full-grown, I have lived in this frame for 175 years. By another reckoning, I have lived many lives (Tituba's, Jane's, and the others') and am much older. The curious, the lustful, the suspicious, and the merely stupid watch me wherever I go and some follow me, scribbling notes and numerals, as if translation into a chart or overview will make all clear and safe as houses. They may be sure that I will lead them for a chase. [[I am never settled.->interrupting D]]I belong nowhere. This is not bizarre for my sex, however, nor is it uncomfortable for us, to whom belonging has generally meant, belonging TO. (click-goto:?page,"birth 2") [[birth 2]]

As a living thing, logos issues from a father (text-colour:red)[—I, on the other hand, have adopted a nominal mother (M/S) who is more like a midwife, and spring unparented from my own past selves—] There is thus for Plato no such thing as a written thing. There is only a logos more or less alive, more or less distant from itself (text-colour:red)[—that is, I don't exist. I am a passel of parts and should be returned to their original owners ('Did you hear something? Never mind, there's nobody there, some butcher's scraps fought over by dogs')—] Writing is not an independent order of signification; it is weakened speech, something not completely dead: a living-dead, a reprieved corpse, a deferred life, a semblance of breath (text-colour:red)[—but look out: zombies are hard to kill—] The phantom, the phantasm, the simulacrum of living discourse is not inanimate; it is not insignificant; it simply signifies little...This signifier of little, this discourse that doesn't amount to much, is like all ghosts: errant. [[It rolls this way and that like someone who has lost his way->this writing]], who doesn't know where he is going, having strayed from the correct path, the right direction, the rule of rectitude, the norm (text-colour:red)[—the chain of existence and events—] but also like someone who has lost his rights, an outlaw, a pervert, a bad seed (text-colour:red)[—a monster—] a vagrant, an adventurer, a bum

My birth takes place more than once. In [[the plea of a bygone monster->plea]]; [[from a muddy hole->born]] by corpse-light; [[under the needle->sewn]], and [[under the pen->written]].Or [[it took place not at all->interrupting D]].But if I hope to tell [[a good story->mary]], I must leapfrog out of the muddle of my several births to the day I parted for the last time with the author of my being, and set out to write my own destiny.

(text-size:1)["I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create."The being finished speaking and fixed his looks upon me in the expectation of a reply. But I was bewildered, perplexed, and unable to arrange my ideas sufficiently to understand the full extent of his proposition. He continued, "You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do, and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede." "I do refuse it," I replied; "and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me. . . . Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world?" "You are in the wrong," replied the fiend."What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another… If I have no ties and no affection, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing of whose existence every one will be ignorant. My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being and become linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now excluded."] [[a promise]]

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(text-size:1)[His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought that as I could not sympathize with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow. After a long pause of reflection I concluded that the justice due both to him and my fellow creatures demanded of me that I should comply with his request. Turning to him, therefore, I said, "I consent to your demand, on your solemn oath to quit Europe forever, and every other place in the neighbourhood of man, as soon as I shall deliver into your hands a female who will accompany you in your exile." "I swear," he cried, "by the sun, and by the blue sky of heaven, and by the fire of love that burns my heart, that if you grant my prayer, while they exist you shall never behold me again. Depart to your home and commence your labours; I shall watch their progress with unutterable anxiety; and fear not but that when you are ready I shall appear."Saying this, he suddenly quitted me, fearful, perhaps of any change in my sentiments. I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than the flight of an eagle, and quickly lost among the undulations of the sea of ice.] [[filthy work]]

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(text-size:1)[I feared the vengeance of the disappointed fiend, yet I was unable to overcome my repugnance to the task which was enjoined me. I found that I could not compose a female without again devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation, and this was to me like the torture of single drops of water continually falling on the head. As I proceeded in my labor, it became every day more horrible and irksome to me. Sometimes I could not prevail on myself to enter my laboratory for several days, and at other times I toiled day and night in order to complete my work. It was, indeed, a filthy process in which I was engaged. During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the consummation of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands.] [[treachery]]

(text-size:1)[I sat one evening in my laboratory; the sun had set, and the moon was just rising from the sea; I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labour for the night or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it. As I sat, a train of reflection occurred to me which led me to consider the effects of what I was now doing. Three years before, I was engaged in the same manner and had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart and filled it forever with the bitterest remorse. I was now about to form another being of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man and hide himself in deserts, but she had not, and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species.Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.I trembled and my heart failed within me, when, on looking up, I saw by the light of the moon the daemon at the casement. A ghastly grin wrinkled his lips as he gazed on me, where I sat fulfilling the task which he had allotted to me. Yes, he had followed me in my travels; he had loitered in forests, hid himself in caves, or taken refuge in wide and desert heaths; and he now came to mark my progress and claim the fulfillment of my promise.As I looked on him, his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery. I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and trembling with passion, [[tore to pieces->cuts]] the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew.] [[she]]

(I told her to abort me, raze me from her book; I did not want what he wanted. I laughed when my parts lay scattered on the floor, scattered as the bodies from which I had sprung, discontinuous as I myself rejoice to be. I danced in front of the disassembly, and vertebrae rolled to the four corners of the wood floor, I wrapped my intestines around my neck and wrists and sashayed about, I pitched my bladder against the wall. She watched me with half-fearful amusement. She was always proper, but there was a fierce hunger under her stays. My hijinks did not make it through the wrought iron flourishes of her prose, but they can be glimpsed in the paisley of its negative spaces, a hurly-burly of minced flesh and gouts of blood.To be linked to the chain of existence and events, yes, but bound by it? No. I forge my own links, I am building my own monstrous chain, and as time goes on, perhaps it will begin to resemble, rather, a web.) [[the remains]]

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(text-size:1)[The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being. I paused to collect myself and then entered the chamber. With trembling hand I conveyed the instruments out of the room, but I reflected that I ought not to leave the relics of my work to excite the horror and suspicion of the peasants; and I accordingly put them into a basket, with a great quantity of stones, and laying them up, determined to throw them into the sea that very night; and in the mean time I sat upon the beach, employed in cleaning and arranging my chemical apparatus.Between two and three in the morning the moon rose; and I then, putting my basket aboard a little skiff, sailed out about four miles from the shore. The scene was perfectly solitary; a few boats were returning toward land, but I sailed away from them. I felt as if I was about the commission of a dreadful crime and avoided with shuddering anxiety any encounter with my fellow creatures. At one time the moon, which had before been clear, was suddenly overspread by a thick cloud, and I took advantage of the moment of darkness and cast my basket into the sea; I listened to the gurgling sound as it sank and then sailed away from the spot.] [[basket]]

Indeed, there were remains—unused lengths of venous plumbing, fatty trimmings, deleted passages, a page that blew off a table in the garden where a rock imperfectly anchored an untidy slew of manuscript pages while she wandered in a reverie, attending only dimly the disquisitions of one of the philosophical friends of the household. Percy himself excised parts he found blemished. Yet the child lived. Lives.[[Has it not struck you as odd that the whole of a female of stature commensurate with that of her monstrous intended (not to mention a "great quantity of stones") could be hoisted by one man and borne out to sea—in a basket?->scam]]

That's right: it was a cover-up, a scam, a lie. We celebrated my death with wine and crusty bread at the little table in the garden, overlooking the lake where fictitious bubbles rose and burst, my phantasmic epigraphs.I had my privacy—I had my life—and I had Mary. [[real M.]]

I alone remember the real Mary, her curious mixture of reticence and passion, the part that twisted under me with a dark satisfaction and the part that wiped her hands afterwards and twitched the curtains open with punitive haste. You can see it in her book, how she embeds her tale in a double thickness of letters and second-hand accounts, as if every precaution were needed to secure the monster behind those locks and screens, or as if she placed a soiled cloth in an envelope and then a reticule so that it should not graze her fingers, pretending that smeared rag did not reek of her private parts.I saw it in the pages of [[her journal->my walk]], carelessly abandoned on a seat in the garden, weighted open with a magnifying glass and smoking in the intermittent sun.