A brief excerpt from the novel that I'm completing.

1. An excerpt from Chapter 3 in The Body in Question
The sun was astruggle to stay lit just over the last peaked rooftops in the housing
tract, and Mom and I were out back with the shears. I was shirtless, with a tea towel
draped across my shoulders, sitting in a kitchen chair positioned on the patchy
crabgrass. Elongated shadows were loose about the yard, dressing things up more
sightly than they normally appeared, giving them more dimensions than were deserved,
Mom and I included. The shears—really just the same dulled, all-purpose scissors that
substituted as letter-opener/juniper-preener/argument-settler amidst the Larry household
for years compiled upon others—fluttered about my head, making felled swoops at the
thicker regions of my overgrown hairstyle. Tattered scraps of hairtrim littered my pale
arms, Mom’s oniony breath all billowy in my ear on the occasions when she’d lean in
close and calculate the exactitude of a certain snipping, styling the important headslope
with which she thought me most handsome.
Truthfully, if one were to corner her most inwarded intentions and put them in a
strongly lighted situation, Mom was just giving me the same haircut she managed for
Dad throughout the expanse of their marriage. Whether it was the only cut she knew, or
because it was the only one she knew well enough to let her hands think for themselves,
she labored to make my Dad out of me, and again, as always, I offered her nothing more
than cowardly backtalk when she lifted up the scissors to me in the living room during a
rerun of MASH and motioned toward the backdoor, her saying, “Go on outside, Son.
You’re father’s image is near faded clean out of you.”
Mom referred to instances such as these as her aching spells, where Dad’s
absence was so arresting that she had to perform his image on the nearest available
Dad-shape or she’d lose him from her memory bank as though he existed for someone
else. That explained the decapitated manikin heads she got from Doreen, her
beautician friend, stationed about the house, all of the heads with the identical hairstyle
she last eyed Dad wearing.
She was always a klutz, no argument there, so it wasn’t surprising in the least
All words and ideas expressed herein are intellectual property of and copyrighted by Jared Elms,
2010.

2. when she accidentally divoted one of my ears with the oversized shears while in
progress of pitifully attempting to sculpt me some sideburns. I didn’t even so much as
flinch in that direction. The only way I knew that it had happened at all was because she
told me in an odorless, dry monotone: “Ah shit, son. There went a sliver of your
earskin.”
I was careful not to admit my condition to her. “Ouch, yeah . . . I felt that.
Smarts like a bitch. Let’s keep to the hair and leave my ears out of it, yeah?”
“Okay, Son. But you’re bleeding something awful. Should I bandage you?”
“Nah, Mom,” I soothed. “It’ll run out of itself soon enough. No sense in trying to
persuade it otherwise.”
So she pressed on with the cut, occasionally dabbing at my earleak with the
corner of the tea towel.
She was working from a picture she’d taken of him a few weeks before his death,
snipping a few strands of my hair, pausing to refer back to her source, returning again to
enact it on me. In the picture, Dad wore a mustache like the bristle portion of a push
broom, the bushiness of which swallowed the good majority of his upper lip. Although I
didn’t have one, hadn’t, in fact, ever been able to cultivate the kind of lip growth Dad
seemed to incubate mere hours after a clean shave, Mom swung around to the front of
me once she had finished the top and began pruning the ghostly non-hair that wasn’t
jutting out and unruly on my own lip. She’d glance back at Dad’s picture and her eyes
would flit with ignition for a moment, but when she came back to me, mine, she
inarguably returned with the matted stare of extinguish. We both allowed the silence
between us to dampen, to see how it would mix with and relate to the remaining smears
of sunlight streaked across the moon-ready sky.
This time, one of the fingers from Mom’s other hand, apparently far away in
thought, got in the path of her scissoring and shaved down the tipflesh of her ring finger
nearest the nail. Immediately she thrust her fingertip up into the air and regarded it as if
it were glowing. I gave her a moment to herself, to let her realize the pain she was
feeling and how it accelerated her pulse and caused a slight sweat to build. When the
All words and ideas expressed herein are intellectual property of and copyrighted by Jared Elms,
2010.

3. shock and throb of it seemed to wane for her, telling so by the open O of her mouth as it
retracted into a tight purse, I took hold of her thin wrist and thrust the wounded finger into
my mouth.
She tasted thickly of iron, salt. Mom rested her gaze on me, kept it there, then
glanced back to the picture of Dad. As I tasted the minor tremble of white blood cells
racing to clot, the bruise of my vise-smashed finger began to tingle like it used to, before
my body made the decision to deprive itself of fully knowing anything but the blotted
textures of its own vacancy. The more I watched Mom’s face and the hurt cramped up
around her eyes, the small twitches of discomfort in her wrinkled brow, the easier it was
to detect a flash of feeling in a remote stretch of something, a stutter of pain somewhere
in mine. My excitement had me clamped down on Mom’s finger, perhaps a little too
firmly, for I could feel the pressure of my incisors digging into her flesh.
Without any kind of word or warning, Mom reeled from Dad and slapped me
across the face with the open palm of her free hand. I spit her finger out as a reflex.
She gathered up his picture, the end table she’s used to prop him up, her shears that
she’d dropped in the grass, and bee-lined for the backdoor. I heard the door slam. Still
seated in the kitchen chair, I fingered the palmprint that she left on my face, and once
that started to fade, started frisking my arms and legs for the stubborn tickles of feeling,
trying to savor what was already receding out of reach, back into nowhere.
Back in the days when I had all my feeling, when the world was still outspread
before me like the hairless virgin that it was, I used to deplete the energy necessary to
take stock in where and which bathroom I attended. There were certain criteria it had to
fulfill. How trafficked was it during the hours of my normal, daily bowel cycles? Were
the facilities themselves updated and replenished often? How long had it been since the
last sanitation agent had done his rounds and signed off on the clipboard next to the
sinks? Were the urinal cakes potently sour and relatively pube-free?
Because the events of my day had pushed me so near a public tantrum, I
headed to the porcelain sanctuary of the Mathematics wing faculty bathroom to calm me,
All words and ideas expressed herein are intellectual property of and copyrighted by Jared Elms,
2010.

4. to smooth my feathering and recuperate my sins in what was otherwise known on
campus as the “Tubesteak Meatmarket.” True to its reputation, no sooner had I locked
myself in my favorite of the four partitioned bathroom stalls and labored toward caking
the toilet seat with the waxy paper ass-shields, pants at about my knees, a brisk rustling
could be heard the stall over from mine.
Sure enough, in less than a few minutes later, a single square of toilet paper slid
under my partition and faced me, inked boldly in black, reading: “Come here often?”
I had with me a red felt-tipped marker usually reserved for grading the
hypothetical student papers that I never located the necessary courage in my heart to
assign, and responded, “Sorry. You’ll have to do better than that.”
There were the echoings of a small protest beyond the partition, perhaps my
courtier flailing around to extract a reason, and then a new square appeared under the
stall, reading: “The bottom of my heart fell out the other day and I’m wondering if we can
stuff it anew with unreasonable circumstances, such as the timeliness of the one we’re
populating now.”
I hurriedly penned, “Since you put it that way,” and passed it back under, nervous
that it wouldn't reach him before the purpose he'd found began to deflate its own
worthiness.
Another one: “Close your eyes, then. Keep them closed. I’m coming under.”
I did, my clothing still abandoned at my ankles.
And since I was true to my word, my eyes fastened shut, I wasn't sure about
where and when things were happening to me, nor the consequence of my gropings on
him and the facial expressions they triggered, though the pressure and impact I felt,
among very little else, was somewhat reassuring that I still factored into my
whereabouts. At certain arbitrary intervals, a flash of discomfort or a dull, low ache
would present itself somewhere on my body as a result of our shamed attempts to make
a plaything of each other’s upshots and outstretches. It was enough to stir a slight
tremble deep in my gut, a half-smile smeared dumbly across my face, though with my
eyes still closed I had no way of telling.
All words and ideas expressed herein are intellectual property of and copyrighted by Jared Elms,
2010.

5. Afterward, I opened to see Tyler from Financial Aid, which proved fretfully
worrisome for me. It wasn't simply that he was the same short, squatty guy that kept
awkwardly flirting with you back when you were suiting up in the high school locker
room, but that he was so seemingly straight in his movements and mannerisms it proved
almost disheartening—for if Tyler was capable of this too, then how far was I unwittingly
scheduling myself to plummet into the recesses of sexual nonpartisanship?
Once he had tidied, Tyler faced me long enough to give me a thumb’s up, and
with nothing else to offer, he left our stall and headed back to his administrative cubicle
to—as I’d imagine—process a few more fixed percentage APR loans, see about some
outstanding W-2’s, and undoubtedly continue to subsidize the rest of his misspent days
foraging for a little love, a little tenderness, however callously interspersed
rendezvousing with persons who couldn’t possibly promise him even half as much on a
renewed basis. No, Tyler—and the sad saps unlucky enough to share his same
predicament—was too foregone to find such regular happiness anymore, not with what
he had admitted to himself about himself.
Perhaps we were all doomed to regret ourselves in hindsight unless we
committed to the logic of unchecked desire, nothing more. By which I meant maybe as
an unfinished prayer. Followed closely by a hollow Amen.
All words and ideas expressed herein are intellectual property of and copyrighted by Jared Elms,
2010.