#675 The Running Legs and Other Stories- Lucas Southworth

#675 The Running Legs and Other Stories- Lucas Southworth

This is like fable or a fairy tale skewed, and twisted into a nightmare. “You’ll see that this story works like a dirty mirror. Be sure to recognize yourself.”

A father comes home from work. He is an axe-man, scary and gruff, but not the devil. His two daughters and their stepmother are there when he gets home. The girls watch in horror as the father cuts the stepmother’s legs off with his axe. The legs run away and the girls follow.

What comes next is a series of connected stories, like a song cycle, trying to remember a dream. They are: The Running Legs, The Bubbling Kitchen, The Two Princesses, The Devil Father, The Beautiful Stepmother, The Spider-web Sidewalk, The Howling Mountain, The Man in the Car, The Very Tiny Door, The Tightening Hug, The Wailing Park, The Loving Witch, The Dying Legs, The Dirty Mirror.

“Do you know why I tell you these stories…They are good places to hide…In them, people do things because they are the only things to do. Nobody has time to think. Nobody has time to remember or be afraid.”

Rating: 8-10-9-8 Total= 35

#415 Lusus Naturae- Margaret Atwood

#415 Lusus Naturae- Margaret Atwood

This is a much different story than the first few in the collection. The narrator is going through a change, a Kafka-esque metamorphosis, turning slowly into a werewolf. They call it a disease, but they also think of it as a curse. The town is steps away from pitch-forks and torches, so the family stages her death, for their own sake, especially to protect their other daughter.

Now she lives hidden, but with anonymity comes a little more freedom to roam about at night. A funny moment is when she comes stumbles across a couple having sex in the woods, she thinks they are of her kind because they have fits and scream like she does. But when she approaches to give them a friendly kiss, all she knows how to do it bite.

Like the Kafka tale this is a worthy homage to, it’s about alienation, and being isolated and ostracized because of ones differences; being made to feel like a burden and the cause of other’s feeling of resentment.

“However she tried to hide it, she resented me, of course. There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.”

Lusus Naturae is Latin meaning: freak of nature.

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34