One leg tucked behind the other, one arm behind the head, the other in front of the foot—this arrangement of the body leaves something to be examined.

 

***

 

My friend speaks low so I can barely hear him. He is younger than me, with perfectly formed hands and stones that hang from his ears all topaz and musical. His fascination is decorously measured. He is the kind of person who never begins a conversation but still manages to travel from place to place. Generally, it is other people who ask him what he wants to eat. Anything, to which he adds that he is a vegetarian. Now there is a phenomenological starting point. But I am too shy to inquire after the nature of his abstinence.

 

***

 

The leg of the Matisse is rounded. A sliver of blank paper outlines a breast. One is able to distort the shape of an otherwise recognizable form, rounding out one kneecap, narrowing the torso, and minimizing the hands and feet, without disturbing the indifference of the form. The blank space sometimes fails to fully separate its respective limbs, as is the case where the calve of one leg connects, in two places, to the ankle of the other.

 

***

 

Blank spaces prove unsettling to the vegetarian, as is the case with the space between the head and the back of the neck, wherein the head appears severed from the rest of the body. This young man wearing an old man’s forest green clothes, who floats through his days, I follow around, knowing he will never bump into a wall, or touch a doorknob.

 

***

 

There are different types of vegetarianism, just as there are different types of vegetables. Vegetarianism of a religious nature is not the same as that of a medical nature, that of an ethical nature. The vegetarian, my friend, has eyes shaped like feathers. His hooded eyelids cover half the irises. They look at me and do not look away.

 

***

 

In the tub with him, going round and round, the blind leading the blind—finally, after what amounted to a lifetime of wandering, I’ve taken to a person who looks like me. A huge hurdle, the irrational fear that kissing a person with my kind of face would translate into thoughts of incest. The hot water of the shower-head sprays down. We sizzle. Though I have to pee, I remind myself not to. It is my first time in his shower.

 

***

 

I have always peed in showers. I am conditioned to as soon as I touch the hot water. I ask my friend, Do you pee in the shower? He says, No? And so I continue living in the solitude of last year’s winter, boiling my eggs and rolling them along the countertop, smoking white cigarettes, fishing for my ears with silver hooks.

 

***

 

My brother is the only other person with my kind of face. Our house has white walls, octagonal windows, and a wisteria tree in the front yard. My brother is also a vegetarian. He’s been a vegetarian for ten years, for so long I forget he is one. Either the nature of his vegetarianism eludes me, or it was never stated. The act of cooking a separate meal for him is something I’ve performed as naturally as breathing or opening a window. Once, though, years ago, in the middle of a silent meal, he asked if he could try what I was eating. His tone was cavalier. I felt the breath sucked out of every object except the man holding the dry, curved bone with a clump of brown at its tip. He chewed thoughtfully and put down the bone.

 

***

 

Overnight, the wisteria tree bloomed. By morning my brother was lifting a mild blue cluster for me to smell. But the flowerman coming down the road had the gall to peddle his inferior wares. A flower for your lady? I stopped him from going on. No, please, I said. He’s my brother.

 

***

 

I had recently discovered garlic heads. I used to always buy it in a jar. So satisfying, squeezing hard objects out of the papery skin, like long white pimples. The smell of the garlic filled the air of the room. I washed the sticky cloves off my hands under the tap. The cloves were numerous, some having fallen next to and onto the Bunka knife in the sink, and I thought about how my brother would mince these little garlic cloves without a second thought, put them in a jar. But I couldn’t. They’d been born of such unusual circumstances…

 

***

 

I thought I would bring all this into my still-life class. My students were very interested in eating the garlic. They didn’t understand—this garlic had fallen into my sink! It was waterlogged and probably sprouting something and wasn’t going to taste like Brazil nuts from the organic supermarket… I told them the vegetarian, my friend, wears a shirt of forest green—Green, that color which comes engendered from Blue yet surpasses in beauty Blue.

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Jenny Wu is currently the Senior Fiction Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, where she recently completed her MFA. Her fiction can be found in The Collagist, wildness, and Hobart.