Read Body and Soul: Short Story for Free Online Page B

Julie’s mother has been stunned into realizingthat her parental responsibilities don’t end at a cell door. Another social worker, the one who takes Julie to the group home, says that Julie should have been living with mentally disabled children all along.
    But Aunt Bea doesn’t let herself off the hook. When Terry leaves for school she starts remembering things that Julie said and did. Every gesture, every word seems to be a clue. Aunt Bea is appalled by the multitude of clues.
    She is resigned to having Terry taken away from her as well. She is almost glad. Her daughter is right—she is too old for this, and it could have been a lot worse. When a social worker she doesn’t know phones to ask if she is interested in another girl, she suspects it’s a mixup and starts explaining who she is and what happened. But the social worker has heard all about it and blames Children’s Aid.
    “This new girl is bright,” the social worker says. “The only thing is, she’s missing both arms just above the elbow. She’s in the process of being fitted with new artificial arms, though, and very sophisticated mechanical hands.”
    At supper that night, Aunt Bea tells Terry. “We don’t have to have her,” she says. “I’m happy enough just with you.”
    “I’d love to see a girl without arms!” Terry cries.
    “If she lived here,” Aunt Bea says, “it would involve more than just seeing her arms.”
    “Would her artificial arms come off?”
    “I imagine so.” Aunt Bea strokes the purple side of Terry’s face. The birthmark is being “erased” in a month.
    Terry takes Aunt Bea’s hand and lifts it up. “Show me your veins,” she says.
    Aunt Bea holds her hand over her head for a minute, then puts it on the table. The blue rivulets emerge as if the hand is under an evil maiden-to-crone spell.
    “Too bad I can’t go around with my hands up in the air all the time,” Aunt Bea says.
    “You know what?” Terry cries. Her feverish, old-woman gaze still startles Aunt Bea a bit when it fixes on her.
    “What?”
    “Too bad you can’t go around with your whole body up in the air!”
    The girl’s name is Angela; she is twelve years old. She is perky, pretty (long black hair, flirtatious brown eyes), and she performs a tap-dance routine to “Singin’ in the Rain,” which she has on a cassette tape.
    Terry is enraptured. Aunt Bea is too, but not so much because of the dance—her daughter took tap-dancing lessons. What wins Aunt Bea’s heart is the sight of those two little winglike arms flapping at one of her artificial arms (she insists on putting them on her herself), flapping and failing to grasp it, flapping and failing, and at last lining it up, slipping the stump into the socket, and clicking it in.
    If you enjoyed “Body and Soul” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection
We So Seldom Look on Love
.

E-book: 9781443402484
Print: 9780006475231

About the Author
    B ARBARA G OWDY was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.
    Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.
    Her first book,
Through the Green Valley
(a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published
Falling Angels
to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection,
We So Seldom Look on Love,
was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into
Kissed,
a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich.
Falling Angels
was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.
    Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—
Mister