Fiction Contest Winner: The Parable of Eleanor Perkins and Her Limp
Story Chosen by Judge James Tate Hill
“Katrin in a Field of Flowers” by Christoper Paul Brown
When Eleanor Perkins was born, the doctor called the nipple on her left knee an oddity. Like most genetic oddities (birthmarks, cleft chins, red hair), Eleanor’s was easy to ignore. It had always been there. But when she turned four, Eleanor asked why no other girl at preschool had a nipple on her knee. Eleanor’s mother, a woman with mismatched earlobes, said, “Everyone is different. So, being different is normal.” Eleanor accepted this answer until third grade.
That year, Richard Brewer pointed to the nipple during recess, called it a “knee boob,” and said he could “yank it off” with his father’s pliers. The school principal rebuked Richard. His solace for Eleanor was a heartfelt suggestion to wear pants.
Eleanor’s mother moved her daughter to Saint Hermione of Ephesus Academy, an all-girl Catholic school. St. Hermione’s, as part of their blue-and-daffodil-yellow uniforms, believed in universal leg modesty. Eleanor could not say why, but the boylessness of St. Hermione’s pleased her, even if some girls were as coarse as the Richard Brewers of the world. Shelly Nash, for example, belched during prayer. Kerstin Turner chewed hotdogs with her mouth open. Still, though Eleanor had no clan of her own and was never any girl’s best friend, she sometimes smiled.
In high school, Eleanor played volleyball, the one sport St. Hermione’s offered that included, as part of the uniform, knee-concealing equipment. It was during volleyball that Eleanor noticed her knee nipple again. It had become sensitive in ways that the plain skin on her right knee was not. The irrefutable moment happened during freshman year.
In a game against the Lady Knights of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, Eleanor set a spike. Heather Van Wyk crudely attempted to bash the ball, but tumbled into Eleanor, knocking her to the gym floor. Eleanor’s full weight landed on the left knee. Eleanor crumpled. Coach Nyberg and Heather (who apologized three times on the way to the bench) walked Eleanor off the floor, their bodies forming uneven but effective crutches. The small crowd clapped politely.
The athletic trainer, a thin, dark-haired sophomore named Gabriella Torres, brought ice to Eleanor, pulled down her kneepad, and stared at the swollen nipple.
Eleanor said, “Is it broken?”
Gabriella said, “No, it’s beautiful.” She then, cube-by-cube, set four blocks of ice into a white towel, folded and sealed the towel, and set it lightly on Eleanor’s knee. Eleanor thrust her hands to the bench, gripped it like a gymnastics bar, and arched her back in a confused and overwhelming rush of pain and tickle.
Eleanor thought little of the experience until her junior year when Gabriella, then a senior, made an odd request on the return bus ride from a match against the girls at St. Catherine de Ricci the Ecstatic. It was the end of the season. Gabriella would soon graduate and leave for college. Gabriella, who rarely spoke to Eleanor (though seemed always to hover nearby), asked if she could touch the nipple.
Eleanor and Gabriella shared a bench in the middle of the bus, the other girls having flocked to the back rows. Coach Nyberg reviewed game notes up front, chatting with the driver. Eleanor, having no sense of the proper response to a quiet senior girl’s request to touch her birthmark, said, “I guess.”
Gabriella said, “Are you sure?”
Eleanor was not. But she wasn’t not sure, so she nodded.
Gabriella, using both hands, eased the left sleeve of Eleanor’s shorts up to mid-thigh. She pulled the extra-long yellow athletic sock down mid-calf, revealing a smooth, hairless knee crowned by a half-dollar-sized, caramel-colored areola that summitted in a soft, blunted tip.
It had never occurred to Eleanor until that bus ride that her knee nipple might have any purpose. It had always been a small protuberance that, if politely cloaked, was little more than a wart or a bunion. But Gabriella slid off the bus seat and turned toward Eleanor. She squatted, her back toward the aisle, and hovered over the nipple as if it were a newly unearthed Roman coin. Gabriella’s breath flowed across the knee and rose into Eleanor’s ribs and groin.
Gabriella set her hands around the outside of the knee then gently squeezed. The touch swept through Eleanor with the hint of an onsetting fever: a sensation that mingled warmth, disorientation, and rapture. Then Gabriella rubbed her index finger around the outer ridge of the areola. This circling increased the disorienting, feverish pleasure, and it caused the nipple to become as rigid as a pink pencil-top eraser. Gabriella said, “Is that okay?”
Eleanor nodded that, yes, it was.
Gabriella said, “Can I kiss it?”
Eleanor whispered, “Uh-huh.”
***
Two Mondays later, Eleanor discovered a new use for her nipple. In Sister Helen’s Bible class, in a room with a ruthless cast iron radiator, two girls had already fallen under the sister’s wrath. Sister Helen had an inquisitor’s vigor for girls who could not overcome the self-gratification of sleep. She made Stephanie Goodwin stand up front and recite the Lord’s Prayer, three times, backwards. Veronica Guerra, having not learned from Stephanie’s example, was assigned to perch on Sister Helen’s desk, looking for any other girls who might drift to sleep. Her watch would end only if she could find someone to take her place.
Eleanor was close to taking Stephanie’s post. She had slept poorly the night before, and the V-neck sweater vest intensified the steady radiator heat. As her head drooped and Veronica scanned, Eleanor, without intention, slid her hand down the side of her wool and polyester, tartan-patterned skirt. Her left ring finger, the one reserved for a good Catholic boy’s promise, dipped below her sock and pulled it down. Then Eleanor, tracing the path blazed by Gabriella’s finger, explored the knee nipple in a muted but satisfying recreation of the bus ride. Eleanor survived the class, her consciousness intact—though she couldn’t be sure, and would not ask Sister Helen, about her purity.
When the bell rang, Eleanor neglected to pull her sock back up and walked through the halls with a curious tingling of the knee. The hardened nipple, sawn back and forth by the itchy interior of the wool skirt, slowed the walk. Eleanor lifted and released the left leg with more deliberation than she did with her right. She had, to any onlooker, a slight limp.
Rather than going to lunch, Eleanor trod the hallway and entered the bathroom. She took the last stall, gripped the bottom of her skirt, and pulled it up to her belly. She sat on the toilet, the cool of still water just beneath her, and moved both hands, in increasing rapidity, up-and-down in matched motion, one over her knee, one beneath her underpants. She broke rhythm only to lick her left index and middle finger before pressing them back to her knee. She then lost discipline and fell into a frenzied chaos of pinching and plunging. Then, when she shivered and twitched and moaned, Eleanor thought of Sister Helen.
Ever after, Eleanor rolled her left sock below the knee. The skirt would cover the sight of the nipple, and no one would know that her new limp was anything but a volleyball injury. Sometimes Eleanor sauntered with the leisure of a eucalyptus-satiated koala. Sometimes she dashed, being told, more than once, “Eleanor, we must not run to the bathroom.” Sometimes she sat and watched the other girls at school. They all walked with the mundanity and steady movement of clocks.
***
At university, a week after declaring as an accounting major, Eleanor went to second base with a Protestant boy named John. She then recognized that the nipple might not be so normal as her mother had said or as wonderful as Gabriella made it seem. After enduring John’s bumbling squeezes (the kinds that suggest boys think breasts are Ziploc-wrapped bags of dough waiting to be kneaded), Eleanor pushed John’s hand to her knee.
John liked this idea very much, it seemed, because he lifted his head, and in a poor imitation of Gabriella on the bus, asked for Eleanor’s full consent. “Yes,” said Eleanor, who was, a moment later, slapping the boy away. He had assumed, so his ascending hand showed, that he had permission to enter wherever he wished.
Eleanor raised her knee and said, “Kiss it.”
But John was not so delicate or curious as Gabriella. He pulled back from the swollen brown spot and said, “What is that?”
“My knee nipple,” said Eleanor.
John said, “Gross.”
Eleanor never saw John again. But she did learn that with future boys it was easy to avoid encounters with the nipple. Besides, they had little interest in exploring below the thigh. This, Eleanor understood, was the cost of desiring boys. Maybe Sister Helen learned this years ago.
Eleanor, despite increasingly flexible boundaries, finished university with her chastity intact. On the last Saturday of her undergraduate career, as she walked to the podium and accepted her diploma, Eleanor thought that perhaps Gabriella Torres might have been a lesbian.
***
Eleanor’s internship, which led to her first post-university job, was a direct line into a world of corporate accounting and accommodating men who offered to relieve Eleanor of the burden of her virginity. It was finally, on the cusp of her twenty-fourth birthday, that she allowed one of them to do so.
Dan Higgins was Jewish and a kind lover. He wore a ribbed condom. He even helped Eleanor clean up afterward, offering a warm, slightly dampened hand towel. Eleanor apologized for the spot of blood. Dan said had he known she was a virgin, he would have been gentler. Eleanor apologized for not mentioning it.
Dan asked about the use of a condom and said, “Were we supposed to use that? Is that against Catholic rules? What’s it like to be Catholic?”
Eleanor said, “It’s like I’m ashamed that I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be ashamed of.”
“Sounds a little cliché,” Dan said.
“Yes, I suppose,” said Eleanor, and apologized.
Eleanor’s evening with Dan marked the first time she, apart from rushed post-volleyball showers, had been naked in the presence of another person. There was only the bandage wrapped around her left knee. Dan said he hoped her old injury would feel better and that he could put some ice on it. Eleanor considered but thought that, between the spotted towel and the winces of pain, there had been enough strangeness for a night. Perhaps on the next date.
But there wasn’t one. Eleanor was promoted. Dan transferred to another department on another floor. They saw each other at the office Christmas party. They greeted and parted.
Eleanor’s new job included a good retirement and medical package. Her insurance had a reasonable deductible for cosmetic and other, as the insurance rep clarified, “elective” surgeries. Eleanor visited a doctor and found that for a five-hundred-dollar copay, she could have two equally normal knees.
She debated the procedure for two months. The nipple had always been there, for better or worse. It was that special gift, as her mother had said, that made her her. But it had also made her a chronic limper whose warmest and most satisfying moment of intimacy was a knee kiss on a high school bus.
“Yes,” Eleanor told the doctor. “Next Thursday will be fine.”
***
It was a short outpatient surgery. The doctor applied a local anesthetic, grafted in skin from the left hip, and covered the removed hole. “It wasn’t hard,” he said. “There were some fantastic nerve endings. That was the tricky part. But the knee, of course, had no mammary ducts or glands.” Until then, Eleanor had not considered the possibility of nursing with her knee. She felt a small sadness, something like mourning.
Eleanor asked Kimberly—a tall, thin, and bookish woman from work—to drive her home. Several times, Kimberly had offered to set up a date between Eleanor and her boyfriend’s law partner, Steve. Eleanor hadn’t said it outright, but she knew she could never love a man named Steve.
Kimberly helped Eleanor with the crutches, opened doors for her, and pressed the elevator button. Inside the apartment, Kimberly pulled back the bed covers, guided Eleanor’s legs, filled a glass of water, and counted out two pills. Eleanor waited for Kimberly to offer to help remove her shorts, but Kimberly never asked. Instead, Kimberly said she was glad that Eleanor finally had the old volleyball injury dealt with. “Those things linger, you know.”
Kimberly handed Eleanor the TV remote and a bag of frozen corn. She said something about Steve, how he had an old knee injury. “You two would have so much in common.”
***
On Monday, Eleanor took an Uber to work, rode the elevator to her office, and survived the day through will power and Codeine. By Wednesday, the knee was only mildly sore, and the crutches were left home. On Friday, a week after the surgery, Eleanor unwrapped the bandages.
The nipple was a dimple, an absence marked by a circle of stitching around stretched skin. The knee was grotesque. But it was a normal grotesque, like the normal aftermath of having a suspiciously dark mole removed. Eleanor added ointment to the knee, which smoothed on and stirred nothing more than a cool, dull pain. The skin neither hardened nor tingled. Eleanor re-bandaged and took a bath and hung her knee over the side of the tub. Her right hand never approached her pelvis, except for a quick, obligatory lathering to wash.
A week later, Eleanor removed the big bandages for good. The knee was still marred, but the stitches were weakening and, as the doctor said, they would decay on their own. There would be some scarring. “Perhaps,” the doctor offered, if she had the procedure done when she was younger, “the scarring could have been avoided.” But the scarring would be far less noticeable than the nipple. She would be free, the doctor said, to wear shorts. She could even put a little cover-up crème on the cap. “No one would know.”
If Eleanor desired, she could move to Phoenix or San Diego.
***
Eleanor wore a skirt and sandals. No socks. The skirt draped just below her matching set of ordinary knees. She took a walk and thought of calling Dan or maybe even that third-grade monster, Richard Brewer. She was normal—her limp almost gone. This was how normal people with normal knees walked: without arousal, without the constant teasing and pricking and stimulation coursing up the thigh, without having to change underwear two or three times a day. It was nice to be normal.
Eleanor’s first full normal walk lasted four blocks. Then Eleanor tired of it. She sat on a bench, inched-up her skirt, and rubbed her finger along the scarred knee. It was as indifferent to her hand as her right knee (the normal knee) had always been. She wondered how normal people could stand walking, why they even got out of bed: would every other step, for the rest of her life, be as banal as that day’s steps.
Perhaps, in time, the sensation would return. The nipple would grow back like a gecko’s severed tail. Until then, Eleanor re-lowered her skirt and looked across the street. A woman in jeans breezed past a homeless man. The woman held a cell phone to her ear and stared ahead. In her non-phone hand, the woman carried a paper coffee cup. Her stride was broad and fluid and perfect.
Eleanor slid her hand over her left knee and thought of Sister Helen. She wondered what became of Gabriella Torres. Maybe Gabby, if she still wanted to, could kiss her knee and make it all better.
about the author
Joe Johnson lives in Portland and writes fiction and poetry. His work has appeared in Flash, Heron Tree, Carve, Rust+Moth, Aethlon, and The Santa Clara Review, among others. He received his MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and gleaned many of his story ideas from reading too much Old Testament and growing up in the Yakima Valley (Washington).
about the artist
Christopher Paul Brown is known for his exploration of the unconscious through improvisation and the cultivation of serendipity and synchronicity via alchemy. He has applied this method to music, video and 2-D art. His first photography sale was to the collection of the Standard Oil Company of Indiana and his video You Define Single File was nominated for the Golden Gate Award at the 47th San Francisco International Film Festival. Over the past four years his art was exhibited twice in Rome, Italy and in Belgrade, Serbia. His series of ten photographs, titled Obscure Reveal, were exhibited at a Florida museum in 2017. He earned a BA in Film from Columbia College Chicago in 1980. Brown was born in Dubuque, Iowa.