This Body
Authors: Laurel Doud
This Body
“Laurel Doud has a genuine talent. … She plots ingeniously, draws her two very different central characters, Katharine and
Thisby, with great skill, and handles some weighty themes with astonishing sureness.”
— Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News
“An entertaining first novel that combines humor with sticky issues of identity. … An amusing novel.”
— Elizabeth Bukowski, Wall Street Journal
“A fresh, thoughtful spin on the well-worn fantasy of inhabiting another body, this offbeat debut borrows the cast of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
and submits them to a very 1990s enchantment. … Crisply written, wry, and intelligent.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Laurel Doud's humorous and engaging story of a woman who dies and regains consciousness in another's body,
This Body
captures the reader's imagination from the first. … Doud writes with such grace and conviction that the impossible seems
quite plausible.”
— Lynn Harnett, Herald Sunday
(Portsmouth, NH)
“The richness and intricacy of the plot propel the reader swiftly toward its satisfying conclusion.”
— Judith Kicinski, Library Journal
“A fascinating and thought-provoking story. … A compassionate first novel of reincarnation.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
This work embodies the premise that the writing of a first novel is often by group process, so it is with orgasmic delight
that I am able to publicly acknowledge and thank the following people:
My agent, Leigh Feldman, who saw what it could be; my editor, Sarah Burnes, who helped me make it what it is — organically;
and my copyeditor, Stephen Lamont, who was “professional fussbudget” par excellence.
My readers: Linda Carroll for her rational view and her unwavering support in all my endeavors; Claudia Parker for her no-nonsense
approach and her perceptive advice; and Terri and Eric Peterson and Robert McKenna for being there at the very beginning —
and at the end.
My fellow writers (and subsequent readers) at Hedgebrook Cottages: Mylène Dressler for her lyrical beauty and encouragement;
Roxanne Ray for her playwright's eye; and Stephanie Grant, who taught an old dog new tricks with her gentle and insightful
guidance on two reads.
But, most of all, to my Muse, Lee Reilly, who loaned me her brain, her heart, and her courage so I could tell this story in
the way that I had hoped to.
See a penni pick it up, all the day you'll have good luck
.
Copyright © 1998 by Laurel Doud
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review.
The author is grateful for permission to include the following previously copyrighted material:
Burma-Shave advertisement from
The Verse by the Side of the Road: The Story of the Burma-Shave Signs and Jingles
by Frank Rowsome, Jr. Copyright © 1965 by Frank Rowsome, Jr. Reprinted by permission of Stephen Greene Press.
Excerpt from “Spilt Milk” by Will Doud-Martin. Copyright © 1998 by Will Doud-Martin. Reprinted by permission of the author.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Hachette Book Group
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First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-08297-6
You had much ado to make [my] anchor hold.
— William Shakespeare,
The Winter's Tale
, 1.2.213
“Some don't like the roller coaster; they go on the merry-go-round.
That just goes around. Nothing. I like the roller coaster. You get more out of it.”
So, thanks, Danner and Will. I wouldn't have missed
the Giant Dipper for anything
.
— with apologies to Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel,
Parenthood
Contents
Act 1, Scene 1: What's past is prologue, what to come
Act 1, Scene 2: Where's the rest of me?
Act 1, Scene 3: What is the body when the head is off?
Act 1, Scene 4: “A lot of people enjoy being dead.”
Act 1, Scene 5: I am a feather for each wind that blows.
Act 1, Scene 6: Was I part of this curious dream?
Act 2, Scene 1: I do perceive here a divided duty.
Act 2, Scene 2: Knowledge can be more terrible than ignorance if one can do nothing.
Act 2, Scene 3: You have a double tongue within your mask.
Act 2, Scene 4: I will not permit you to have two families,
Act 2, Scene 5: To live a second life on second head.
Act 2, Scene 6: Some of us are cursed with memories like flypaper.
Act 2, Scene 7: Do not give dalliance too much the rein.
Act 2, Scene 8: I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know what I remember
Act 2, Scene 9: What's gone and what's past help should be past grief.
Act 3, Scene 1: I think you people have proven something to the world — that a
Act 3, Scene 2: All the world's a stage
Act 3, Scene 3: What we've got here is a failure to communicate.
Act 3, Scene 4: What, must I hold a candle to my shames?
Act 3, Scene 5: He told me I would forget. But how could I not remember?
Act 4, Scene 1: You speak not as you think. It cannot be.
Act 4, Scene 2: Youth! Stay close to the young and a little rubs off.
Act 4, Scene 3: I am almost out at heels.
Act 4, Scene 4: The fates are against me. They tossed a coin — heads, I'm poor;
Act 4, Scene 5: Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
Act 4, Scene 6: Life is a thief.
Act 5, Scene 1: Believe me, if a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.
Act 5, Scene 2: … we are not ourselves
Act 5, Scene 3: To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there's the rub.
Act 5, Scene 4: The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
Act 5, Scene 5: As you grow older, you'll find that the only things you regret are
Write me a prologue; and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm … this will put them out of fear.
— N
ICK
B
OTTOM
,
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, 3.1.15
“
Wait
… ,” she cried.
But Death took her anyway.
After she regained consciousness and was able to think a bit more clearly, she wondered if “wait” was the reason it happened
the way it did. Her “hocus pocus.” Her “abracadabra.” Her “presto chango.”
“Say the magic word, Sparky.”
Wait
…
It couldn't have been a fluke, though; somebody else — somewhere, somehow — must have stumbled upon it too. But in all the
years of waiting in grocery store checkout lines, she never saw any such headline in the
National Enquirer
or the
Star
or the
Globe
. She read only the headlines, of course; she never actually opened any of those tabloids. Well, maybe once, when actor Harrison
Ford secretly wedded Melissa Mathison, the screenwriter for the movie E.T., in a private ceremony at the Santa Monica courthouse.
But in all the years she had stood there, pretending not to read even those headlines, she never saw
THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE! MIND OF DECEASED WOMAN TELEPORTS
400
MILES INTO BRAIN-DEAD GIRL. POSITIVE ID ON BRAIN-WAVE PATTERNS. FAMILIES CLASH OVER CUSTODY AND FILM RIGHTS
.
What's past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.
— A
NTONIO
,
The Tempest
, 2.1.253
Fade in.
Pain in her eyes is the first sensation.
Too bright. Too bright.
Waves of disorientation swell and roll underneath her. She squeezes her eyes shut and waits for the buckling to subside. When
the surface firms, she forces her stiff eyelids to roll up over blistered pupils and wills her vision to track. As the shapes
in front of her stabilize and come into focus, she realizes she is lying on a bathroom floor.
That much she can tell.
She is up close and personal with one of the squat porcelain knobs that cover the bolts at the bottom of a toilet — the ones
that never stay on, though this one looks as though it's never come off. A halo of rust barnacles grows solid around its rim.
The side of her face is sticking to the floor, and when she tries to shift her jaw back and forth, the skin stretches and
pulls. There are oatmeal-like clumps in her mouth, and it's hard to breathe; her nostrils are packed tight. She spits out
what she can and pulls her head — ever so gently — from the floor. There is a soft rubber-soled sucking sound. The movement
sends her head spinning, and she grabs the toilet seat. Body and mind seem to connect, and even through her clogged nose,
she smells a foul odor rising up like a fog from the bathroom floor. She gags, the muscles in her stomach and buttocks cramping
spasmodically. The misery of it jolts her to her feet. Before she can faint, she blindly pushes herself out of the bathroom
and away from the smell.
She moves from one room into another. The stink lessens, but she has brought much of it with her. Finding a kitchen sink with
a plastic tub full of dirty dishes, she fumbles with the knobs and gets a stream of water going, rubbing her face while digging
into her nostrils with her fingernails. She washes out her mouth and, when most of the slime is gone, leans under the faucet
and drinks. She straightens up, and the maneuver sends her head whirling away from her again. She sinks down to the floor,
and the ceiling above her fades out.
When she wakes up, cold and clammy and in the dim light of fading day, it takes her a while to realize that the sink is overflowing
and that she is soaked through. It's easier to stand up this time, though she has to hold on to the rim of the sink. The knobs
ripple slightly when she reaches out to turn them off. She pulls some dingy-looking towels from the handle of the refrigerator
and throws them on the floor to sop up the water.
It's hard to think. She has never felt so sick in her life — not even after that wedding banquet, when she drank an entire
bottle of champagne after coming off three months of strenuous dieting. Her husband and their three-year-old son had left
to take the babysitter home, and her daughter, who was almost a year old and very mobile, stayed with her. She thought she
was just fine, but suddenly the champagne hit her stomach and her head with a double-impact punch. She vaguely remembered
her daughter coming into the bathroom as she was draped over the toilet bowl, but when she woke up later almost delirious
on the cold floor, she had no idea how long she had been passed out or where her daughter was.