“Oh, Mrs Honigbaum. After our fourth dinner together, I found myself missing her as I lay on my bed, digesting the mound of schnitzel and boxed mashed potatoes and Jell-O she’d prepared herself. She made me feel very special. I wasn’t attracted to her the way I’d been to the girls back in Gunnison, of course. At eighteen, what excited me most was a particular six-inch length of leg above a girl’s knee. I was especially inclined to study girls in skirts or shorts when they were seated beside me on the bus with their legs crossed. The outer length of the thigh, where the muscles separated, and the inside, where the fat spread, were like two sides of a coin I wanted to flip. If I could have done anything, I would have watched a woman cross and uncross her legs all day. But I’d never seen Mrs Honigbaum’s legs. She sat behind her desk most of the time, and when she walked around, her thin legs were covered in billowy pants in brightly colored prints of tropical flowers or fruit.”
—from Granta [subscription req’d]