Free Naked, on the Edge by Elizabeth Massie Page B

gasped and put out her hand to find that it was just a current of air passing though the damp brick room, travelling from one ill-hung door to another in the opposite wall.
    Was this world not filled with such as her, existing in conjunction with mortals who most often believed their own reality was the sum and total? And so what incredulous magic could not happen, and what damnable curse was impossible?
    The room was hot and rancid, foul human scents coiling like smoke from the floor, the walls, the chairs, the gurney. The men who had been here just minutes ago had stunk at first of excitement, and then disgust. They claimed for themselves the crown of civility, yet winced and vomited at the result of their self-proclaimed goodness.
    "Is this not me?" she repeated. "Look, Alexandre, and see that flesh which you once loved." She shook her head, warding off the stench, then ripped her gloves from her hands and threw them to the floor. She clutched at the frilly bodice of her dress, and ripped it from neck to waist. Her dagger-sharp nails raked the white skin of her breast as she did, leaving long, bloodless skin-lips gaping silently in the air.
    Cursed costume of the modern, nineteenth-century woman! Such prudes, such whores, tied up and trussed and playing at seduction with their prim dress, not knowing what it is to be wholly female! Ah, but she had known! Alexandre had known her femaleness and she his maleness, and they had reveled in the wonder of it all.
    She tossed the ripped cloth aside. Then she wrenched off the rest of her garb - the leg-of-mutton sleeves, the long muslin skirt, the petticoat, cotton stockings, garters, buttoned shoes. All were hurled away. The hat, the hairpins, the ear bobs. Her auburn hair fell free about her shoulders.
    Danielle closed her eyes and caressed her cold skin. She traced the length of her arms and torso, feathering the soft hairs on her chilly stomach, strumming the already healing skin-lips on her breasts.
    She had been naked when they had taken away Alexandre from her the first time. Lying in a stall of the weanling barn they'd been, Danielle leaning gaily into the wiry hair of Alexandre's chest and laughing at the prickling straw in her hair and in her back. She had picked up a yellow stem and had ticked his chin and his nose. He had kissed the straw and then her fingers. He had wrapped his arms around her waist and nestled his chin into her neck, his tongue playing easily along the tender flesh there.
    "You were tender and true," she said, her brows knotted and lips trembling. "But only one wrong laid on your head, as any human would have who has lived past infancy. How, then, did this curse come to you?"
    Beneath the sheet, Alexandre did not move. Danielle took several more steps and grasped the sheet that covered her beloved.
     
    T he handsome, tattered young man arrived at Bicetre on a frosty, late March morning in 1792, appearing like a spectre beneath the shadows of the pear orchard behind Paris's infamous hospital and prison. The sky had rained not an hour earlier, and the rain had been cold and severe, drilling chilly puddles into the ground and knocking branch tips from the naked trees. Shivering droplets hung triumphantly to the fur of the animals in the paddocks and to the emerald leaves of the boxwood shrubs that lined the narrow dirt pathways.
    The brick institution of Bicetre was large, dark and filled with most unpleasant business - that of madness, of loneliness, of anger, desperation. Of screams. Of silence. Bright, curious doctors ministered to the sick. Hardened officers tended the miscreants.
    In the shadow of the great place, flanking its west side, was a four-acre plot on which animals and vegetables were raised for the use of Bicetre's personnel, patients and inmates. It was called appropriately the Little Farm. Fenced paddocks monitored the cows and sheep and pigs; in a small hutch nested chickens and pigeons. Several gardens bordered with woven vine fences