Free Miss Jane by Brad Watson

would not. They lived out their lives in shade and dampness, quivering when you passed and going so still if you happened to notice and squat down to take a closer look, to touch. One day she came upon a strange one that was not at all modest, growing straight up and tall with a small cap on its top. She broke it off at the base and took it home to show her father, but her mother saw it first and snatched it from her hand and threw it into the hog slop bucket.
    â€œBut what is it?” Jane said. “I’ve never seen one like it.”
    â€œIf you see another, you leave it alone,” her mother said, oddly angered.
    â€œWhat’s it called?”
    â€œIt’s called a stinkhorn,” her mother said, “and aptly so.”
    When she asked her father about it later, during one of their walks, and asked him why it grew straight up like that when all the others were short and round or flat like fat leaves growing from a tree’s bark, he said some called it the devil’s horn and some called it dead man’s finger. “There’s different shapes of it from just what you found.”
    When she next saw Dr. Thompson she asked him about the stinkhorn and her mother’s reaction to it.
    â€œYour mother was upset because she’s a modest woman and it so happens the stinkhorn mushroom resembles a part of the male anatomy or body, the part that is used in reproduction. In making babies.”
    â€œSure is a big’un,” she said.
    The doctor said nothing, but rubbed his mouth for a moment and seemed to grip his jaw, then removed his shaded spectacles and rubbed the lenses on his shirtsleeve.
    â€œWell, in fact,” he said, “there are varieties of the plant that resemble the complementary part of the female anatomy as well, in quite a lurid fashion.”
    She didn’t know those words, complementary, lurid.
    â€œLike mine?”
    â€œNo,” the doctor said. “Not really.”
    â€œIt’s what I’m supposed to look like, then?”
    â€œNot exactly,” the doctor said. “It’s just people using their imagination. For the most part, anyway.”
    He told her that he would explain it to her in more detail when she was a little older.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with now?”
    He fiddled in his vest pocket for his pipe and took it out, but only held it out from him and looked at it as if to examine it for flaws. Then he looked sideways at her.
    â€œSoon enough,” he said. “When the time is right.”
    She walked off, perturbed, but then came right back.
    â€œI need you to tell me why I’m the way I am, why I’m different, or how I’m different. Why can’t I control myself?” She had learned this discreet term well enough over the years.
    He looked at her a long moment, his eyes squinting that tired squint, a mote of some kind in there that was more than a speck of dust, more something in his mind than his eye. Then he ­nodded, said, “All right, then.”
    They sat on the ground and he told her as best he could about what she did not have that most girls and women had. “First, there’s no ‘why.’ It’s just how you’re made. Inside you,” he said, “Ibelieve you have just about everything, if not everything, that any other girl has. But on the outside you don’t have everything they do. Everything is kind of tucked up inside you, hidden away. And one thing you do not have is the little muscle that allows you to control yourself. It’s a squeezing muscle, see. And when you need to go potty, if you have the little muscle, then you can squeeze it and stop it until you get to a privy or bathroom or a good-sized bush to hide behind, you know.”
    She nodded, serious. She was trying to form a picture in her mind of her insides, and make that match up somehow with what she’d been able to tell about herself from what she could see on the outside. It