Free Jews vs Zombies by Daniel Polansky, Adam Roberts, Sarah Lotz, Ofir Touché Gafla, Rena Rossner, Shimon Adaf, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Anna Tambour Page A

look.’
    ‘Better.’ Leo produced yet another magazine from inside his fitted suit. ‘This? I just picked it up.’
    Irving pulled the magazine close to his face. Its ink was still loud, crude. Only out for a few months, this February 1941 Spicy-Adventure Stories, ‘Space Burial’, featured a screaming redhead slipping off the back of some flying bird – the important thing being that apricot sateen number with the shaped straps and wholly improbable way that the breasts could be supported. He snorted. ‘Artistic license. No can do. Not with that fabric and no seams.’
    ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’ Leo pointed to the bed. ‘What do you think of that one in the line-up?’
    ‘ “The Soul Scorcher’s Lair”?’
    The middle-aged man with no paunch waited. After all, he had once had dreams, too. But 15 seconds was enough.
    ‘If you think I’ll let a fantazyor eat your mother’s kreplach. And she a widow working her fingers off… ’
    ‘Hot-formed lace, steel underwire, flare-banded from armpit to breast differentiators, elasticised arm straps, presumably three-hook back, D cup, black, suitable for full but firm breasts because there is still no adequate support for the average woman.’
    ‘Excellent, my boy.’ Leo smiled broadly, the picture of the proud uncle, even possibly, though he’d never seen it, the university professor gratified that his student had actually listened to all his lectures. Leo was proud of himself, too, for he had successfully hidden the hurt that the boy, through the callousness of youth, had dealt him. For Irving was right. That bra had been a great seller in ’37 – but its success had rested on the racy lace and daring black. Women don’t know how to fit a bra, and this one, for all its advertised appeal, was two flimsy colanders, so the average woman’s breasts were sadly earthbound or showing their inadequacy of build with an embarrassment of collapsed cups when what they needed was adequate shaping, filling, engineering, uplift.
    As Irving civilised his hair and washed his face and hands, he heard his mother setting the freshly scrubbed table in the kitchen – laying it with three places for the three people who lived in that little flat in the Bronx.
    He was pleased in one way that he’d made Uncle Leo happy. Of course he didn’t want to hurt the man – and besides, he felt sorry for him. But he also felt a simmering anger that he could hardly admit to himself. To sign his life away. Yes, so Mama had started in the sweatshops at the age of nine. But still. Irving put that out of his mind while he dried his face, and dreamed for another snatched moment of designing rockets.
    What he knew of the breasts of the average woman, of any woman for that matter, was the sum of what he’d seen of Egyptian, Greek and Roman statuary in the Metropolitan Museum, all those magazines his uncle brought home for him to study, and Leo’s own blueprints and lectures about the real things.
    Irving wondered if the man, that lifelong bachelor, had ever touched the real things. He’d gone from being a tailor of men’s suits, an unenviable specialty in New York in the 1930s, to a brassier designer, only because of a friendship made by Irving’s mother, who when her husband dropped dead of a heart attack when Irving was only 13, went into business on her own, sewing foundation garments to fit particular women, especially those with a breast or two cut off, and opera singers.
    Her constructions, all made of pink canvas, could have held cement. Their fillings felt rather like it, and never shifted. Sometimes she made shapes that looked quite beautiful to Irving, but that she inevitably had to modify for her conservative clients, who seemed to prefer what Irving thought of as the ‘squashed look’. Maybe they were ashamed. He didn’t know but felt frustrated for his mother, who couldn’t afford that luxury.
    It was she who had talked to her brother about setting Irving up. She not