In that moment, I believed her more than I had ever believed anything in my entire short life. She was the only person in the world who gave me attention, the only person who did not find me odd or anemic or too preoccupied with things no one else cared about.
She stepped toward me, till she was only an apple’s distance away. I stared at her eyes as hard as I knew how. I could smell her skin. Lavender soap and the sweat of a girl and blood on her lips. The smell of the apple. The smell of a boy who has no idea what will happen next, a feeling I would long for the rest of my life.
She plunged her teeth into the apple, enough to hold it in her mouth without using her hands. Her stitches stretched and she bloodied her own lips further.
Then she waited for me to do what she had instructed me to do. My body felt like one human tremor. But there was nothing I would not do for Aurora — then or now, for the rest of my life — so I took my dumb little fist and pulled my dumb little arm back and socked the apple out of Aurora’s mouth.
Her head snapped to one side. She made not a sound.
Blood everywhere.
Stitches unsutured.
Mouth unholy in its wound.
She turned to face me. She smiled. Monstrous in her beauty. The laugh that came from that ragged hole of her clattered my little spine.
I was scared — but I was also drawn to her. So I smiled too.
Then she started to peel off her bloodied dress, right in front of me. For a moment, all I could see was her white slip and the form of her, a tiny drop of blood having made it to the crest of her breasts, then just beginning.
For the rest of my life, that image of Aurora would become my understanding of things. And I knew that moment would shape my life’s devotion to her.
My life, and possibly hers, were shaped in that childhood room.
—
Much later, when Aurora lost her leg in the war, my devotion took material form. I could not bear the weight of her lost leg. In my nightmares I watched her try to walk and fall, try to stand and fall, try to move at all and fall again, like a statue collapsing but infinitely worse.
So I set about to design and build her a new leg.
First, I studied the history. And there was history — which surprised me.
In ancient Egypt, the wholeness of the human form was important in the afterlife as well as the living realm. Some of these objects have survived to be rediscovered in our time. The Greville Chester Great Toe was made from linen, glue, and plaster.
The horse-hoofed prosthetic leg was popular in China.
The Middle Ages were filled with peg legs and iron legs.
Tezcatlipoca, the ancient Aztec god of creation, lost his foot in a battle with the Earth Monster. He is often depicted with an obsidian mirror where his flesh foot used to live.
In the mid-to-late 1500s, Ambroise Paré invented the modern prosthetic leg. He is also considered to be the father of modern surgery. He was a barber, a surgeon, and an anatomist for four different French kings. In addition to improving amputation techniques, and thus survival rates, he developed functional limbs for all parts of the body. The adjustable harness and hinge knee, with lock control, are still used today.
In the United States, the demand for prosthetic legs burgeoned during and after the Civil War. James Edward Hanger, a Confederate engineer — and, it is said, the first amputee of the Civil War — designed and patented a prosthetic leg while he was convalescing, a device known as the Hanger Limb. Hanger and other prosthetic pioneers, including the Salem Leg Company of Massachusetts, marketed a range of devices, extolling their comfort, strength, durability, convenience, and elegance. Their products were notable for the use of sockets and sheet metal and steel, enhancing their steadiness, smoothness, and silence; they were often lined with leather dyed to resemble flesh, and often included hair.
It would be no exaggeration to say that I became obsessed with the design and construction of Aurora’s leg.
I began by studying the basic form of the Salem Leg, designed in 1862. I admired especially the joints and the smooth lines of the foot. For Aurora, however, the leg had to have something quite different: it must be beautiful. Beautiful enough to be its own objet, an artwork worthy of museum display. I used rosewood, a favorite of ours—A wood with blood in it, she joked. After devising the basic construction of my own version — its own formidable task — I set about hand-carving the wooden frame, adorning it with roses and vines and gold inlay. I hand-painted bloodred toenails as well. And, after weeks of labor, when I was finally satisfied that it was worthy of her gaze, I bundled and wrapped this precious object and sent it over the ocean to her.
Of course, I never saw her reaction when she opened the package. And she never spoke of it, except in one brief letter she sent by return:
It is said that god created Eve from tsela, 
traditionally translated as “one of his ribs.” And yet the term can also mean a curve, a limp, an adversity. Not necessarily a rib at all. Think of that. Perhaps Eve is something more like a limp — in which case we might do well to consider her power to be larger than life, as I have experienced my own limp as a source of insurmountable creative and erotic power.
—
With my first monument commission, I bought Aurora a boardinghouse.
I devoted my life to creating larger-than-life statues.
There are times when I think they are all for her.
My dream manifester, my vision-maker Frédéric,
Do you know what I wanted to be as a girl, my apple?
A nun! Is that not priceless?
On my childhood journey across the Atlantic, aboard the German liner Frisia, I met — well, I suppose it would be more accurate to say I pestered — a Dominican nun. The woman was a mere four years my senior, yet the distance between ten and fourteen in a girl is vast. I know the same is true of boys and men and every creature in between, but the distance plays itself out differently on the bodies of girls. What blooms there — supposedly between our legs, but really everywhere in the world, drawing us to it as if we were starving children — is desire. There is no desire greater than the desire of the child. One must not speak of it. One must not admit it. We hurry to create taboos around what first emerged in us in place of tails: that incredible world where piss, shit, cum, and life fully live. Otherwise, girl children would people the earth with devils!
The steamer carried around ninety first-class passengers, one hundred and fifty or so in second class, and about six hundred in third and steerage. I know these figures because I positively hounded Endora, the Dominican nun, and she had made it her business to know everything she could about the souls who would share our passage. I had fixed my eye upon her — you will love this, my love — from the moment I spied her travel trunk being loaded when we were still ashore. It was a simple trunk, covered in horsehair, but nothing about that journey was more mesmerizing to me than that trunk, as if held within it were the real object of my girl-curiosity, the nun’s story.
Before the ship had sailed, I found my way into her line of sight, and soon into her confidence — and, by the time we reached your statue’s city, I had decided that I too would become a nun. You laugh! But I was dead serious. And I think you know how formidable my desire was, even as a child. What interested me about the nun’s story were her descriptions of caring for gravely ill hospital patients. Diseased bodies and horrible sores and broken bones, illnesses so horrific that nurses had to wear protective clothing and tend to patients by reaching their gloved hands through gauze curtains.