Legs
rosanna armendariz
Agnes the old maid, everyone's frumpy lumpy next-door neighbor, is sitting in front of her TV watching her legs turn blue. The heavy lycra support hose she wears all day aren't helping, and her health insurance won't cover the surgery to have the varicose veins removed.
She gets off the couch and walks stiff-legged to the television screen. When she touches it, her finger goes through without resistance, like piercing a membrane. The Simpsons are on, and now she's touching Bart. "Hey, stop poking me, man!" he says in his high-pitched cartoon boy voice. She laughs and thinks that it would be fun to be there, too. So, she climbs onto the entertainment center and pushes her lumpy body through the tube. Cartoons don't get varicose veins. In Bart's world, Agnes's legs are smooth and they stretch like rubber.
Rosanna grew up in Brooklyn , New York and later moved to the US/Mexico border region where she attended the University of Texas at El Paso and earned a BA in sociology and an MFA in creative writing. Her short stories have appeared in Callaloo, Bryant Literary Review, and Moon Journal. She has poems in Poetic Voices without Borders (Gival Press 2005), Illya's Honey, Thorny Locust, and BorderSenses. One of her short fiction pieces has been selected for inclusion in the next GirlChild Press anthology—Just Like a Girl: A Manifesta!