Odd Shaped Breasts Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey 6/1/93 There was a girl who spent most of her childhood afraid of getting large breasts. She expected it as early as age eight; the women of her mother's family were all cursed by ungraceful bustlines stuck like clay onto short torsos. But as she grew into her curse, she was dismayed to find herself even further cursed than she'd ever feared. Her breasts grew not only large but odd-shaped. The left pointed up like a sideways Dairy Queen cone. The right was round, or more ovoid; it was looser than the left, and bounced sideways when she ran forward. She showered and dressed in gym class as quickly as she could; she tried to keep her back to the other girls as much as she could, which wasn't much. She always wore thick support bras that just made her breasts look even larger. The good boys, i.e. the boys who let their gossipy sisters influence their dating choices, avoided her religiously. The bad boys welcomed her; they loved any large breasts no matter how odd-shaped. She gained a slut label, but didn't make out with anyone until after she'd become fully accepted into the bad-boy community. The bad girls were jealous of her; partly because she eventually became adept at stealing their boyfriends, partly because they were in awe of a deformity so peculiarly feminine, so peculiarly permanent; a true scar of life, far more authentic than any tattoo. The good girls hated her, naturally. They hated anybody who was different; her deformity was so OUT THERE, up front, unhidable from a gym class of the 100 snootiest girls in school, that the good girls naturally had to hate her even more than they hated other different people. With no peer-group support for academic or extracurricular work, she became disenchanted with school. The bad boys graciously entered her into the alternate reality of Southern Comfort and Winstons for lunch, which further hurt her chances of faculty support. With her college and career prospects dim indeed, her main opportunity for upward mobility was marriage. Her family took her into the city for a makeover consultation. They spent hundreds on a new wardrobe, new hair and new color scheme for her. To keep her away from the bad boys, her parents shunted her off to afternoon charm and bearing classes; these only put her in further close contact with, and harassment by, the good girls. On the day she graduated from high school, she moved in with a 22-year-old who still hung out one of the bad boys. He got a job driving a truck for his dad's company; she got a job as a fill-in dispatcher for the company, and finally became its office manager. After a few years of hearty drinking, her doctor warned her to take up a sport. Still self-conscious about her breasts, she wouldn't go to a health club or jog or swim in public. She might have died without a home exercise machine that she would use in the living room on her days off with all the curtains drawn. She never had a massage, never took her bra off in a fitting room, never wore a two-piece swimsuit, never skinny-dipped, never breast-fed her only child (a son). To the end of her days, no woman saw her odd-shaped breasts except her doctor and nurse. The only men who ever saw them were her husband and the several affairs she had over the years. Whenever she began an affair with a new lover, she undressed in the dark and would only make love under the sheets. She always told her lovers she preferred to keep a sense of mystery about her.

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