Once there was a woman with two legs. It sounds as though she was normal as normal could be, except one of the legs could sing and the other one couldn’t. The knee had a mouth, but no eyes. As soon as the woman crossed her legs in a short skirt, the knee began with a high note and travelled down to the lowest bass. It was quite a range. There was no choice but for the voice to let itself out, though it had never been taught even the simplest of tunes. Since this phenomenon was unconventional, not to mention inconvenient, the woman took to crossing her legs with the mouth tucked inside her knee. In case she forgot herself and crossed with the voice leg on top, she was immediately and thrillingly notified of her indiscretion by a resonant High C. It didn’t take her long to make the adjustments. She also took to wearing long skirts so no one could catch sight of the happy little mouth just waiting for a chance to show off.
Because the woman got very good at her wardrobe and very disciplined about the way she sat, the mouth began to droop. The woman noticed little downturns at the corners when she dared look at what now seemed an ugly deformity, not beautiful or unique, which is what the mouth would have thought of itself had it had a brain.
The mouth began to droop with disappointment, despair even. But these emotions were short-lived. The mouth soon set itself into a grim little line that fit with all the other little lines of the knee. It made the woman joyful to see her gaping wound close over. It took a very long time for her to trust that the mouth wouldn’t reappear. She still wore the long skirts and sat right knee over left — just from habit — but she retained the memory of her former humiliation.
The voice forgot it could sing. The woman went to her death wearing long skirts and crossing right knee over left. They buried her with her right knee over left and in a long skirt because they thought of her just that way. But this isn’t the end of the story.
Once in the coffin, the little mouth woke after its long mind-mandated sleep. Without the mind telling it what it could or couldn’t do, it finally had its freedom. So the mouth detached itself from the decaying woman’s flesh, ate its way out through the wood. Up it burrowed like a mole through mounds of dirt. It hopped outside into the lonesome cemetery and with glee cried out into the darkness. “Meeeeeeeeeeeee!” it sang, from the highest note to the lowest and all the ones in between.
Kathryn Kimball grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, has an MFA and PhD, and taught writing and nineteenth-century English literature. Her translations and poems have appeared in various literary journals. She published a chapbook in 2021 and a volume of poetry in 2025 and won the “Columbia Journal” 2023 translation prize.
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