Before bed, Leonard catches a glimpse of himself in the bedroom mirror; he is wearing something unexpected. He pauses, squints his eyes, backs up, then steps closer to the mirror again. He pats his chest, happy to discover he's wearing the French revolutionary Saint-Just's human-skin-waistcoat over his striped blue pyjamas.
'Of course, of course,' he says to himself in the mirror, admiring his reflection and the fine stitching on the waistcoat. He skates his fingers over the skin; it is smooth, pale, the skin of a slut who denied Saint-Just's advances. She had her comeuppance; he had her captured, executed, and tanned, her skin stitched into a fitted waistcoat. Saint-Just was able to possess her flesh after all.
He feels his black, yellow and blue-striped penis buzz quietly to life. It has been dead a long while, but from time to time it stirs again, like someone emerging from a coma. He sits on the edge of his bed and looks at himself in the waistcoat in the mirror. He tries hard to bring to mind those black and white portraits of Saint-Just in the year twelve history textbook. He was a monster with an angelic face; he had a long nose, youthful eyes, and, depending on which depiction it was, dark curly hair. When Leonard retrieves the right image, he lies face-down on the bed, places one of his teddy bears between his legs and rocks gently to and fro.
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Bequest
Short StoryLeonard wants to bequeath his tattooed skin to the National Gallery of Australia. He has been almost completely inked by one of Australia's best contemporary artists, but he is a canvas that nobody wants. Strange things start happening to Leonard, D...
