Bex O’Brian

Word Count 578

It was a cold Canadian afternoon. I was thirteen, stoned, and heading home after skating with friends. I decided not to take my skates off or put my guards on for the quick walk back. The feeling of exhilaration as I tippled down the steep hill, tiny sparks flying beneath my feet, was quickly overcome by the mind-bending pain when, unable to slow my momentum, I got my skate caught in a storm grate.

I was told that the first neighbour to reach me fainted outright. I don’t know if I kept fainting or if my body was in such shock that I was removed from reality altogether. I have no memory of being taken to hospital. The next time I became aware of my surroundings, I was lying on a gurney in the hospital corridor. I had broken both my tibia and fibula, but one skate was still on. They didn’t want to remove it in case it was holding the foot together. They couldn’t check if there was further damage. In fact, they couldn’t do a damn thing for me because both my parents were out fucking other people, and I was a minor.

For four hours, I lay there waiting. That morning, I had shaved my legs. My damaged, smooth shin became something of a touchstone as nurses and doctors passed by and gently ran their fingers up my shin. There was one doctor whose touch I started to crave more than I did the appearance of my parents. He didn’t shy away from the break point. With his hand on my smooth leg, I was not a stoned child but a woman who was being given an erotic peek into the world of the male touch.

When I was being bathed as a kid, my mother would sing, “I’m hairy high and low. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. Men don’t want me, that I know.” Being little, I was anything but hairy. Still, from what I had seen of my mother, hair was looming.

When that day dawned, I had my own Ruskin moment when taking stock of the down between my legs. Although, it would be years before I took a razor to my, delightfully termed, bikini line. I doubt I even had any hair on my legs when I shaved for the first time, but that night in the hospital sealed a need in me to be hair free, and I have shaved my legs every single day for the last fifty years, even in the most trying circumstances.

I was quite the attraction while working on a documentary about the Turkana tribe of Northern Kenya when I’d lather up my legs every morning. To a people living on the edge of drought who would rather cover themselves in ochre mud than strip their skin bare, I must have been an object of ridicule.

I have shaved my legs in the Outback of Australia, the wilds of Canada, and through terrible vertigo when bending over was terrifying. I have shaved through Covid, hangovers, and the recovery from hip replacement surgery. One way or the other, I have figured out a way to drag that razor up my shin.

Some women need to put on their face. Others, like my Irish grandmother, didn’t feel human unless she was in “her stays.” I can’t exist in the world or relive that doctor’s touch unless my legs are ultra smooth.

Bex lives mostly in France with her husband and their dog. She’s been scribbling around on various projects for the better part of thirty years. She is the author of the novels Promiscuous Unbound and Radius (under the name Bex Brian) At present, she’s working on a new novel entitled, The Last Lover.