Legs - Lila Bovenzi

You know what I hate? Those razor commercials with that stupid annoying song. You know, the one that goes, “She’s got it! Yeah baby, she’s got it!” and is about Aphrodite or whatever. Like shaving has to be some beautiful, sensual act that turns you into a perfect goddess with sixty-inch legs that shine like a bald guy’s forehead every time you descend the staircase at your latest gala wearing a ridiculously short dress.

But it’s not the song that gets me; it’s the dress. No it’s not the dress. Women have a right to wear whatever they want, even if it means everyone at the gala can definitely see your underwear as you descend said staircase holding a glass of champagne between your perfectly-manicured fingernails that you paid way too much money for. Anyway it’s not the dress; it’s the legs. Those damn, beautiful legs.

I always wonder when I see those commercials: where do they find these women? Is there a tree somewhere that women grow on, women whose feet have never touched the earth below, who have never gotten the chance to fall or stumble or scrape their knees, but whose legs sprout from the hips down until they’re ripe for the picking, and producers come and pluck the ones they like best, lay them gently on the ground, slather their legs in baby oil, strap on a pair of heels, and send them off to the studio? If that tree does exist, then I pity those women.

Really, I do. I mean, sure I’ll never be able to wear a dress like that, or at least if I did, people wouldn’t turn around to stare at me as I descended that staircase because I looked good, or even to see my underwear, but to gape in disgust at the patchwork remnants of injuries that runs all the way from that bruise I got last week on my thigh when I bumped into the side of a table, to the scars from mosquito bites on my ankles that I wouldn’t stop picking at.

But even though there are some scars I regret, like the ones I got from slashing a blade across my skin until it hurt enough for me to forget everything else that hurt, most of them I don’t. I’m glad I didn’t grow on some tree, and that my feet have touched the earth, and that my legs look more like a map than a blank sheet of paper. Because it means I have proof that I have existed, so on nights where I lay awake and wonder whether I'm even alive, I can look down at my knee, trace along the scar I got when I was eight and I went down a water slide with no water, smile, and say for certain, “Yes, I’m alive.”

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Lila Bovenzi graduated from the University of Rhode Island with a Bachelor of Arts, specializing in Spanish and creative writing. Her work has won multiple university awards and has been previously published in the Bryant Literary Review and the URI Magazine. She specializes in literary fiction with themes of magical realism.