The body the stroke left her: rictus, claw, dragging leg, unreadable hand

texture · STANDING (YDAU)

• When: STANDING — her permanent post-stroke condition throughout YDAU
• What: The stroke's deficits are permanent, and they are the first thing anyone sees. The right side of her face is pulled over into a rictus; her right arm has atrophied into a semi-claw, its nail-extensioned fingers strapped into a black plastic brace; she walks with a dignified but godawful lurch; her speech is an overenunciated slur that sounds perpetually loaded; her handwriting is so palsied she cannot read it (Gately prints her next day's appointments in block letters). She is photic-seizure-prone — the fluttering fluorescent bulbs are why she and the other seizure-prone area AAs never attend the White Flag Group. She dresses almost entirely in black, keeps scabby golden retrievers (one with Grand Mal epilepsy), and the unruined half of the picture persists alongside the ruin: the left side of her face is very pretty, the long red hair and the body still, in Gately's phrase, sexually credible.