Dry Cleaning – New Long Leg

Post-punk
Written By Akhil Srivatsan
 
 

Your calves age you: each muscle, each sinew, a record of every mile you’ve walked, every minute you’ve stood around or milled about, every kilogram of excess weight you’ve carried. 

Consider this. Given the heart wants, well… what it wants, maybe you find your heart wanting a forty-year-old globocosmoperson. The sort of person who is from nowhere and everywhere at once – someone who moves their lips and hands and head and knees in a way that’s from no particular place in the real world – someone who wants desperately for you to know they’re not from the city or province or county you might assume they’re from. 

Have a peek at the calves of this skips-a-button-and-rolls-up-his-shirt-sleeves-about-a-quarter-of-the-way-up kind of guy, maybe on a Sunday at the beach, a date for which he makes the two of you coleslaw sandwiches that he stows in a picnic basket backdropped by a red-and-white checkered picnic cloth. As he strategically compliments the shape of your neck, ask yourself: is this man full-calved or is he stilted? The answer should tell you all you need to know about how the gears in your heart shift when under the cosh.

About why it wants what it wants: why what it wants may be a thirty-odd-year-old corporate lawyer who is often vocal about her new-found contentedness – almost pride, she wants to say? – in her decision to prioritise her career over other things in her twenties despite all the pressure to do otherwise. The sort of person who seems so at ease with who she is, with what she does to earn a living, with where she wants to be, that you conclude, mostly for your own sake, that there has to be a deep sea of suffering simmering somewhere close to the surface. As she orders you a serving of okra gumbo out of the overlong menu of a neighbourhood Lebanese café, ask yourself: if you were to circle a measuring tape around her calf at its thickest point, and divide that number by the circumference of her ankle just above the medial malleolus, will this ratio be greater than or lesser than 1.6? 

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Akhil Srivatsan
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