Sophia Burnett

His True Dimensions Sophia Burnett

"I resemble a Madame Tussaud's waxwork after a fire. The heat of the bomb forever claimed my eyebrows and gave me an erratic hairline. All that remains of my left ear is the orifice. Hot shrapnel pinched ferociously at the soft clay of my baby face, it took most of the flesh from my lips on the left side, leaving my teeth exposed in a gruesome snarl. My nose is a mess of flattened skin on the right side, and on the left an absence of cartilage makes morbidly obvious the skull that lies beneath. The skin over my face and neck looks like a hastily carved gammon roast. I have no left eyelid, no lashes. But I have my eyes." A man can endure great suffering as long as there is no glimpse at what his life could have been, no foray-however rapid-into that adjacent world inhabited by a version of himself that was never harmed, never abandoned, never longing for something unattainable. This is the story of James Huntington, a man who lingers in that adjacent world at his own peril.