“Magnitude” by Meredith Shepherd (Fiction ’11)
Fiction alum Meredith Shepherd’s story, “Magnitude,” was featured in Another Chicago Magazine.
Read an excerpt below.
Magnitude
A typical woman’s body is less than 10% head. I know this because, in the mid-1990s, a team of researchers used a gamma ray scanning technique to gather data on the relative weight of human body segments in a sample of college-age students. My father told me about the study before dinner one evening. I was twelve years old then. To make the findings easier for me to imagine, he grouped them into general body areas and rounded the percentages. He only gave the mean figures—the typical woman—which he’d committed to memory. From the ground up, she is 18% legs, 16% pelvis, 53% torso, 5% arms, and 8% head.
Read the rest of the story: Magnitude.
