Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on May 30, 2007
Literary Imagination 2008 10(1):62-71; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm082
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A Reasonable Facsimile
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My father had beautiful feet. The toes were long and well-shaped and the arch was high. He often went barefoot or wore sandals, showing off his lovely feet. He did this with a certain vanity that only enhanced his masculinity. It was his poor feet I thought of when I tried to imagine him dead. Would his feet, I wondered, in his Catholic way of thinking, be healed of the sores and scaly skin infections that plagued his last years before he met his maker? Keeping up appearances was a cardinal point in his lace-curtain Irish approach to the world. He truly worried, unlike anybody else I’ve ever known, about what other people would think. I’m imagining him embarrassed by his feet in heaven with a barefoot Jesus. They compare their wounds like two old war buddies. Do Catholics believe that the resurrected body returns to its former glories? Does