Aside from the obviously fantastical aspect of her leg becoming a mathematical object, the characters who come to Jane's aid in the story also are obviously somewhat unreal. The first is a stranger who offers a business card reading "J.F. WIDDERSHINS / GEOMETER AND MAKER OF DIVIDERS AND POLYHEDRAL SUNDIALS". He somehow recognizes her as a person who should know mathematics (though she has become used to the catch phrase "dunno really" since intentionally suppressing her intellect):

Widdershins calls for assistance from an acquaintance named Hoodlum who describes himself as a "Rock and roller...anarcho-syndicalist and collector of irrational numbers." At one point, he points to one of the perfect unit squares in what was formerly Jane's leg and says `Which means that the diagonal of your one centimetre-sided square is the square root of two. An irrational number. It don't exist.' (I am not sure what the author meant us to make of this remark. Since the Pythagoreans, there have not been many people who insist that irrational numbers do not exist!)

The next `expert' to get a look at Jane's leg is a self-described `nuts and bolts man', differentiating himself from the `airy-fairy' mathematicians. But, he brings questionable interpretations of quantum mechanics into it, claiming for example that unless she observes her leg it does not exist. General relativity also comes into it when he suggests that her leg has become a black hole.

This story appeared in Shape-Shifter, the first collection of short stories by the actress Pauline Melville. The collection won some awards, and the story was entertaining enough to read. However, at least from my perspective of viewing it as an example of mathematical fiction, this story was not particularly special.

In fact, the only thing it really makes me think about is other stories that are somehow similar. In the way that it describes the suffering of a person who has developed a mathematical "illness", it reminds me of Connie Willis' haunting Schwarzschild Radius. Widdershins' description of mathematics as reality made me think of The Mathenauts. Moreover, the caricatured representation of the experts and the humorous encroachment of the mathematics of infinity into daily life reminded me of Art Thou Mathematics?.

Though the sentences in Melville's story are as beautifully written (if not more so) than those in the other stories mentioned above, the ideas themselves are not presented as interestingly here as in those previous works.