“The Color of Flesh” is a short story published in 2015 in Steve Tomasula’s only short fiction collection, Once Human. It tells the story of Yumi, a young manga artist with a prosthetic leg, who lives with Jerome, her partner, who makes life-size puppets for a living—CPR manikins and crash-test dummies that he also artfully stages for burlesque performances. One day, Yumi finds Jerome’s stash of what she calls “cripple-fuck magazines” (11) and becomes increasingly worried that he’s sexually fetishizing her for her prosthetic leg. Yumi confronts Jerome, who is in the midst of staging various body parts into intricate poses. The fight escalates and Yumi, enraged, trashes the apartment, sending artificial body parts flying everywhere. The resulting visit of two police officers, that automatically deem Yumi the victim because of her disability and Jerome the abuser because he’s black, leads to Yumi defending her partner by striking one of the officers with her prosthetic leg.

“The Color of Flesh” is unique in Tomasula’s body of work. First, as a short story, since Once Human, the collection it belongs to, is the only book of short fiction he’s published as of 2026. Second, as a quite linear narrative that clashes with his usually partly palimpsestic and fragmented texts. Third, as a new media piece, Maria Tomasula’s drawings augment the story in various ways, and the text itself is subjected to numerous typographic variations, thus providing the reader with non-traditional ways to read the narrative. If the drawings seem, at first glance, to merely illustrate the story, a closer examination of the story reveals that they relate to the narrative they are adjacent to with varying degrees of proximity, and appear, little by little, to assert themselves as narratives in their own right that sometimes greatly diverge from the one told by the text.

This possibly multimodal reading of the text echoes the content and structure of the written narrative. Anne Larue, in her article entitled “Do We Not Bleed?” “The Color of Flesh” in a Pop Cyborg World,” analyzes the story as a conversation between the center and the margins (244), exposing the relativity of classifications of gender and race (257). This analysis, which shows the dialectic potentialities of the story, may be extended to the realm of the reader’s encounter with the text, as it shows similarities with the reception of cyber- and hypertexts, which I believe to be formally and theoretically adjacent to “The Color of Flesh,” a story that demands “new strategies of reading” (Banash 19). The hybrid (multimodal and multidirectional) reading experience offered by “The Color of Flesh” mirrors its hybrid construction and unfolding: it is part traditional, part ergodic, and part hyper-reading, borrowing from Espen Aarseth’s and Katherine N. Hayles’s theories of reading applied to cybertexts and digital media.

A Multimedia Story

The strict linearity of the storyline of “The Color of Flesh” might initially seem odd to a reader familiar with Tomasula’s work, as his narratives are often marked by more or less radical forms of fragmentation, palimpsest, and ergodicity, which might be broadly defined as the use of narrative maze-like strategies. Moreover, readers expecting from a collection entitled Once Human to read futuristic tales taking place in a dramatically proleptic after are bound to face slight disappointment insofar as Yumi’s story deals with a more nuanced form of posthumanity than the title of the collection suggests. The setting and the characters are quite mundane, and the scene could easily be set in our early 21^st century. Rather than an atmosphere of radical estrangement, the background of the story conjures up an impression of domesticity and familiarity. The Shakespearean intertext¹, as well as the evocation of J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel, Crash, confirm the inscription of the story in a rather classic context, albeit subversively so: Anne Larue highlights the story’s reflection on “cyborg philosophy” (257) and its ties with a new exciting future by “conjur[ing] up the new queer face of our world” (241), notably through the aforementioned intertext (246). As a result, the story may be interpreted as a political reflection on gender presentation and equality, discrimination, tokenization and, ultimately, on intersectionality.

From a formal perspective, “The Color of Flesh” has an ambiguous place in Tomasula’s body of work, and more specifically within the Once Human collection. The story is augmented with black and white drawings reminiscent of manga produced by Maria Tomasula. However, they are more than mere illustrations; Anne Larue rather calls them “illuminations:” “the visual becomes fully an integral part of the text” (243). Actual illuminations, directly inspired by the traditionally medieval practice, were drawn by Tomasula for the short story “Medieval Times,” (200-250) notably one composed of a peasant, a satyr, and the golden arches of the McDonald’s sign among other anachronistic figures and objects. “The Color of Flesh,” however, is the only story in the collection to contain as many as fifteen images, and the only one to feature a form of sequential art like manga.

It’s not the first time Steve Tomasula uses sequential art in his fiction. His first book of fiction, VAS: An Opera in Flatland, opened with a comic book bubble that ushered the reader into the novel. The content of the bubble, “First pain,” (9) is clearly part of the narrative that starts, on the next page, with a more traditional block of text: “Then knowledge: a paper cut” (10). In “The Color of Flesh,” the narrative told through text and the one told in the drawings mostly run parallel to each other but, sometimes, diverge slightly, the pictures offering an askew, sometimes analeptic, proleptic or dissociative version of the story, changing the reader’s appreciations of its content or understanding of its substance.

The drawings in “The Color of Flesh” might be considered as Yumi’s attempts to supply meaning to what she is experiencing when language fails. The third person narrator’s use of internal focalization, with Yumi as a focalizer, allows the reader full access to her constantly edited thoughts. The frequent use of epanorthoses, anaphoras, and polyptotons gives the reader the impression that the text is constantly in progress:

“That is, a leg wasn’t a uniform. Or a pair of shoes. It was more intimate than that. More intimate than even dentures. Almost a part of her although it was apart from her. Or maybe it was more correct to say its apartness was a part of her. Which isn’t to say that she ever confused the leg she wore—is that the right word?—with herself. There was her leg, then there was her other leg. Her not-leg. And her not-leg, like the Band-Aid, was always a pale shade of? what?—not white, not the white of a ghost or a dead person, but not the color of flesh either, not if her other leg, her non-prosthetic leg, was the color of flesh. Whatever that meant” (2).

The phrase that gives its title to the story, “The Color of Flesh,” actually meaning the color of skin in the context of the narrative, contributes to the story’s and Yumi’s wider reflection on the inadequacy of language, especially when it comes to identity politics:

“Another girl was fitted for a charity leg: a black girl, as they were called then, even though everyone knew blacks weren’t black any more than whites were white. (…) But trying on the new, old donated leg with its straps and buckles, the girl looked black because the leg was white, that is, a vinyl, orangey color” (2-3).

Yumi’s reflection on the societal role of colors as tools of societal categorization—and, by extension, of discrimination—is echoed in her always vain search for the right word conveyed in free indirect speech by the narrator when she talks about Jerome:

“He had pulled the rug out from under her. From under them. From under whatever it was that they had had. Or what she had thought they had had or what she had thought he had thought they had had and that was the most dizzying thing of all—the idea that what they had actually had was a nothing. A void. An absence—at best a gap between what she thought and what he meant by “love,” a disconnect”(7).

At the end of the story, she mentally conflates the sexist slur “cunt” and the ableist one “cripple” (“the c-word flooded her with adrenaline” 20), effectively commenting on intersectional issues by showing the imprecisions and inadequacies of language. The political comes up to the surface of the story in its content and in its form, “The Color of Flesh” echoing the dark hours of discrimination in the US both diegetically (through Jerome’s confrontation with the police officers for example) and formally (through the vacillating and fragmented narrative that the new media form chosen by Tomasula offers). Anne Larue analyzes the political in the story in light of the figure of the cyborg, “a new human who refuses to be unified under a scheme consistent with the majority (…) made of juxtaposed identities,” much like Yumi (245). The presence of visual media as integral parts of the story contributes to extending this reflection on intersectionality and the fundamental hybridity of identities by questioning the adequacy of the (traditional) text form to deal with narratives, especially when they’re steeped in identity and sexual politics.

In the story, Jerome is described as a performance artist “of sorts” (4) whose work is steeped in questions of visibility and representation. His defense upon Yumi questioning him about his porn collection is a series of verbal epanorthoses that associate artistic creation to lying, reviving the century-old debate on art, illusion and the real that has occupied the human mind by way from Plato, Clément Rosset and countless others.

""I did put them there,” he admitted, “but I didn’t hide them. Not if by hide you mean lie, not if by lie you mean mislead, not if by mislead you mean veil…,"" “not if by veil you mean mask,” “not if by mask you mean act,” “or con, or color, or cover up, or cloud,” “not if by act you mean deceive instead of tell a poetic truth or protect” (12).

Anne Larue adds that the story features a “gendered treatment in the occupation of space,” (247) a concern that is transferred to the space of the page. By making Yumi’s form of artistic creation of choice, manga, an integral part of the story, Tomasula offers a metafictional commentary on issues of literary transgression within that very space, especially given the majority of mangaka seem to be male.

Transgression and Discrepancies on the Page

The page in “The Color of Flesh” is a collaborative space. At the end of the story, at the bottom of the last page, right after the last sentence, artist Maria Tomasula and designer Robert Sedlack are credited along with Steve Tomasula as having participated in the elaboration of the story. All three creators’ names are on the same level, in the same font size, signaling an act of co-creation or, at the very least, of artistic collaboration. This is a unique occurrence in the collection as the other contributions, like Maria Tomasula’s in “Medieval Times” for example, are only mentioned in the form of a list in the paratextual space between the title page and the beginning of the collection per se. In “The Color of Flesh,” the peritextual reference is situated in the space dedicated to the body of the text and appears as a slight unveiling of—and attention given to—the creative process. As such, what is normally peritextual finds its way within the space traditionally reserved to the narrative itself, overflowing from the margins, much like Tomasula’s drawings do: that is the case the speech bubble that contains the word “flesh” of the title (1), as well as the drawing of Yumi’s cyborg alter ego kicking the aforementioned bubble (1), and the two drawings of other versions of Yumi on page two, the protagonist recognizable by her barely-there leg. As the story progresses, Tomasula’s drawings occupy more and more space, to the point of sometimes covering the page numbers (for example on page thirteen), but never in a stable, continuous way (the page numbers reappear after this erasure). In a parallel movement, the typography and the layout of the text keeps on changing, signaling the plasticity of the text-image relationship: this may be observed initially on page six, the single-column text suddenly becoming laid out in two columns, or on page ten and eleven, where the typographical variations and font-size changes are the most visible. The relationship between text and image in “The Color of Flesh” provides a metafictional reflection that is ultimately integrated into the story itself. The drawings, much like the metalepses that punctuate the text (“and this is where our story really begins,” 1), draw the reader’s attention to the effacement of textual boundaries in favor of a hybrid narrative, both textual and visual.

In the story, the reader is gradually let in on the artificiality of the story, and on the performative aspect of representation. Take the following description of a young girl Yumi observes trying on a prosthetic as a child: “the girl’s skin was more coffee-colored while Yumi’s own skin was, well, coffee-colored too. Or call it tea. Or bamboo, if that helps you imagine it more” (3). The metalepsis at the end of the passage draws the attention of the reader toward the inescapable inadequacy of representation, insofar as it is performed by language, itself considered as inadequate. However, visual representation is also deemed as fundamentally flawed: the color of Yumi’s and Jerome’s skins, for example, can only be rendered on the page by shades of gray because of the color constraints of the black and white manga form.

The story even goes as far as offering a reflection on the construction of representation in fiction. This is achieved through the use of the epanorthoses I have previously highlighted in the first section of this article, as well as through the constant use of modifiers (“her new old leg” on page three, “the black-not-black girl” and “his own other voice” on page four, and so on) that make the text always seem almost unfinished, in the process of being elaborated at the same time as it is being read. This is replicated in some of the drawings that also appear unfinished, for example on pages four and five. As a result, the text seems to be constantly in progress. This idea is reinforced by the previously mentioned typographic and layout variations that give the impression that the narrative instances are trying on different styles for size, inasmuch as those often can’t be explained by changes in the diegesis.

The varying degrees of disconnection between the text and the drawings also further engage the reader in a reflection on the elaboration of representation in fiction. Page fourteen is a good example of the discrepancies between the two media. The text describes Yumi symbolically morphing into the manga version of herself (a “gigantic robot,” described on page twelve, and only represented in a drawing on page thirteen), in a fit of rage, wreaking havoc in the apartment, while the drawing adjacent to the text shows her helplessly weeping on a couch, surrounded by adorable forest animals typical of manga destined to a female readership. The text corresponding to the latter image only appears on the following page: “She flung herself onto the couch and leg go a heavy sob” (15). The discrepancy created with this unexpected adjacency exposes and questions the artificiality of representation and its inherent inadequacy.

This type of gesture is typical of Tomasula’s fiction, which Lance Olsen describes as “function[ing] as a performance of disclosure, of unconcealment” (215). The text-image hybrid Tomasula creates in “The Color of Flesh,” according to Olsen, “call[s] the participant’s attention to her or his own engagement within the unfolding event of [[reading]], and hence to his or her own engagement within the constantly unfolding reminder that [[reading]] is nothing if not a mode of [[writing]]” (216). Olsen notes that the collaboration between text and image the author sets up contributes to “open[ing] a passage between levels that result[s] in their interpenetration, or mutual contamination,” (219) that is to say, to enter in a form of ontological metalepsis, as it was theorized by Marie-Laure Ryan, that Olsen quotes in his essay. The new media collaboration in “The Color of Flesh” thus simultaneously “jam[s]” the narrative and opens it to new possibilities (Olsen 219).

This reflection on representation is akin to that offered by Japanese artist Mari Katayama whose self-portraits both construct and deconstruct rules and patterns of representation. Much like Tomasula who, to borrow Françoise Palleau-Papin’s words, “clutter[s] his text with repetitions and echoing patterns, and immerses readers in an experience of dissociation,” (261) Katayama, who was born with a congenital disease that led to the amputation of her legs when she was nine years old, saturates her self-portrait with prosthetics and hand-sewn objects, making her real—the term being of course debatable—body parts difficult to make out.

Both Tomasula and Katayama’s integration of the visual, post-ornamental form in a narrative that questions gender norms and society’s normative disempowerment of disabled people lead to a reflection on transgression. In a CNN article about her work, Katayama’s self-portraits have been called “provocative,” something that echoes Yumi’s refusal to be reduced to a commodity in a world pervaded by the porn industry and, to an extent, the porn aesthetic.

Hybrid Reading Experience

The Tomasulas’ collaborative play with two languages (textual and visual) culminates in their mutual contamination. The text’s linguistic and diegetic play with hyperbole, treated with humor by Steve Tomasula, is echoed in Maria Tomasula’s exaggerations of diegetic clues in her manga-style drawings: her anthropomorphic flower (8), her reinvention of Yumi and Jerome as cyborgs accompanied by a ghost-like figure (5) (that Anne Larue identifies as the recurring manga figure of the monster of doubt, page 247), and the towering robotic figures of the policemen (Tomasula 19). Conversely, the drawings’ concern with hybridity and the awareness thereof is reflected in the text’s relationship to the symbolic: for example, when Jerome snaps off the penis from a manikin in the middle of a fight that he is losing with his girlfriend and may make him feel emasculated (10), or when the narrator mentions “the manga-style drawings of [Yumi’s] face that she sometimes included in crowd scenes” (8), echoing her need to be seen by her partner.

In this era of new media, hypertextual and cybertextual possibilities, the reader is further encouraged to question the frame of the story and, more generally, the frame of the book, as the author and designer use the page to experiment, precisely, with the shape of the frame, on page fifteen for example, where three frames are drawn onto the page, visually splitting the text. This reflection on space is echoed in the text that is contained within those boxes, as Yumi observes “the narrow rooms too small to hold her rage” (15).

Moreover, the references to media that are outside of the text—Carlo Collodi’s 1883 frightening original version of the Pinocchio fairy tale, or Constantin Brancusi’s 1928 sculpture Bird in Space---obliquely find their way into Tomasula’s drawings, respectively on page three and on page nine, the dangling limbs reminding the reader of a terrifying Gepetto’s workshop (3), and the thorn of the rose recalling Brancusi’s arched blade (9). Finally, the extension from page 20 to 26 of the black surfaces to most of the page, the black engulfing the usual white background as well as the page numbers, encourages the reader to go one step further in their questioning of the necessity of the page and of the ways in which they engage with it, in short, of how the page as it is represented and occupied affects their reading experience.

“The Color of Flesh” thus seems to function metafictionally as a tool to question and, possibly, to better understand systems of reception in the era of the new media novel. In his introduction to the collection of essays he edited on the work of Tomasula, David Banash states that “Tomasula’s novels emphasize a radical openness to other media while still managing to retain their formal consistency,” thus “developing the form of the novel,” (12) and “forcing readers to reinvent or simply improvise acts of reading” (20). This reinvention might come from an understanding of the specific reading experience provided by the story at hand as partly ergodic.

David Banash, Kathi Inman Berens, and Pawel Frelik have all used various aspects of Espen Aarseth’s concept of ergodicity to qualify the experience of reading Tomasula’s fiction. I would like to quote Lance Olsen’s assessment, as it seems most apt when it comes to “The Color of Flesh”:

“we are habituated to conceptualize pages as meticulous Windexed┬« windows through which we tumble into narrative worlds. If we (and [[ I ]] use the term loosely) come to think about the page at all, it is typically as we sit composing at our computer screens within the context of what Bill Gates has guided us into believing a page should be and look like by means of Microsoft Word---its margins, its movements, its fonts, its flatness---which, of course, Gates unthinkingly absorbed from those five hundred years of print history. Tomasula’s texts wrench the non-ergodic reading process by making reading a non-trivial visceral event, the foreignness of the reading/writing moment (and hence of meaning-making itself) foreign once more” (213).

This foreignness is what drives Olsen, but also Flore Chevaillier, in her essay entitled “Experiment with textual materiality” collected in the same tome, to understand Tomasula’s works as forms of fiction that asks the reader to ask what is on the page, to enter into a dialogue with the object and their past experiences as a reader (possibly in the form of expectations or intertextual networks) that they are invited to perform. The term performing seems to fit particularly well as Tomasula’s and more generally the new fiction novel reader, is alternatively called a “participant” by Olsen (213), a “consumer” or “user” by Aarseth (1), and a “recipient” by Ulrike Küchler, who deems them spurred by the fictional object to “intervene creatively” (205).

According to Lance Olsen, “In order to begin interacting with Tomasula’s new-media novel, the participant is made conscious (…) that he or she has entered an ontologically metaleptic field of play (and pain?), where s/he is both prosthetically inside and corporeally outside the text, here having infiltrated t[here]” (220). This awareness of the reader is conducted in “The Color of Flesh” by the reader’s ergodic, non-linear, choice-driven, non-exhaustive experience of going back and forth between Steve Tomasula’s text and Maria Tomasula’s drawings. In that sense, the reading experience of “The Color of Flesh” appears to be hybrid, much like the story itself.

If the story lends itself to both close and ergodic readings, I would like to suggest that, as an “information-intensive environment,” it might also lend itself to hyper reading, as it was defined by N. Katherine Hayles in How We Think. Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis:

“Hyper reading, which includes skimming, scanning, fragmenting, and juxtaposing texts, is a strategic response to an information-intensive environment. (…) Hyper reading correlates (…) with hyper attention, a cognitive mode that has a low threshold for boredom, alternates flexibly between different information streams, and prefers a high level of stimulation. Close reading, by contrast, correlates with deep attention (…) focuses on a single cultural object for a relatively long time” (12).

In “The Color of Flesh”, the reader is faced with information presented in a wide variety of shapes, both when it comes to the text or to the drawings. Both forms are endowed with a significant cultural and symbolic charge and references, while playing with various levels of self-reflection, constantly drawing the attention of the reader toward the artificiality of the story while still fueling their affective reading of the text through the use of humor, for example. The hybridization of the linear textual narrative with the non-linear visual narrative creates myriad possibilities for the reader, who is then encouraged to hybridize their modes of reading. It might be considered as a fruitful gesture in the era of attention economy, in the sense that, much like cybertexts and hypertexts, it demands a form of hyper attention on the part of the reader.

The presence of Maria Tomasula’s drawings in “The Color of Flesh” is a conversation between text and image that opens up a reflection on their reception in new media narratives. Throughout the story, the text’s font, layout, and size change, at first glance randomly, or even erratically, seemingly without a diegetic reason. Tomasula’s drawings, that initially seem to merely illustrate the story, soon start relating to the narrative at varying degrees of proximity. Although this type of practice isn’t entirely surprising to the reader of Tomasula, it is nonetheless unique in the way it presents the interconnectedness of two forms of media with high degrees of narrativization. These produce two sometimes complementary, sometimes compatible, sometimes even competing stories with which the reader ergodically interacts.

This is made possible by Steve Tomasula’s practice of hybridity, both in the space of the page and even more materially with the book as an object. After publishing multimedia novels and various hypertexts, Once Human might be considered as a return to a more traditionally American form, far less interactive: that of the collection of short stories. In “The Color of Flesh,” however, he continuously bends conventions, but he does so within the traditional rectangle of the page. The book format is never abandoned or deemed insufficient, and the new media proliferation takes place within the constraints of the traditional object.

This almost Oulipian exploration of the possibilities of hybridization within the fixed frame of the short story collection opens up numerous and original strategies of resistance to the rigidity of the format. Despite the general frame being left undisturbed, Tomasula blurs the Genettian textual boundaries, words and images circulating past the usual thresholds of the text: the peritextual margins are invaded, the intertext seeps in, and the metatext lies in wait in the metafictional aspects of the story, while forms of digital hypertextuality loom.

These transgressions, whether symbolic or material, allow in return for a hybrid reading experience, linear and non-linear, informed by traditional patterns, augmented by the possibilities offered by new media, and potentialized by the hyper attention demanded of the reader. The breaches that open up between the different layers and levels of the text are as many lines of communication potentially traversed by the reader, whose hybrid reading experience associates hyper and close reading in a movement that both identifies the specificities of each media and conflates their effects.

Works Cited:

Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Banash, David. “Introduction”, in Banash, David (ed.), Steve Tomasula. Steve Tomasula. The Art and Science of New Media Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2015.

Chevaillier, Flore. “Experiment with Textual Materiality: Page, Author, and the Medium in the Works of Steve Tomasula, Michael Martone and Eduardo Kac,” College Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think. Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Küchler, Ulrike. “New Media—New Literacy? The Digital Reader’s Creative Challenges,” Metamorphoses of (New) Media. Cambridge Scholars, 2015.

Larue, Anne. “Do We Not Bleed?” “The Color of Flesh” in a Pop Cyborg World”, in Banash David (ed.), Steve Tomasula. The Art and Science of New Media Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 244-257.

Ogura, Junko and Lo, Andrea. “Sewn Limbs and Surreal Backdrops in the Art of Mari Katayama,” CNN, March 3, 2020. Accessed February 9, 2026.

Olsen, Lance. “Ontological Metalepses, Unnatural Narratology, and Locality: A Politics of the [[Page]] in Tomasula’s VAS & TOC”, in Banash, David (ed.), Steve Tomasula. The Art and Science of New Media Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 209-223.

Palleau-Papin, Françoise. “Enumeration and the Form of the Short Story in Steve Tomasula’s Once Human,” in Banash, David (ed.), Steve Tomasula. The Art and Science of New Media Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 259-272.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Shakespeare, William. 1596-1597. The Merchant of Venice. Dover, 1995.

Tomasula, Steve. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Tomasula, Steve and Tomasula, Maria. “The Color of Flesh,” Once Human: Stories. Fiction Collective 2, 2013, pp. 1-24.

Tomasula, Steve and Tomasula, Maria. “Medieval Times,” Once Human: Stories. Fiction Collective 2, 2013, pp. 200-250.

Editors note: This essay has been subject to a single peer review process.

Footnotes

1. “We have noticed in the text the importance of the Shakesperian intertext: Jerome tells a story of his youth when he was compared to Othello and accused of stealing a scooter because he looks like Othello. From the beginning of the story, it has been a real tour de force not to reveal in the drawings that Jerome is Black. For example, he is represented in shadow; nobody can notice exactly the color of his flesh. The “defense” of Jerome against Yumi’s accusations is a “performance,” with an implicit reference to As You Like It: “all the world is a stage.” Jerome is a performer and for him the revelation of the truth is not possible without a theatrical device. The quote from The Merchant of Venice [“If you prick us, do we not bleed?” (Act III, Scene 1)] is all the more important: the title, “The Color of flesh,” has its roots in Shakespeare’s drama, and the allusion of cutting the flesh and bleeding when cut is precisely what happens to Yumi when she cuts herself” (Larue 249-250). ↩