All the Horrible Girliness

Finger

LOP OFF

One day, Jaime woke up and the fourth finger on her left hand felt all tingly. The next morning she couldn't feel it at all. The next day, she couldn't feel it again, so she picked up the phone first thing, while she was still in bed, to call the doctor about it, and her fourth finger broke off.

Completely. Off.

It clattered to her hardwood floor next to the nightstand, like wood hitting wood. She spread her left hand out before her eyes, stupified and grossed out, but there was no blood. She stared at the place where her fourth finger had been. Where it had broken off, right at the palm, there was only skin, smoothed thinly over a nub of bone, soft and sensitive like brand-new baby skin. She thought of screaming, but instead she rubbed the new skin a bit, pierced it carefully with a fingernail, and practiced picking up things without it. It wasn't so bad.

BREAK UP

Brad broke up with her, he said, because the whole missing finger thing was just too weird. This announcement shocked her, certainly; she and Brad were at the five-year mark in their relationship and she'd been sensing that he was going to do a ring thing soon. However, she didn't lose her composure when her finger fell off and she certainly wasn't going to freak out over this. Losing a boyfriend, even a long-term one like Brad with a good job and a wide smile, wasn't anything like losing a finger, like seeing a part of yourself that you've had forever just fall off. She watched him go through the motions of a breakup, the small tears, the soap-opera hug with the last squeeze and pat on the back, the walking away with slumped shoulders, the forgetting of his jacket. This jacket felt heavy in her hands when she picked it up. She was supposed to raise the jacket to her face and smell him, the cologne he wore, maybe throw the jacket in rage to the floor or cut it into bits with scissors. She was supposed to do the normal breakup stuff, go through the motions, but instead she felt in his pockets and found the little velvet box. The ring was pretty, a simple solitaire, a little less than what he could afford but she would have really dug it. She would have cried, if she were still going through the motions of a whole-handed life. Now she took the pretty shiny trinket out and touched the smooth stretch of skin over the ghost of her fourth finger. It was cold and wouldn't balance there. It fell off a few times before she set it back in the velvet box, shoved the box back into the pocket of his jacket, and called his cell phone. "You forgot your jacket," she said, dull and without even a lilt of heartbreak. When he returned, he looked at her eyes, hoping for a hint at whether she'd found the ring. She smiled and told him to drive safely.

ABORT, ABORT

Jaime worked in an office as an envelope stuffer, but even she could tell there was more than a little bit of metaphor going on here. Her mother, for one, lost her mind.

For the first couple of weeks, people liked to ask about the finger. Where was the finger now? Jaime had to admit that she'd left the finger where it had landed and rolled, under the bed. No, she hadn't gone to the doctor. It didn't hurt, there were no white spots indicating leprosy, and nothing else seemed to be going numb. Besides, it wasn't so hard to do things without that finger. She wondered why she had ever needed it at all. It would have been harder to go about things without a pinky, perhaps, but day by day it became easier and easier to live without the ring finger.

Which caused her to wonder about the rest of her body. What was needed, and what could proabably just drop off?

MISSILE COMMAND

People stopped caring about the finger. Most people didn't notice. She daydreamed about other body parts losing sensation. Of removing her ears when she wanted quiet. Of having different-sized boobs that clicked on and came off, packed in foam. She wondered how she would redesign her closet space. If this kind of freedom would require special IKEA furniture. In a panic, she ran to a junk drawer and found an Allen wrench, tried it out on her coffee table legs, and discovered that she could use it just fine without the fourth finger on her left hand. She took the coffee table completely apart and stacked the pieces on the balcony. It turned out, all of Jamie's furniture could be taken apart with an Allen wrench. She did this. While taking her bed apart, she found her fourth finger. It was stiff and hard and the color of light wood veneer.

In two hours her apartment was flat. All the bookshelves and tables and dressers and such were reduced to their individual parts. She stepped gingerly between these pieces of bigger things and found her fourth finger, threw it and the Allen wrench into the garbage disposal and listened to it break.

The next morning, there was a silence she could not explain. It followed her. Irked her. She hadn't realized, until this day, that there had been a cadence to her walk, a thrum in her temples. She hadn't known what it was like to be without this drumbeat until she woke with it gone. Without it, she tripped over her own feet over smooth concrete. Her arms ceased swinging naturally with her walk.


ANDROID LUST


Brad slept fitfully. He dreamed of girls made of tin, dancing on yellow brick roads to goth/industrial music. He dreamed of taking them down into the grass under trees that grew lunchpails, of kissing their hard cold tin skin and pushing into them through holes that scraped and tore at him.

In the morning, he rolled over and, on the pillow beside him was a throbbing, moving, cheerful human heart.

He shrieked, rolled away, kneeled on the side of his bed and watched it from there. It pulsed and throbbed, attached to nothing and nothing moving through it, jerking off damn near enough to fall off the pillow. He reached out with one finger and touched it, gently and then with increasing pressure. It was tough and hard and dry under his hand, the movement inside unlike any power he could imagine. He momentarily burst into tears, then, collecting himself, decided this human heart on his bed might be a kind of glitch, something that would go away if he just left the room awhile. Like a glitch in the programming of his brain.

Slowly he rose, pulled on his bathrobe, and went to the kitchen for breakfast. He had Wheaties with milk and two spoonfuls of sugar, a short glass of orange juice and a Power Bar. Very soon after, in the bathroom, he showered and shaved and applied cologne and when he returned to his bedroom, the heart was still there, wildly banging away on the pillow on which Jaime's head used to lie.

Jaime. He called her office with fingers so shaky that he dialed the wrong extension twice, but finally was able to leave a message for her to call him immediately. In the meantime, he dressed in his closet, inserting wallet and cell phone into the appropriate pockets, collected his briefcase and keys and left, hoping for the best. He was in his car and halfway down the freeway before he considered that it may have been some kind of sick joke.

PUMP UP THE VOLUME

Brad. Bradley. B. R. A. D. Everyone could be taken down to their basest parts. Things could be modified to run smoother. Things could be snapped off like Leggos and thrown away. Jaime started counting the letters in people's names and trying to eliminate whatever she could. Bra. Br. People had always called her Jame. What about Jam? Jam was good on toast. Except strawberries. Blueberries couldn't be trusted, what with the rolling away. Like Brad. Brrrrrrad.

Her brain went like this often lately, ever since the day before her rhythm had gone. She couldn't snap her fingers or sing along with music and her mind never stayed on track.

Plus, she had a hard time answering the phone. Something about the even-ness between rings, the precision of them. Her hands clapped over her ears when it rang. Finally, she turned off the ringer, called in sick to work, and crawled onto her mattress for a few days.

The knocks on the front door were uneven, disjointed, so Jaime got up. She stretched and yawned but didn't feel rested. She answered the door, naked, and Brad was there holding a cardboard box labelled "Fry's Frozen Fries." He shoved this toward her, looking angry, so she took it and went inside.

Hollering ensued, a bunch of "What-is-the-meaning-of" and "Such-a-gross-joke," but Jaime tuned Brad out and lifted from the box a little pounding thing about the size of her fist. It felt like a newborn kitten in her hand, but a squirrely, mad bumping around kitten with no fur. Actually not like a kitten at all. She touched its rounded edges. It was not at all like a heart cut or ripped out of a body, but more like a plastic heart you'd see in a biology class. Except real. Except dry. Except really working, really thumping away between her palms. Maybe a bit stiffer.

As an experiment, she turned on the living room stereo, and hummed along with "American Pie" by Don McLean. She had perfect timing, as long as the heart was in her hands.

She turned to Brad, slowly on one heel. If her heart was going to go the way of her fourth finger, it would be wooden soon. She held it to her chest, where it burped and groaned and struggled.

"I've been missing this," she said.

posted by Samus @ 2:23 PM