Movement & Bones

Image by Jolene Armstrong

Our dogs won’t stop barking at the little man in the yard who is cataloguing our trees, telling Teddy which ones are healthy, which are diseased. All I can think is thank god he arrived in a mask today because this is June 2020, the time of Covid-19 and, although we called him to try to save one of our three Norwegian spruces—the middle tree that turned bright chartreuse last fall—we don’t want to die to do it.

Drab female house finches flip out safflower seed from a wide, plexiglas box feeder we have suction-cupped onto the living room French doors. They flit away. Our resident thrasher hops beneath a tube feeder in the center of the backyard. The men move around to the side of the house, their voices trailing away enough that the dogs settle. Gordon, our bullish dachshund remains alert, his eyes on me. Sasha, the hound, is on a hassock pushed up against one door. She drifts off now, her head listing against the window.

Until the men are within sight and sound of the front door. She bolts up and Gordon bounds after her. Louder and more fearsome than the last outburst. Until the man and Teddy disappear again.

 I am inside because I have no right hand and no right foot, because of the way the car crumpled when my husband and I were hit by a teenager in the rain in late February. It was late morning and we’d been fighting, we weren’t speaking. But he asked me to go to brunch so we were making up, reluctantly, wordlessly, I guessed. He put his hand on mine and I held it. Then he took a different street—a wrong one for the restaurant, I mean—and I said, “Didn’t you want “Morgan?”

“I found an apartment,” he said. “I paid first and last plus the pet deposit, so the dogs can go back and forth between us.”

I let go of his hand and he replaced it on the wheel, as if it had never belonged to me at all.

“Franny, I’m sorry. I just can’t do this anymore.”

My tongue went thick. My teeth wouldn’t fit together all of a sudden. I rolled down the window even though it was raining. He looked over and he reached for me in a kind of rough way. I put my arm out the window, my whole shoulder. I felt the pinging wet drops—felt like somehow they could save me from what was happening if I could just crawl inside enough of them—and that’s when it happened, the speed of hot metal carving me.

The driver, just a teenager, said that he meant to stop. I don’t remember anything else about him until nine days later when he came into my room at the hospital. Teddy wasn’t sure the boy should be let in. He stood up, like to shake the boy’s hand or to punch him maybe. I didn’t know who he was. There were always so many people coming in and out of the room. I didn’t even know if there was still poop in the bedside commode and I didn’t much care—sometimes new nurses didn’t understand that they needed to empty it, that that was part of their job, too, after helping me to it and back to bed.

So the boy walked in and right away Teddy was up. I stopped staring out the window at the sad outdoor patio of the restaurant shut down by coronavirus across from the hospital, and the bank and empty fields and highway turning pink by the end of the day. At first, I thought my eyes had turned him pink, too, from looking too long into the remnant sun. But then I saw it was really his face. He had those red cheeks some teenagers get, so full of acne they look colored in with crayons. I felt tender for him, and then my face made a small smile, which was the first since the accident.

“You sure you know what you’re doing in here?” said Teddy to the boy and he moved to block him now so I could only see my husband’s back—which is by no means in itself broad or intimidating, but here it seemed quite large indeed.

He answered Teddy, saying, “Yes, sir.”

And so they both walked over to me and I swallowed hard because now I’d figured out who this must be. I wiped my nose with my gauzy right nothing and I looked at Teddy and then the boy and at Teddy and my missing right foot screamed in pain between the big and second toes, where the wheel well ripped my foot straight up past my ankle.

Teddy let the boy have his seat at my bedside and he pushed over the big recliner I had to use for my occupational therapy sessions. It still had toothpaste spit on the armrest from that morning, but he didn’t care. I loathed the o.t. routines. And I loathed my left hand.

“I’m…” the boy started, then lost his nerve and looked down. He pulled a folded spiral notebook page from his pocket but held onto it. “I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll do anything to show you—to make it right, I mean.” He looked up at the white blanket covering my legs.

We waited for him to say more or to give me the paper, but he did neither.

“Okay,” I finally said.

He broke his trance and looked at me.

“You can yell at him, you know,” said Teddy.

The boy grabbed his chair’s armrests like to hold on for a hurricane.

“But I know you won’t.” Teddy shook his head.

“You ready, Franny?” Martha, the good nurse, came in with the godawful wound care cart. Sometimes she changed my bandages twice a day, sometimes just once, depending on seepage.

Teddy stood, set a hand on the boy’s shoulder, and said. “You should go.”

“No,” I said, “He should see it.”

Martha already had all the dry gauze off of my arm. When she reached the inner layer, the petroleum-soaked gauze, she slowed down almost imperceptibly, just enough to be careful around my stitches and the drainage tube. Removing that bandage always hurt and freaked me out so she knew to go quickly because my asking her to go slowly—as probably every single amputee did—only made the painful ordeal last a million times longer. I bit my lip and held my breath.

“Oh, God,” said the kid, gulping.

“If you’re gonna lose it, step out to the hall,” said Martha, glancing at him while she finished.

“Oh, God,” he whispered.

Teddy shoved the boy’s head between his knees right as he offered up a juicy moan.

“Good call,” said Martha. “I don’t think he would have made it to the hall.”

She had it off now. The way it felt when the moist padding pulled away and finally came free, was like suddenly my hand had regrown there, all light and airy and possible for about two minutes. A tiny fist thumping with blood and muscle, its fingers not quite separated in a mitten made of pins and needles. And then, just as quickly, it would be gone again.

“How does it look today?” I asked.

“Not too angry. The sutures look good. Tube’s doing its job.”

“Don’t talk about the tube,” I told her. She knew I couldn’t stand the tube.

“Sorry, I forgot.” She smiled at me then finished her appraisal. “Puckering isn’t too bad. Looks quite good—see for yourself, Franny,” she said, preparing a new bandage to cover my wrist and make-believe hand.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said and kept my eyes on the thin, white blanket.

Martha covered my wrist again and wrapped the protective padding and was done. She peeled back the covers to look at the dressing on the end of my leg. “We’ll do that one before my shift ends later tonight,” she said and then she wheeled out the wound cart and left.

By now, the kid was breathing all right and was almost upright again.

“You can go now,” I said.

He walked out silently, or started to, but came back and put that piece of folded up spiral paper on the foot of my bed. Then he left.

“That was weird,” said Teddy.

“Why not just hand it to me?” I said.

“You’re right there.”

“I’m right here.”

I leaned forward to get it and couldn’t reach. “It’s like a Far Side cartoon: Must Have This Many Hands & Feet to Read This Note. So Sorry.”

Teddy got the note and I read it. The boy wanted to give me his hand and his foot. I mean literally, he wanted to give them to me so a surgeon would attach his to my limbs and I would go on living like nothing had happened to me and he would be the one who couldn’t walk or write or comb his hair or cook a meal or ride a bike or fucking play with the dogs outside.

“What’s it say?” said Teddy. “Why are you crying?”

“I’m not.”

“You are.” He got in the bed with me. “I shouldn’t have let him come in here. I’m sorry. What the fuck did he say?” He took the paper. Little bits of the spiral flaked off onto the blanket and were instantly lost there but I tried to find them, to pick them up and I didn’t know what—preserve them? scatter them to the floor?

He read it. I cried. He cried.

***

When Teddy comes in from the yard, he tells me the middle spruce has needle cast disease and it will die in a year or two, and so will the other two in a couple more years. But the viburnum and redbud, too, are doomed. They all need to come out. I am stuck in the house because prosthesis fittings weren’t considered “essential” in the March and April shutdown, so appointments are all backed up. All I have is a supersized rental wheelchair from the hospital—they’re pretty much all you can get anymore—that doesn’t even fit in our hallways so Teddy carries me to it each morning and I sit in the living room all day long until he carries me to bed at night. It doesn’t make sense, of course, I could sit in any chair just as easily, and it’s not as though I can move myself around in this because turning the wheel with one hand while dragging the chair forward with one foot would only have me turning eventual circles. But the hospital insisted we leave with something in order for me to go home instead of to a rehab facility so Teddy loaded it in his new car. I could see the trees as a metaphor for the country—the rotting away under Trump—or see the virus as a metaphor for the same—but who needs metaphors when reality is just as frightening? And how did this become about politics? This is the story of our trees dying, our country dying from Covid-19, my body dying in pieces. And our love, somewhere along the way, that died, then wasn’t allowed to.

I hear the clink of Teddy getting a beer from the fridge. “Want something?” he calls.

“I’m all right.” I don’t drink much. If I do, I’ll just need him to carry me to the toilet and back. I have one Vitamin Water each day. Teddy unscrews the cap and leaves the open bottle on a table he’s set up next to my wheelchair in the morning. Like this, I can hold my pee until bedtime.

I watch the birds. Now a mourning dove and a male house finch share the window box. Sun glows up his red breast and head. The dove is too tall for the box so she has to duck her head while in it, which makes her neck feathers separate into an Elizabethan ruff. She pecks at seed. The finch picks it up. She lumbers off into the air. He stays a while. Two female finches join him. He jumps at one of them and she flies away, too.

Teddy comes in. “Birdwatching again?”

I nod.

“Want the remotes? Or a book or something?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nap,” he says from the doorway, yawning.

He teaches third grade so he’s off for the summer, even though we’re quarantined. Not everyone is, of course. Crazy people two houses down from us had a huge party last night, no chairs six feet apart—throngs of people everywhere, standing shoulder to shoulder, food tables packed tightly together, smokers standing at our fence line laughing, music to all hours. Teddy walked the dogs out the front door and went in the opposite direction of their house, but he couldn’t avoid all the parked cars and people who belonged to them running out to retrieve a phone charger, leaving early, or arriving late. I made him wear two masks and he crossed the street whenever he saw people coming at him, so he came home and described the walk as a constant zigging and zagging to avoid aerosolizing droplets. Then all night long, Gordon and Sasha circled and barked at the French doors til Teddy carried me to bed, my naked pink and puckered stumps feeling strangely light in the air, like a sawed woman magic trick who can’t be put back right.

I was a ninth grade English teacher. I don’t know what I am now. Sometimes I dream I’m passing out quizzes bouncing around on one of those bare metal prosthetics for runners that looks like a springy letter L. I get going too fast and high and crash through the roof of the school. I always wake up there in a cold sweat with Gordon licking my face. Teddy thinks it’s unrealistic for me to go back to work. That may be true. I don’t know. The occupational therapist in the hospital said amputees can do all the same things fully-limbed people do, it just takes more focus and effort. Well it also requires prosthetics.

Teddy’s dad is a lawyer and he had us file disability paperwork right after the accident. It was just approved this week so I guess I’m officially disabled. He also had us get a lawyer to sue the driver’s insurance company for everything I’ve lost. Some days I sit here and catalogue all that is. Some days, it’s a list in dollars. Some days, it’s a list in words. And some days, it’s a list in movements and bones.

I am a still body now. I sit here all day and I grow. I’ve stopped wearing jeans because I have just one hand and they require two to pull up the stiffer denim, to work the tight zipper, to finagle the button into its hole. But even if I had two now, the waist wouldn’t close. And one of these days, the jeans I’m not wearing would stop zipping all the way up. The occupational therapist tested me on dressing. Teddy had brought a pair of sweatpants and a loose t-shirt for me to go home in. I’m awkward and lurchy, balancing on my left foot, standing to dress, but I could pull up the pants’ waistband a little bit at a time: the left side, then the right side, then the left side, then the right side, reaching around with my left hand to get the sweatpants up all the way finally. And the shirt I managed pretty well, even using my bandaged stump to open it up the way one normally does with a shirt.

So I dress like a slob now in loose sweatpants every day so that I don’t have to ask my husband to pull up my undies and pants, so I am not even more of a chore to him, so I am not more to resent because how can I not be someone he already loathes to hear call his name. And these loose pants are getting snugger by the day. I wear my shirts untucked, of course. Let him think the state of my dress has more to do with my competency than my growing size.

Teddy yawns again. “What do you need?” he says. “Do you need to pee?”

“No,” I say, too loudly. I never need to pee! Haven’t you noticed me trying to minimize your burden? I take a quick, softening breath. “I’m okay. Could I please have my laptop, though?”

“Sure,” he says. He fiddles a minute with untangling the cords on the floor, then brings it to me. “Just set it here when you’re done.” He clears a spot on the table next to me. “You’ve got your phone, it’s charged—” he flips it over to check, “—okay, good, and you’re sure you don’t need the bathroom?”

I nod.

“Okay.” He smiles, but it’s the look he gives his third graders: protective, wary, proud, helpful, and disappointed all rolled into one face.

He goes to the bedroom and shuts the door. Within minutes I hear him snoring. Gordon’s long body is stretched across a patch of sun on the carpet. Sasha is curled up in a sunny bed against one of the French doors. Momentarily, she opens her eyes then shuts them again and both wags a couple of times and grinds her teeth twice as she drifts back off. I open my computer, order eight loose-fitting jersey dresses. Then I spend the day researching different types of prosthesis hands: the hook, the dummy, and the bionic.

***

Tonight in bed, I lie here with my book propped on the special reading pillow Teddy got me so I don’t have to try to hold it one-handed. But I don’t read. I let out a deep breath. Sasha is curled up against Teddy’s thigh. She retucks her nose into her tail. Teddy is doing a crossword.

He was doing one the first time I saw him, in the teachers’ lounge when we both taught middle school and I was new to the district. He gave me half his pastrami and swiss sandwich because I’d forgotten my lunch. Half of his carrots and chips, too. Then he asked me, “Oh man, who wrote Lasher?” He came around the table and sat next to me and showed me the clue: ‘Lasher’ novelist’s favorite food? “It’s 22 across,” he said and pointed to the boxes, where he already had: _ N _ _ _ I _ _ P _ L A _.

“That’s Anne Rice,” I said and he started to write in her name. Then we looked at each other. “Pilaf!” we said. After that, we did the puzzle together at lunch daily and shared whatever we each brought to eat 50/50. He’d come to my classroom to pick me up for lunch and my students oohed and aahed. We were dating at work and dating outside of work, seeing movies, going to dinner, cooking for each other, taking weekend trips to Louisville, Nashville, and St. Louis. And always we’d pick up The New York Times, or at least the local paper, and do the day’s crossword. We even woke up and did the one on the morning of our wedding. But that was four years ago and I can’t remember when we stopped or how or why.

I sigh and now Gordon, stretched out lengthwise and up against my right leg, sighs too.

Teddy looks at me. “You did your exercises, right? Are you having pain again?”

Well, there’s always some pain, but no, that’s not this. I shake my head.

He goes back to his puzzle.

“Got any clues you want help with?” I ask.

He pencils in two letters. “No, I’m doing all right. Thanks, though.”

“Huh.”

I watch him move through several more clues without writing anything into their boxes.

“How about now?”

“I’d really just like to do this on my own,” he says. “You know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

He writes something down but lightly, tentatively. Just to show me he’s getting somewhere, but he isn’t really. I think of the car instead, before the metal.

“Why don’t we ever talk about it?” I say.

“It?” he says, still studying clues.

I wait for him to understand. But he doesn’t.

“About what you said, in the car?”

He stops writing and looks at me. His face blank.

“Getting an apartment.”

Softly he says, “I know what I said.”

“We’ve never talked about it.”

He shakes his head. “It’s moot now.”

“You don’t have to stay just because I’m broken.”

“Don’t say that.” He sets a hand on my right upper arm.

I look away. “It’s been four months. You never even touch me.”

“I touch you.” He squeezes my arm.

“There,” I say, pulling my arm free, “but never down here.” I wave my right wrist. “Or there.” I lift my right leg under the covers. Gordon lifts his head, then sets it back down.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You don’t want to hurt me. Are you serious? Are you fucking serious!” I close my book, set it on the nightstand and dump the reading pillow onto the floor. I turn off my lamp and move down beneath the sheet. I roll away from Teddy and shut my eyes. Gordon pushes into the recess my bent legs now make.

Trapezium,

Trapezoid,

Capitate,

Harnate.

Scaphoid,

Lunate,

Triquetrum,

Pisiform.

Metacarpals, five.

Phalanges, five; their distals, middles, and proximals, too.

“Franny,” says Teddy, “Listen, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. This is all new to me, too.” He moves his body up against mine, as much as the dogs in between our legs allow. He nuzzles my neck. He touches my arm again. My elbow. The middle of my forearm. The last two inches of my arm. My wrist. My stump. He wraps a finger around it, then another and another. Then his hand cups it and he holds it. At first his touch is needly, somewhere in between pain and itching. Then, though he does not squeeze my stump, it almost feels like what’s there has a beating heart.

In the morning when I wake, he and the dogs are gone from the bed, as usual, and my own hand is wrapped around my stump. I text Teddy that I’m awake and he and the dogs come to get me.

He sets down his 9 am yardwork beer and carries me to the toilet. “There’s aphids everywhere,” he says. “On the quince, on the roses; they’re even on the weeping crabapple. I’ve been spraying.”

“Sorry I can’t help.”

“Yeah, that sure does suck,” he says then grins. “Don’t worry about it.”

I wipe and he flushes. With me still sitting on the toilet, he fills the basin we use for me to wash my hand and stump. Warm water feels so strange on it. Sometimes it burns. Sometimes I feel my right hand cramping up. Then he loads my toothbrush for me and I spit when done. He squirts moisturizer into my palm and I rub it into my missing limbs.

Teddy has to do everything now. Carry me everywhere, get my clothes, hook my bra, unhook my bra, pick up my clothes, laundry, cook, clean (or not), refill the birdfeeders, mow the lawn, feed and walk the dogs, go get curbside pickup groceries, and every last little or big thing I’m not thinking of around here. It isn’t fair, of course. Though I’m hardly sitting around eating bonbons, I may as well be. Still, this is where we are and we settle into a sort of routine.

In July, we have the spruce torn out, the viburnum and redbud, too. So all over our back yard there are huge gaping holes left in the landscape, just, of course, as there are on my body. Just, of course, as there is in our marriage. We don’t talk about it. And nobody calls to schedule the filling in of my body or the filling in of our trees, though we’ve settled on a hemlock to replace the spruce, because it’s a native species and flora that will thrive in this particular climate’s heat and humidity, this particular climate’s rage and hostility, this particular climate’s grief and regret, is a must.

The dogs have taken to sleeping in the trees’ holes. They dig them a little deeper, a little wider, a little fresher and cooler, then hop down in and sleep for hours. Sasha sleeps in the spruce’s shaded hole. Gordon loves the sun so he picks the redbud’s, and we don’t see either dog until late afternoon when they’re hungry and thirsty and come to the back door now, wide-tongue-panting, covered in dark earth and clay, wagging and proud.

I stifle a laugh, looking at the muddy smudge Gordon’s nose makes down low on the glass door. Sasha’s looking into the sun, her tail beating steadily where she stands behind him. I set down my pencil and clipboard with the alphabet under tracing paper. “You need to fill the holes,” I tell Teddy. “They can’t come in here like that.”

“Where am I going to get a dump truck full of dirt right now?”

“Then keep washing them every time they go outside and want to come back in.”

“This is ridiculous,” he says, getting up from his book. “It’s bullshit.”

“Fuck yeah, it’s bullshit. Do something about it.”

Teddy storms out to the kitchen and out of the house to go hose off the dogs for about the twentieth time this week. I pick up the clipboard and start tracing letters with my left hand again. It doesn’t feel like writing, but like shape-making. Like my brain doesn’t register anything my left hand can make as holding the potential for meaning words. I trace a line of shaky lowercase c’s, that just look like terrible backward commas, and then toss the whole thing away.

I stretch my legs, extending them both straight out, and can’t help but see the obvious. An ankle moves its foot in six different ways: dorsiflexion, plantarflexion, inversion, eversion, medial rotation, and lateral rotation. You never think about any of them unless you wake from a coma and have to relearn walking. I work my right calf muscles to rotate my foot at the end of my ankle, if I still had an ankle, if I still had a foot.

The dogs come in, running through the house to get to me and they put their moist snouts in my hand and butt their noses against my right wrist. Then they shake out their wet coats.

“Sorry, I forgot a towel.” Teddy stands in the doorway.

“I see.”

Sasha takes up her spot on the window hassock and Gordon stretches out in the sun on the floor again. “God, that thing will take forever to dry out,” I say.

“Sorry,” Teddy mutters.

We don’t say anything more for a bit, but I think of things I could say. Stupid things. Angry things. And things he could say or should say. But the fact is, where are we going to get a truckful of dirt right now if we can’t even get one tree planted? Or a foot and a hand made? Everyone’s gone nuts in Arizona and Texas; black people are being strangled, shot, teargassed, and beaten by cops at protests in cities all over the country; Trump has sent unmarked troops in unmarked vans to round up and detain protesters in Portland; Covid cases are spiking, but our governor here in Indiana won’t even mandate masks; and people keep moving, moving, moving about, so no dirt in the yard, no hemlock, and no foot and hand.

“Want to stream something?” Teddy asks.

“Sure,” I say. “Move me to the sofa.”

We sit together and Teddy even holds my hand while we watch another British police drama and I don’t know why, but I turn to him and I kiss his neck and his ear and I sort of suck on his earlobe for a second and then I kiss his lips and we french and we haven’t frenched in probably at least eight months. And then while we’re kissing, I reach for his shorts, the waistband, the button, and I manage it one-handed, but the zipper stalls midway on a fold without a second hand, so he helps.

Then that changes everything. I don’t want to be doing this, but I’m still doing it. Because I’m an adult and I started it and I can’t just run off. And stopping would be embarrassing and probably more excruciating than just finishing up. So I push his boxers down and whiff the faint sour of skin that lives on other skin and isn’t freshly showered. I pull out his penis and work it in my hand while we kiss, feel it grow and firm up as his breathing shallows and quickens.

I stop kissing, say, “I can’t squeeze the top of your balls at the same time anymore.”

“That’s okay,” he says, shutting his eyes. He cups my cheek and kisses me again, then reaches up my shirt and touches my breast inside my bra.

I lean over and finish him in my mouth. The taste is too much sweat, metal, and watery spoiled milk all at once. I swallow.

Teddy turns the show back on, but I can’t concentrate on it. Someone new is dead and someone else is suspected because the last suspect is now dead, too. I’ve missed too much. I watch the feeder birds. A particular cardinal that visits every now and again. He has no crest and his head is nearly all black. We call him Wendell. He eats two seeds and flies out to the tube feeder. A female cardinal is out there, too. Maybe she came with him. I hope so, that he has a partner, someone to love and love him. I glance at Teddy, thinking to point out that Wendell is here, but he’s engrossed in the show. The forensic pathologist is performing an autopsy on an old man while talking to two detectives, all of them wearing masks to fend off the smell or protect the evidence from contamination.

Tonight at dinner, I ask Teddy if he’s afraid for fall.

“Of course I am,” he says. He takes another bite of his soft flour taco, from which the contents back out the other end and land on the plate. “How do I keep eight- and nine-year-olds from touching one another? How do I stop them from sharing food? From whispering in each other’s ears? How do I make them keep their masks on? They can’t even remember to wear a winter coat to school on days when it’s freezing cold out; how do we count on them to remember to bring their mask every single goddamn day?” He puts down the taco and his eyes shine under the hanging light. “And how do I stop from comforting them when someone at the school—a teacher or a schoolmate—tests positive and winds up in ICU and dies? How do I stop them from hugging one another? And how do I stop myself from hugging the child who comes to me crying?”

“Oh, Love.”

His eyes are wet. “I’m not that strong.”

“It’s too much to ask of teachers.”

“It’s too much to ask of children.”

I touch his hand. “Yes,” I say. “It is.”

He clears his throat. “I’m just glad you’re not going back in a classroom,” he says. “You’ll be safe. That’s good.”

“Unless you bring it home.”

“Right,” he says. He gulps his beer and looks at his plate.

“I’m sorry. I need to think more positively.”

“There’s something to be said for being realistic.” He takes another gulp.

In bed tonight, he leans over to kiss me once then whispers in my ear, “I want us to have a baby.”

“What?”

He pulls back and waits for me to believe him. “Come on,” he says.

“What?”

“Let’s do it.”

“There’s so much uncertainty,” I say slowly.

“Yeah, but….”

“We don’t have any idea when there will be a vaccine.”

“I love you,” he says.

“And there’s that.”

“I do, I love you.”

“What about before?” I say.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I was…I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

“You got an apartment, Teddy. You were as good as gone.”

“I’m sorry.” He sits up now. “But that’s done.” He looks back at me. “It’s done. It was a mistake. It wasn’t real. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t real.”

“Do you still have the apartment?”

“I broke the lease. I got out of it.”

“You don’t understand,” I say.

“What? Tell me.”

“You don’t understand: How will I ever know which part of our life is the real one?”

And this is when it happens. When the weight of these months—of his apartment, the car accident, my ruined bones and missing pieces, the months and months of seeing no one but a man I love but cannot trust while the universe implodes outside these walls—when the weight of my world finally comes crashing out of me.

I sit up, sobbing. I throw his pillow at him. “Fuck your apartment!” I scream.

“I know,” he says, trying to hold the pillow, but I have it again and I swing it at him hard. Again and again, I hit him with this fucking pillow. “That’s right, Franny,” he says. Tell me to go to hell.”

Again and again I hit him with the pillow. Again and again I see his face then I don’t see his face. I see his face then I don’t see his face. And each time I see it, his eyes are closed and his bangs have blown down across his forehead. I see him, I don’t see him.

I hold the pillow and wipe my nose on it. “Fuck your apartment,” I whisper. I hug the pillow and cry into it.

Teddy touches my elbow then my stump. “Well, I haven’t left, have I?”

“So I’m supposed to be grateful? Poor, hideous me?” I sniffle.

“No, I just mean: I’m here,” he says. “I didn’t leave. I would have left if I wanted to—accident or no accident, stumps or no stumps.”

“Are you sure?” I pull my head up from the pillow, tears stopping, lips in a snarl. “You’d have to be a colossal asshole to do that, you know.”

“Yeah, but by now I would have,” he says.

“Even before I get my prostheses?” I say, “I can’t even walk or fully dress myself! You’re a total dick.”

He turns his whole body to me. “Franny, I haven’t left you.”

“But you would?” My eyes tear again.

“But I haven’t!”

“But you would!”

He covers my mouth with his hand. “Stop it,” he says softly. “Shh. I love you, Franny. You almost died. I couldn’t believe it. That I was going to leave you. I was going to leave you. And you almost died, but you didn’t.” He presses a fingertip into my chest. “You’re here and I’m here with you.” He replaces his hand across my closed mouth. “I lost my mind along the way somewhere, but it’s back and I’m here. I’m not going anywhere without you.”

He takes his hand away now, but I don’t talk. I sit here looking at him, my eyes still wet. Finally, I reach for him with my right arm, feel his smooth chest against my stump, his bristly neck and cheek, his wispy long quarantine hair. And I wonder when was the last time I felt something, truly felt anything? I pull him to me and we kiss, softly, again and again.

About the author

Noley Reid is a queer, disabled writer, whose third book is the novel Pretend We Are Lovely from Tin House Books. Her fourth book, a collection of stories called Origami Dogs, is forthcoming from Autumn House Press. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, The Rumpus, Meridian, Pithead Chapel, The Lily, Bustle, Confrontation, and Los Angeles Review of Books. www.NoleyReid.com

About the Artist

Jolene Armstrong is an associate professor of literature at Athabasca University. Her art ("Artist/Machine") has appeared in Macromicrocosm, and in 2022, she has art ("Cosmic Sunflower") appearing in an upcoming issue of Wild Roof Journal, with a translation of a Hjalmar Söderberg short story, "The Blue Anchor" coming up in the Hunger Mountain Review. Later in the new year, her short story "Jólakötturinn or The Yule Cat" will be published in the The Society for Misfit Stories. In her spare time, she assembles in images and words the shimmering, sometimes terrifying, ephemeral beauty that marks our collective existence on this blue planet.  She lives and works in amiskwaciy-wâskahikan treaty 6 territory (Edmonton). www.jolenearmstrong.ca