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“And yet here we are.”
“I said I’m sorry, Adrien.”
I grunt, “Yeah, I’m sure you are.”
I set the used glove beside the towel and examine the damage.
The prosthetic itself is functional and expensive enough that I should probably treat it better than I do. I’ve gone through several configurations over the years, each supposed improvement accompanied by technicians explaining torque, grip patterns, battery life, sensory feedback, socket fit, and twenty other things I stopped pretending to care about sometime during the second year after I lost the original.
“Did Mathias tell you whether he wanted the body moved tonight?” I ask.
Kenny shakes his head, shrugging. “Said to call when it was finished.”
“It is finished.”
“I can call,” he says, pulling out his phone.
“No.”
That seems to surprise him.
Thin red lines have worked their way into the articulated grooves near the wrist joint and between two of the fingers.
“Does that hurt?”
My head lifts slowly, and I fix him with a cold, silent stare.
“What? I was just asking,” he stammers, voice pitching up.
“No, Kenny. It doesn’t hurt, because it’s a goddamn piece of machinery. Can you please stop fucking speaking?”
He goes to open his mouth, “I—” but something in my expression must clue him in, because he finally zips it and turns away.
“Thank fuck,” I mutter under my breath, crossing to the utility sink.
The water runs brown for several seconds before clearing. I hold the prosthetic beneath it, carefully working blood from the outer joints with a cloth while Kenny remains extremely interested in the opposite wall.
People are always strange about the arm.
Some pretend not to see it at all, eyes skating away like it’s a social misstep.
Others can’t look anywhere else.
A few ask questions immediately, apparently unable to comprehend that the person standing in front of them may not want to discuss the worst day of his life with somebody he met two minutes ago.
I learned years ago that making people uncomfortable first saves time.
The prosthetic itself doesn’t bother me anymore, unless shit gets into it, like right now.
It’s the missing arm that bothers me more. It’s rarer these days, but sometimes there’s an itch in a palm that hasn’t existed since Iraq, or pain shooting through an elbow that was left somewhere beneath concrete and blood and pieces of a building I never saw again.
Brains are stubborn things.
Mine spent years refusing to accept what was obvious.
I dry the prosthetic carefully, working the towel into the narrow spaces between the fingers. The silence in the warehouse is thick now, broken only by the drip from the tap and Kenny’s nervous shifting near the door.
“You think you can scrape enough brain cells together to finish this?” I call out to Kenny without turning.
