Written by J.D. Strunk
The morning after his father’s funeral, Joe awoke to find he was missing an arm. His right arm, specifically. Losing the limb was not entirely unexpected, as this very thing had happened to Joe once before, following a different funeral. The last time, it had been Joe’s left arm that disappeared during the night. But Joe was right-handed, and so, after the initial shock, life had returned to a semblance of normal. But now, with his dominant arm gone as well, Joe knew his life would never again be the same. At forty-nine years old, he would need to relearn how to live.
With a calmness at odds with the depths of his calamity, Joe rolled out of bed and entered the bathroom, where he studied his armless torso in the bathroom mirror. As with the left arm, the right arm’s disappearance left no wound at all—just a perfectly smooth mound of skin at the shoulder, as if no arm had ever been attached there to begin with.
“Well,” said Joe to his reflection. “This is life, now.”
Still in his pajamas, Joe descended the stairs. In the kitchen, his cat, Bueller, rubbed against his legs. She was hungry, but even if Joe somehow managed to get the cupboard open, he had no method for pulling the metal tab off the cat food tin.
“I’m afraid breakfast will be delayed today, Bueller,” said Joe to the cat as he pushed a wooden chair toward the front door. Sitting in the chair, Joe used his bare feet to turn the doorknob. So too he used a foot to pull the door closed behind him.
“I’ll be back,” said Joe through the closed door.
Behind the door, a hungry Bueller meowed.
Not surprisingly, people double-taked at Joe as he walked the village streets wearing only flannel pajama bottoms and house slippers. But just as quickly, they looked away. Joe knew they were attempting to spare his feelings by not staring, but he would have preferred they come speak to him. He always enjoyed a good conversation.
At the corner store, Rory Pepperidge held the door open for Joe, and Joe thanked him.
“It was a beautiful service yesterday,” said Rory, following Joe into the store.
“It was, thank you for attending,” said Joe.
“Can I help you with anything?” Rory asked. As he spoke, Rory’s eyes never once landed on Joe’s bare chest and armless torso.
“Um…yes,” said Joe. “I need cat food. A bag, not the tins.”
“Sure,” said Rory. “Let’s go find it.”
Side by side, they made their way down the pet food aisle. Once they were alone in the back of the store, Rory lowered his voice. “Can I show you something?” he asked.
“Uh, sure.”
Rory unbuttoned his cuff and rolled up the sleeve of his button-down shirt, revealing the wrist of a metal prosthesis beneath. While the hand mimicked flesh, the rest of the arm was silver and shiny.
“Rory!” said Joe. “I had no idea.”
“It’s not something I wear on my sleeve,” said Rory, pausing a second to see if Joe caught his joke. (Joe did not.) “But you really ought to give it a try.” After rebuttoning the cuff, Rory placed a hand on Joe’s shoulder. “I know they are expensive, Joe, and I know you’re still looking for a job, but a couple prosthetics will change your whole life, I promise you.”
“I’ll look into it,” said Joe.
***
As it was a beautiful morning, and since the cat food didn’t weigh much, Joe decided to take the long way home. Using side streets, he passed downtown, with its white gazebo draped in reds, whites, and blues for the upcoming holiday. In the park, a young man was throwing a tennis ball to his dog. The man was likely in his thirties, Joe figured, given the tautness of his skin and the wholeness of his body. Same for the pack of runners that passed Joe as they circled the park. Joe sighed at the sight of so much youth. It was just then that the man threw the dog’s ball too far and it rolled to Joe’s foot. Instinctually, Joe bent down to pick it up (the cat food falling from his head in the process). It was only when no arm appeared before him that he remembered the reality of his situation. The young man approached Joe, and Joe kicked the ball gently toward him.
“Thanks,” said the man, whose dog was now running circles around them both. “Need help with that cat food?”
“That would be great,” said Joe.
Joe stood still as the man rebalanced the bag on his head, each side sagging down in a half-moon.
“Hey, would you mind picking one of those roses for me?” asked Joe, eyeing a flower bed some twenty feet away.
The man stared at the roses in question—part of the park’s landscaping. For a second he hesitated, and Joe felt a twinge of regret for asking the man to essentially vandalize the park. But then the man approached the flowers, and picked the reddest of the many roses.
“Could you just set it in my mouth?” asked Joe.
The man set the rose in Joe’s mouth, as instructed. “I’m sorry about your father, Joe,” he said. “He was a great man.”
“Yew knew my fadder?” said Joe through clenched teeth.
“He taught me high school history,” said the man. “Probably my favorite teacher.”
Joe smiled, and as he did, one of the rose’s thorns pierced his upper lip. But Joe didn’t notice.
***
It was only as Joe entered the graveyard that he finally felt he was amongst peers. All around him were men and women in wheelchairs, or on crutches, or limping—old widows missing all four limbs, middle-aged sons and daughters missing an arm, a leg, or both. Throughout the gravestones, children ran and sang. Children, with all four limbs, to whom life was still a game, and death an illusion.
Joe meandered through the myriad gravestones until he arrived at a plot dusted with fresh topsoil.
“Hiya, Pop,” said Joe, letting the rose fall from his teeth and onto the grave. “First day. Not a great start, as you can see.”
As Joe stood silently, sucking the blood from his thorn-pierced lip, a gnarled old man on an electric scooter rolled over to him.
“You Bobby’s boy?” asked the old man kindly.
Joe took in the man. He had to have been pushing ninety: Both his legs were missing, both arms were prosthetic, and an oxygen tank on the back of the scooter was attached to a hose and mask, into which the man occasionally breathed.
“Yeah, I’m Joe,” said Joe.
“Howard,” said the man. Joe expected Howard to extend an arm, out of habit, but he did not. “I knew your father from when he was a boy,” Howard finished.
“I remember you,” said Joe with a smile. “You worked at the lumberyard?”
The old man nodded.
“I always loved going there with Dad,” said Joe, tears welling in the corners of his eyes.
Howard gave Joe a kind smile. “You will survive this, Joe,” he said. “I know it feels impossible, but you will learn to live again.” The man placed the oxygen mask up to his face, breathed in several deep breaths, then removed it. “Only got the one lung,” explained Howard.
“Lost the other when little Jeremy died.” A long pause. “My grandson, if you remember.”
“I do,” said Joe. “Lost in the river. He was only what, ten years old?”
“Nine,” said the man. “I woke up the next night gasping for air. Been gasping ever since.” The man cleared his throat. “You married, Joe?”
“No,” said Joe.
The man tapped his left leg, which ended at the knee. “This here was Annie, God bless her. That’s who I just visited. Jeremy’s in a different cemetery.”
Joe eyed the children running through the gravestones. “Is there any way to spare them?” he asked. “Keep them whole?”
“Sure,” said Howard with a dark laugh. “If they love no one, and no one loves them in return, they will die whole, sure enough. You see it from time to time—someone my age or older, all four limbs, walking alone.” The old man smiled. “But I’ll tell you, I much prefer our
lives to theirs.”
Both men stared at Joe’s father’s grave for a long time, neither saying a word. At length, Howard rolled on, but Joe stood fast. An hour passed, and then two. Eventually, his neck ached beneath the weight of the cat food. Feeling bad for Bueller, Joe turned to leave. But before leaving, Joe moved to touch his father’s gravestone one last time. Without thinking, Joe knelt before the stone, felt his arm extend, felt the stone on his fingertips. Cold and smooth.
.
J.D. Strunk‘s fiction has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The Louisville Review, Pithead Chapel, Necessary Fiction, The Coachella Review, Summerset Review, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for The Bellingham Review‘s Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, and his stories have been nominated for Best American Short Stories and Best of the Net. He lives in Denver, Colorado. Instagram: @jdstrunkwriter.