They amputated my wife’s arm today.
By "they," I mean doctors; it didn’t come as a shock to either of us. In fact, I’d been saying for weeks that it was time to be off with that sickly limb. I think maybe my exact words were:
“I would rather reach out for the empty space than hold the corpse.”
She said I was being insensitive. I said she was being sentimental; it was like leaving grapes on a vine to spoil.
In the weeks that passed, I witnessed how the concept of ripeness could become a memory. Puss bubbles would hiss noxious gas out at me for the slightest provocations. Craters of rot, patches of necrotic flesh blistering up her arm, ceasing precisely at the hinge between forearm and bicep. That old limb was long dead.
But my old lady is stubborn. And in her bouts of hardheadedness, she would use it, swinging it limply to waft around the fog spawned of its own rot. And during our meals, she would lay it across the table, pretending her fingers still worked. I never once saw how she managed to eat with one hand. No, my eyes were always fixed on the pale white bone peeking out from the middle of her forearm.
When our intimacy died, she asked if I still loved her. I said, “Of course,” meaning it. But following the kiss I planted on her lips that I knew better than my own, I tasted something bitter at the back of my tongue. She noticed when I winced. We never said anything about it, but she nervously scratched her arm and filled the inside of her nails with a slimy layer of skin.
#
“I’ll miss this old girl,” She tells me in the hospital room.
“Why?” I ask her. It seems like an ignorant question, but the fact that there are so many reasons is what makes me curious to which she’ll pick out in particular. She doesn’t answer. She looks down longingly at the pile of decay strewn over her lap.
I repeat to her a lullaby of proofed-over platitudes, sung to me by the nurses about her procedure. She nods them off and rubs only her left eye.
When the doctors come, I hug and kiss her while holding my breath. Watching her move down the hallway, it sways with her movements as if to wave goodbye.
Waving back, I allow myself to smile, having finally bested the wretched limb.
#
The first time my wife shows me her stump, it’s been months since the surgery.
The white bandages come off, and I can now see how her bicep ends. Like a mountain grown in reverse, its toppled peak aims at the ground with a lumpy point of pale flesh. I’m caught between breaths by the sight.
I ask her if she feels a whisper of the arm still there, like the nurses said she might. She tells me “no”, flatly. Maybe her exact words are:
“It lives only in my memory, in the moments where I forget and reach out for something that’ll never come to me.”