SmokeLong Quarterly

Last Thursday, Tilda lost her hands. It was Sunday now. It happened last Thursday. She woke up for work in the morning, she was a technician at a Valvoline, and she got dressed like she usually did, put on her underwear and her uniform and all, and she got herself a bowl of whole wheat cereal with whole milk. The whole stuff? Her mother had always told her to get herself foods that began with “whole” because you want the whole thing, not just part of the food, which I guess makes sense. But that doesn’t matter; this is about last Thursday, not all those years back. Let’s see, she had her whole bowl of cereal sitting right there in front of her and her black Valvoline uniform. Just right there, nothing to it: some cereal. Tilda, she’s peculiar, I guess. She does this thing, she eats cereal with two hands. Right? Well, what I mean is that she ate cereal with two hands. Now she eats it like a dog: lap, lap, lap. But she was eating her cereal with both her hands, big hands, big hairy hands, with all those veins. What she’d do is she’d take up a milky bite with the spoon with one hand, and she’d cup her other hand under the spoon as if she’d catch any milk that’d run off, or a bit of cereal, or something like that. She was doing this, and then her hands fell off. Plop. Right into the damn bowl. Plop. No kidding. And she lost her hands.

She walked to the bedroom, Jessica was there. She lay on the floor because that’s where she slept, also a peculiar person, but that’s where she slept when she and Tilda hadn’t had sex, because if they had, she slept on the bed, like a goddamned normal woman. Tilda held up the ends of her arms, the flat bits where she used to have hands, where she’d always had hands, but now she didn’t. Jessica yawned. “What happened?” she asked.

“I lost my hands,” Tilda said.

“Strange thing for a person to lose.”

“They’re in my cereal.”

“I can take you to the doctor?”

Jessica knew Tilda hated doctors, especially their doctor. As in, “Why the hell do I need to update you about my menses when I’m here for a fucking flu shot?” Maybe she just had a strange doctor. He also smelled like baby lotion, but he was not a baby. So, they ended up not going to the doctor. What happened was Jessica followed Tilda back to the kitchen and the cereal, and they sat down at the table, and Jessica fed her the rest of that cereal, pushing the hands around in the milk to make sure she got every last bit, and then Jessica drank the milk from the bowl, and the hands were there at the bottom. Some droplets of milk had gathered at the tips of the hairs closer to where they would have connected to—or formed?—Tilda’s wrists. Jessica picked up the hands, wiped off the milk. “I’ll put these over here, okay?” she said, setting the hands on the kitchen counter, and she washed the bowl and spoon.

“I’ll take some PTO,” Tilda said.

“That’s probably the right choice.”

“You’ll have to put in the request on my phone for me because, you know, the hands.”

Jessica walked back to their room and got Tilda’s phone. She put in a PTO request for Tilda. The boss called a few minutes later, you know how they are, and he was doing some yelling about procedural standards regarding PTO and sick days, but when they explained it, that Tilda had lost her hands, he got it, and it was fine. He was still on edge, and he warned them that the next time Tilda didn’t notify him at least 24 hours before she had an emergency, she’d be fired, but it was overall fine. So, she had her PTO, which she’d saved up to a whole three days. They used the PTO, spent it together since Jessica didn’t have a job anyway, so might as well. What they did was they stayed on the couch in the living room and didn’t sleep, and they watched documentaries. It’s a normal thing. There was one about tuataras and how they’re not actually lizards, even though they look like lizards, or some stupid bullshit like that. And then the three days were up. And they were out of PTO. And Tilda’s hands were still on the counter.

It was Sunday, and Tilda was supposed to return to work. Tilda shut off the TV, and it was dark. Jessica got off the couch. She went to the counter and put on Tilda’s hands, attached them right to the bottom of her wrists, so that she was wearing both of their hands. She walked back to the couch and took off Tilda’s Valvoline uniform and dressed in it herself.

Jessica stood over the couch in the dark. “I guess I’ll get going, then,” she said.

Tilda could’ve said thank you, but she didn’t. She sat there in the dark in her underwear, and Jessica walked out the door and went to work. When Jessica left, Tilda went back to their bedroom, and got down on the floor, and waited. She forced her nubs together in front of her face, their wrongness a blatant crease, and waited for Jessica to come home, which she eventually did, only to find Tilda unmoving on the hardwood, the nubs smushed in front of her eyes.

“How was work?” Tilda asked.

“It was good,” Jessica said.

“That’s good.”

And they looked at one another. And then they were naked on the floor, the two of them. And the Valvoline uniform was on the bed. And Jessica was smiling. And they lay on the floor, and Jessica put their hands all over their bodies, and neither could tell who was touching whom.