Furthermore(53)

Only then did she discover she was missing an entire arm.





She wasn’t bleeding, and this was the first thing Alice noticed. The second thing she noticed was that her right arm had been ripped off at the shoulder, and as she was only now beginning to regain the full use of her mind, the third thing she noticed was that she had been partly turned to paper.

Where blood should have been there were instead wisps of tissue, and where bone should have been there was instead a strange breeze. And though she felt the inclination to bend her arm, to make a fist, to shake herself out of hysteria and tell herself to stop crying—(It’s alright, I’m alive, I’ll survive, she would say)—she could do nothing but stare at the space where something important once was. And then, dear friends, the fourth thing she noticed:

Her bangles were gone.

The loss of an arm and an entire arm’s worth of bangles (the latter, of course, being the greater loss) was too much to digest, especially like this. Like this: her head aching from the hit, her legs cramping from the run; still climbing to her feet and stumbling to stay upright, still moving, now panting, two short legs trying not to trip; her two feet pounding the earth, hard hits like heartbeats against the cracked dirt beneath them. She was off balance, unsteady with only one arm but she wouldn’t stop, she wouldn’t think, she refused to acknowledge any of this, not even for a moment, not until the dirt turned back into grass and the sun fell over sideways and night climbed over day and she was back where she started, forever moving forward just to move backward in time.

Finally, Alice fell to the ground.

She rolled over in the grass, adrenaline keeping her from collapsing into panic, and took a moment to marvel at the twilight she’d returned to. Just above her head was Tim’s big red door, and just in front of her was wide-open nowhere with a pond nearby. The crickets sang to scratch an itch and the frogs croaked along because it was a catchy tune; the tall grass danced with a sultry breeze and the moon sat atop an unwashed cloud, shining over everything. Somehow, even in this moment of perfect terribleness, the Still night was still lovely, fragrant, and awfully enchanting, and Oliver Newbanks stood before her, looking like he’d been spun from glass.

Oliver Newbanks, who appeared to be catching his breath. Oliver Newbanks, who was looking at Alice, eyes wide, chest heaving, sweat beading at his brow, and he said once, softly, “Alice?”

So she whispered once, softly, “Oliver?”

“Alice,” he said, urgently now, eyes tight and shining, “are you alright?” His voice was pitched low, like he was afraid it might crack.

And Alice shook her head. No. No, she wasn’t okay.

The moon was quickly rising, and with it, a veil of darkness that partially obscured Alice from view. So Oliver drew closer, and only then did he see what had happened to her. He jerked back, clapped a hand to his mouth, and cried, “Oh goodness, Alice!”

She didn’t know what to say.

Oliver reached out to touch the place where her arm might’ve been, and she saw his hand shake.

“Are you in pain?” he whispered, his voice trembling.

Alice shook her head again. No. In fact, she felt nothing at all. She hadn’t yet processed the shock of losing her arm, so she wasn’t sure how to react. Should she be scared? Should she be strong?

“Will it grow back?” she asked.

Oliver’s eyes went so wide Alice could see the white rims around his irises. “No,” he said softly. “The effects of Furthermore, when they can’t be fixed, are always final.”

That’s when Alice began to feel.

His words stabbed at a corner of her brain; it was a twisty, piercing pain that exploded behind her eyes and took her breath away. For no reason at all she was suddenly desperate and aching, aching, where her arm used to be, and suddenly there was nothing in the world she wanted more than to have two arms. Suddenly all she could think about was having two arms. Suddenly there were a million hundred trillion thousand things she wanted to do with her arms and suddenly she couldn’t, suddenly she couldn’t, and it was all too much. The stabbing pain caught fire and dropped a flame down her throat and this shocked her heart into a terrible, tripping beat, and in less than a moment she was so thoroughly and absolutely shattered she couldn’t calm down long enough to make herself scream.

She looked at Oliver.

“. . . have to find a painter,” he was saying.

“What?” The word was more of a rasp than a word. Alice had already lost a father, the length of her right arm, and an entire set of bangles, so it made sense that her voice would follow suit.

“Yes,” Oliver was saying. “It’s the only way.” He was on his feet now, arms crossed, pacing the length of the same five-foot stretch. “The problem is, I don’t quite know how to find one. I’d only ever heard rumors, you know?” He looked up at her. “And the trip will take us off course, of course, and cost us a great deal of time.” He looked away again, mumbling. “Though obviously the expense would be worth it.” He seemed to be speaking entirely to himself.

“Wait,” she rasped again. “What do you mean?”

Oliver stopped pacing, looked up in surprise. “We have to get your arm fixed,” he said.

“But I thought you said—”

He shook his head, hard. “No, no, it won’t grow back. But we could get someone to paint you a new one.”