Like an Arm Outstretched, Reaching

(3,251 words)

The pain starts with a twinge in his back.

Which Clay pays no attention to because his mattress is so old it holds his shape when he gets up. He thinks nothing about the odd sensation beside his spine that creeps toward his right ribs. Not until he tries to rub it like a knotted muscle and feels a lump, like a stick bound beneath his flesh.

“Didn’t they say if anything weird happened to you then you should call them?” Amanda, his sister, says when he calls her in subdued panic.

The assistant who brought in his discharge paperwork at the Tomorrowist Institute had said just that, he remembers now: Let them know if anything strange developed in the next four to six weeks. It’s been five weeks, long enough that the dental crown he paid for with the money from the experimental trial has been fit, ordered, and glued onto his stub of a root-canaled tooth. He listens to Amanda tell him about yesterday’s drama at the dollar store she manages as he rummages around to find the paper with the number on it. When it seems like she’s done, he responds appropriately, then hangs up and calls the Institute.

The receptionist on the other end says little as Clay explains. He’s not sure if they believe him, or if it’s even something they care about, until they ask if he can come in after work the next day. Clay only works part-time at the convenience store down the street, so this shouldn’t be a problem. He takes it.

In the hours between the call and the appointment, he tries not to imagine what the lump could be: a frayed bundle of muscle come unraveled from where it should be? Cancer? A worm growing under his skin? A bone spur? He thinks back to the equipment that surrounded him at the Institute, wondering which of the sleek white machines gave him a tumor.

He takes the bus to the Institute again, since last time they told him he couldn’t drive home by himself and he doesn’t know what they might do to him this time. After a series of pokes and scans and measurements at the clinic, he knows little more than he did during the sleepless night before. Except that it definitely isn’t cancer, or even a bone spur. He feels too weird to ask if it’s a worm. It not being cancer is a relief, but one that opens a door to horrifying new and bizarre explanations. 

His theories mount with every soft “hmm” from the technician looking over the results. Was it the chewing gum he swallowed in elementary school on a dare? A twin he absorbed in the womb now resurfacing twenty-four years later? Maybe on some level he does wish it was cancer, a terrible yet known outcome. Maybe he just doesn’t want any of his batshit guesses to be right.

“And when did you notice this?” asks the technician examining him.

“Yesterday.”

The technician hmms. “Most people experience only mild side effects. Those who experience severe side effects are more likely to see them develop as time goes on. At this stage, it’s hard to tell if this is mild, moderate, or severe. If the growth doesn’t progress anymore, come back in a few days and we’ll remove it.”

“What if it does ‘progress’ more?”

“Then wait until it erupts.”

* * *

The thing in Clay’s back is big now, taking up a triangle-shaped area between arm and hip and rib. It doesn’t hurt—he hasn’t touched the pills the technician gave him in case it did—but it does feel strange as the growth makes his skin ripple. His muscles shifting do hurt, though, the worst charley horses he’s ever had. “The growth,” as the technician called it—such a malignant-sounding name. Growths amass, they take over, they consume. He wonders if this will consume him.

At first, he obsessively measured it to see if it was getting bigger, or if it would magically shrink away until it existed only in memory. He tried marking its size through a rough measuring with his fingertips, but his own inaccuracy made him obsess more.

He remembered how Amanda used to do her hair and bought a hand mirror so he could use it to reflect the toothpaste-spattered bathroom mirror. With the twice-reversed numbers of the ruler he held to the growth, he marked just how much it had grown by the day. Or the hour. Or the minute.

He doesn’t tell Amanda. She hardly comes over, anyway. No need to make her worry. No need to make her recoil from the thing becoming part of him.

Soon, its growth is simply obvious. He abandons the ruler but not the mirrors, fascinated by the way the lump curves down in a rounded corner before merging with the expected shapes of his doughy back. How the skin of this triangle shape sinks in the middle.

The growth is soft, or it feels soft covered by his skin as he traces a finger up and down its sloped edges and around the angles of its shape. Late one night, he tries thinking very hard about the thing, wondering if it will move at his bidding. He’s been drinking, because this isn’t something you think about doing when you’re sober. He can’t be sure, but he thinks he sees it twitch.

He doesn’t try moving it again. He prefers to believe he imagined it.

Sometimes, he thinks he can feel through the growth, that he can feel what the inside of his flesh feels like, all warm and slick and firm but soft. He tries not to think about what this means, this sometimes-thought that he can feel what he feels from the inside. And the fact that he might have moved it once. No dead twin fetus would do that.

As he probes it and watches through his system of mirrors as it shifts under his skin, he knows one thing for certain: It’s gonna hurt like hell when it “erupts.”

* * *

It erupts. Through gritted teeth and screams muffled against his old, bumpy mattress, Clay takes the pills the technician gave him. The medicine knocks him cold. He’s glad for that in the moments before darkness takes him but less so as he’s stuck in the molasses river of fevered dream. Later, he remembers snatches of his dreams: trees stretching their roots from the ground, coral growing like a warp-speed time-lapse, clouds scooping him up with tendrils of mist-like tentacles and flinging him into an abyss of stars.

The pain is an afterthought when he wakes in the clearing fog of his drug-induced sleep. Both because the pills have done their job and the strangeness of his conscious reality.

First, according to the thirteen texts and seven missed calls from his boss over the last three days, he’s been fired. He runs two hands through his hair as he scrolls through the increasingly desperate messages. First the ones from his boss, then the ones from Amanda. Amanda’s are less insistent than his boss’s—his ex-boss’s. He starts to wonder what that means when he realizes what he’s doing. Two hands in his hair, one on his phone.

Three arms, three hands, all with five deft fingers that he can wiggle at will. This new, third arm is a right, connected to his existing body where the triangle lump had been. But it’s not like someone just copied and pasted his other right arm down lower. This arm is pale like his stomach. That’s what he assumes, anyway, from what he can see of the skin.

It’s tough to tell under the mottled mess of dried blood, bits of lint, and what Clay figures out are chunks of skin and flesh. The whole length of it is thin, all skin and bone without muscle or flab or hair to make it look more normal, less skeletal, less wrong. At the top of that bloodied, skinny thing is a ragged, scabbed-over half-moon, and the scab is already drying and flaking off to what will definitely be a brutal scar. On the other end, the fingernails are soft like a baby’s, or like a foal’s feet when they still look like tentacles instead of hooves. It doesn’t hurt, though, hardly even a twinge.

The new hand does hurt, though, when he pricks his soft, new fingertips with the tip of a safety pin. These same fingertips burn when he picks up a just-filled coffee cup. The coffee spills when he drops it and he recoils, not just for the burn he feels in a place where a week before he had a soft, ill-muscled back, but because he had given no thought to grabbing the cup with this new hand. For reasons he cannot define, that is the thing that unnerves him the most, more than the fact that it was growing at all.

He screams. Of course he screams. He screams as he looks at it and then the blood crusted on the mattress. When the downstairs neighbor pounds on the floor, Clay grabs the T-shirt he was wearing when he conked out and shoves it in his mouth to muffle the sound. Which is good because when he sees the black crusted hole in its back, he screams again.

“It . . . um, the growth erupted,” he says, hoarse, when he finally calls the clinic, almost forgetting their verbiage for the act of sprouting a new arm. He is told to come in tomorrow morning.

Clay tongues his crown as he warily eyes the hand. It is resting on the bed beside him, a new part of his body his mattress has not yet learned. “Yeah, that’ll work,” he says.

It’s warm for April when he leaves, but he wears his biggest hoodie anyway, his third arm curled around his midsection. He drives his ratty old Toyota this time, even though one of the tires is going flat and he has less than a quarter tank of gas. He stops at all yellow lights and uses his blinker for a full five seconds before turning or changing lanes because he can’t figure out how he’d explain it to a cop.

He’s still hoping he won’t have to explain it to Amanda. That they’ll fix him right up at the Institute and he’ll be left with nothing but a thin scar to lie about. Maybe he can say he got stabbed with a bottle. Or he sold his kidney on the black market.

At the institute, Clay flexes his new arm when told. He relaxes when asked. And all of his shoulders, including the one half-wedged in his back, slump in relief as the technician talks. “Yes, removal shouldn’t be a problem.” But they tighten up again when the technician adds, “All we’ll need is your insurance information and we can schedule the surgery.”

“Insurance?” Clay asks. He hasn’t had insurance for a while, even before he was fired. “You didn’t need my insurance info when I did the trial.”

“No, but this isn’t the trial. It’s surgery.”

“But this—” Clay gestures with his new hand, “—is from the trial. The trial caused this, right? Isn’t—I mean, how else would I have got it?”

“Well,” says the technician and shrugs a little, as if that is enough of an answer.

* * *

Clay keeps his arm beneath his shirt, enduring the discomfort of feeling his stomach flab with his arm—and feeling his arm with his stomach flab—for the normality of appearing like he still has just two arms.

But as the days go on, the impulse to use the arm grows stronger. In the shower, he unconsciously catches a falling bottle of 2-in-1 shampoo-conditioner with his third hand. At the grocery store, he holds milk in his right hand, a dozen eggs in his left hand, and lets his second right hand carry a cheap loaf of white bread by the bundled edge of its plastic bag. To the outside observer, he is sure the bread dangling from below his hoodie looks strange. And for a moment it only amuses him—not horrifies—to know how much stranger the truth really is.

It’s almost a week before Amanda crashes his apartment, because she can tell he’s bullshitting her over the phone. When he hears her knock, he is trying to decide whether watching The Fly is a great idea or a terrible one. He is glad for the distraction from that self-sabotaging decision before he remembers he hasn’t told her about his arm. He has, in fact, hand-waved his way out of every question she’s asked about the Institute and if they had fixed the lump in his back. He starts curling his hand underneath his hoodie again before deciding to rip off the proverbial bandage.

“Hey,” he says, opening the door and standing to the side so she can go through.

“Hey,” she says. She lifts up a bag with the logo of the Mexican place located in the same strip mall as her dollar store. “I brought Rodrigo’s, but it might be co—”

The bag falls from her hand and hits the cracked linoleum floor with a wet thud. Her eyes widen and her mouth freezes in a tight O as she stares at his new arm.

He shrugs, all three hands upturned like, “I know, right?”

Over semi-squished burritos, he tells her the story. He expects her to blow up at him for the lies, both blatant and by omission, but she just mutters something that could just as easily be a prayer as a profanity.

“They said, they actually said, they couldn’t do anything without insurance?” She asks because somehow that’s the unbelievable part.

“They actually said that, yeah.”

She sets down what’s left of her burrito. “Can someone else do it?”

“What does that mean?” Clay is afraid he knows exactly what she means.

“Remember how Uncle Andy tried to fish something out of the lawn mower chute a few years ago and somehow didn’t cut off all his fingers?” she asks. “But he did have that really bad cut on his hand? And he ended up just supergluing it back together and it was basically fine?”

Clay does remember, and he remembers the gnarly scar that still takes up a good chunk of Uncle Andy’s hand. But he also knows that wasn’t the end of the Uncle Andy story.

“Basically fine?” he says. “You know he still can’t make a fist. And this isn’t some cut, okay? It’s all right up—” He reaches back, trying to lift his hoodie to show her.

Amanda hesitates a moment before pressing her lips together and crouching by his back. She pulls up the fabric and rests it on his new sort-of shoulder. And then she sucks in air fast, a near-silent shriek. Clay can feel the wind from her yanking her hand back even though she hasn’t touched him yet. He hears her gag and can’t bear to turn around to see her face looking at this new part of him.

Which seems rude. It’s all healed up now. No scab. No blood. Real fingernails, and it’s even started getting meat on it so it looks more like an arm and less like a giant spider’s leg. She could be seeing something so much worse.

“Sorry, sorry,” she mutters, and lifts his hoodie again. He tenses as he feels her finger touch his flesh. She just pokes at first, then pinches a little, but gently.

“Damn,” she finally says. “I see what you mean.”

Somehow, that’s worse than her arguing with him and threatening to go out and get a saw. For the first time, he feels his eyes start pricking with tears, and his throat starts to hurt with the emotion gathering there. He makes it look like he’s struggling with the hoodie. By the time she helps work it back down to his waist, he’s got his feelings under control again.

“Any suggestions?” he asks.

She sits back down to pick up her burrito, then sets it down again. “Get insurance, I guess.”

His heart sinks hearing what he expected. Like maybe part of him hoped there was some other magic way out of this.

“And until then?”

“Get used to it?”

* * *

Amanda says she’ll help him look for a new job, and she does. But he wasn’t exactly a top candidate before sprouting a new limb. She can’t hire him or she would, so she says. Corporate policy. He wonders if that’s true.

He starts cutting holes in the side of some of his older T-shirts. After a couple of weeks, even ventures out around his apartment complex without hiding his third arm—at night, yes, but eventually he grows bold enough to do it during the day, too. And then he goes back to the grocery store and lets his third arm carry the bread in the open, drawing furtive looks from other customers when they think he’s not looking. But he hears no muttered freak or small children crying.

Amanda eventually finds him a job opening at a coffee shop she frequents near the dollar store, and says she’ll put in a good word with her manager. It’s enough to get him an interview, during which Clay makes a point of calling himself “handy” and “always willing to lend a hand.” He assumes it’s that go-get-‘em attitude and sense of humor that gets him the job. Though later he hears he was hired as part of the shop’s push to hire more “non-traditional” workers.

But a job’s a job, he tells himself. Like a third hand is a third hand. Like life is life sometimes.

Even if he doesn’t want this to be life. He adapts, but he also misses being able to lay on his right side without making his third arm fall asleep. He misses being able to buy clothes at a store and have them fit without pressing his spare appendage to his midsection. He misses having people he wants to date be willing to be seen with him in public, misses being ignored in stores and on the street and on the bus because he’s just another young, average, out-of-shape guy.

Amanda keeps reminding him there’s still that promise of surgery, even though the double-digits he’s got leftover from his paycheck don’t add up very quickly.

“You could try crowdfunding?” Amanda suggests, but in a way that tells him not even she thinks that will work.

He thought at first he could work hard enough at the coffee shop to score one of the coveted positions with benefits. But he figures out quickly those are usually outside hires. There is no climbing up the ranks; this job is supposed to be a stepping stone to something better outside the company, like college or an office job somewhere. But in the days filled with taking orders and frothing milk and ignoring customers snapping photos of him, anything better feels very far away.

One step at a time, he tells himself. One day at a time. And the days aren’t so bad if he doesn’t think about the years ahead.

And if he doesn’t think about the twinge in his back, just to the left of his spine, and the lump growing underneath it.