from Buying Cigarettes for the Dog
Three Arms Less
When there was a war, a little brown boy had his arms exploded right off the sides of his body, where they were attached at the shoulders. He was ten years old. It hurt him a lot. And when he woke up, woke up so he could actually feel the pain that came from his arm holes, he was told his entire family was dead. They exploded completely: his mother, his father, his two older brothers. Well, he wasn’t told this right away, but everyone in the world who saw his picture in the newspapers, where he was lying in bed with his torso wrapped in white bandages and his face smiling at the camera, they knew, because under the picture it said so, said that his entire family was dead and he was a nice ten-year-old boy with no arms.
So everyone in the world knew that his family was dead, but he didn’t even know it himself for about a week. The newspapers also said he had wanted to be, when he grew up, a man who did things with his arms. Like a carpenter or a goat herder or a player of traditional musical instruments, things he would need his arms for. The people who exploded his arms off his sides said they would make him new arms, out of a fake material. But fake arms probably wouldn’t work well enough for him to do any of those jobs he wanted to do when he grew up. His name was Ali. Everyone in his country was named Ali.
And that’s not all: another thing that happened was that a man was climbing up a mountain and some rocks fell on him, and a really big rock landed on his arm and the arm got stuck. So the man had to cut off his arm to free himself. He didn’t do this right away, because first he was waiting to see if anyone would find him and push the big rock off his arm. He waited for five days. Also, he became very hungry because he had thought he was going to climb for just one day and had brought only enough food for one day, but then had to make it last more days than one. Also, he had only brought one book to read. It was a book about sports and some guy who was good at it. He read the book three times before he cut off his arm, and before he cut off his arm, he broke the bones in his arm so he could saw through it more easily with his little knife. But it still took a couple of days of sawing. His name was Aron, like everybody in his country.
The whole world read about him in the newspapers, because who could imagine that a person would be brave enough to cut off his own arm? They have an expression “He’d cut off his nose to spite his face,” but the situation here was that Aron cut off his arm to save the rest of his body. It was funny that they finally found him just a few hours after he had cut through the last bit of his arm. It hurt him a lot, but it was very cold on the mountain, so some of his nerves were probably numb. A few days after he was rescued he went on television and told his side of what he had done, and he said a lot of things to do with religion.
So then what you had was this world with three arms less. It really threw things off all over the place. Buses were late and a guy fell on his head and Miss November’s left breast was a little bigger than her right breast and someone got a hamburger with a safety pin in it when they ordered a hamburger. You couldn’t read the newspaper without coming across another thing that was a result of how off-balance the world was with three arms less.
Ali ended up in the country that exploded his arms off and killed his family, and he lay at night in the dark in a little bed that smelled of talcum powder. He learned how to roll over by rocking his hips and pushing with his feet. Aron sat in his apartment in a big chair and with only one hand turned the pages in the novels he read. Also, he dreamed about being the first person to climb all the way to the top of some big mountain with only one arm stuck on his body.
After that, the number of arms in the world never changed.
Copyright © Stuart Ross
