Quicklinks:
|
Great Writing - Home > Short S. > The Bastard Arm
| READING ROOM | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| COMMUNITY | |||
|---|---|---|---|
|
| ABOUT GREAT WRITING | ||
|---|---|---|
|
| WORK AWAITING REVIEW |
|---|
|
| GW IS... |
|---|
|
Great Writing creative writing community is designed to prompt ideas
and provide inspiration and motivation within aspiring and amateur
authors. Whatever your topic; from love poetry to Doctor Who or Harry
Potter fan fiction, Great Writing's online writing group is where you
can make new friends and improve your creative writing. |
| WHO'S ONLINE |
|---|
| We have 1187 guests online and 1 member online |
Shorts
| print friendly version | |
| The Bastard Arm | |
| By Bobgeorge | ||||||
| 26 May 2008 | ||||||
|
There were a few minuets of calm after the waitress walked away and I watched as her gait seemed to be stifled by her cheap shoes. They were rubbing against her ankle, she’d probably die with scars on her toes. ‘People should always buy expensive shoes’ I thought and wondered why some insisted on stumbling about in life.Just then I caught myself eyeing her up and down, inspecting her, I was spying on myself spying on her from across the room. ‘You sick bastard’ I shouted, ‘Watching a waitress hobbling for kicks, what kind of man are you?’ I didn't want an argument with myself in public. ‘A man can only be on the losing side when he argues with himself’ I thought. But the truth is you’re also the only winner when you argue with yourself and as I realized this I shouted back. ‘I just happened to notice that her feet look sore in those shoes!’ I stared at me shouting and saw myself settle and shake my head a little before sipping my coffee. Then I was looking back down at the table, past the cup. Unsure at how I had managed to view myself from across the room I muttered, ‘Odd café this.’ I decided to ignore myself and avoid a fight.
My eyes darted along the rubbery foreign appendage, along the curve of the hand and wrist and then panic built. It was undeniable, the awkward sensation, the feeling that the whole of the arm no longer belonged to me. Instead it lay with a dead weight on the table, like a bored snake or a chopped log. I had half a reflex to look up for its owner or to call out: ‘For Gods sake! Whose left THIS ARM on my table!’ Of all the things to find hanging from the handle your coffee cup! Was this sanitary I wondered? Then I looked over at the ketchup bottle and thought that perhaps it was just the way things were in a greasy spoon cafe. I was sure if I were to pick the arm up and throw it, that it would land several meters away, perhaps hit the wall with a thud or smash the café window. In that case who would be to blame? Me or the arm? I scrunched my eyes and in a brief moment made it clear in my mind that at the very least, the coffee was mine. I had ordered it. Not the arm. I inspected again: the hairs between the joints of the fingers, the knuckles, the lines and the contours of the alien landscape were all unfamiliar. The fingernails, a mole, a little scar, they didn’t look like mine at all. ‘It can’t be my hand.’ I muttered. I didn’t ever remember owning an arm like that. In fact an arm seemed like a very odd concept indeed at that moment. I decided to try and move it away from my cup of coffee and found that I could move it independently and seemingly with the power of my mind. When I decided I wanted the fingers to wiggle, the fingers wiggled, all I had to do was think ‘up’ and up the arm moved, if I thought ‘left’, then left it moved. I could control the bastard. The thoughts may have come easily but the arm itself felt heavy and there was a delay between the instructions and the movement, as if they were being relayed up miles into space to some satellite and then sent hurtling back down to earth, like the echo you hear in a phone call from abroad, or the time between the flash of lightening and the sound of thunder. I banged it on the table, it hurt but there was no delay in it, the pain was instant, so I did it once more, harder and more desperately and again pain. Each time I banged the thing it felt more and more like my hand, my arm, attached to my shoulder and my body. It now seemed connected to my brain and my mind, to my instinct. The delay had vanished as I swiped the table, the bang coupled the flash. I supposed I was causing a scene but ‘Sod it’ I thought, ‘I’ve discovered an arm.’ One final time I slammed the arm down and as I did it hit the coffee cup and knocked it off the table and into the air. I watched as the cup smashed on the floor and its hot contents sprayed across table to my left and all over the man sat there. He screamed and writhed in pain, flapping his burned body around and spilling his own drink on himself and then wailed some more. I became cruelly aware in that instant that the five or six other people in the café were glaring at me. My deduction was that they’d been watching ever since I began to bang my arm on the table. Their faces were stunned and blank. ‘Fuckers’ I thought, and shouted ‘Never seen an arm before?’ There was silence and mouths hung open. It was a situation that one couldn’t really see coming. It had no reference point, no relation to tie a knot to; there was no seabed to anchor, just space. As a scene it had blundered into the café and sucked all the tittering conversation out of the air and then sat there with its feet on the table rudely asking: ‘What?’ I pictured myself slapping my hand on the table, banging it fruriously with an inquisitive look in my eye. 'Fine' I said aloud, acknowledging their right to be silently shocked. When the scolded man stopped feeling sorry for himself and started to feel angry with me, he stopped sobbing and arose, he was red in the face. It was apparent by his biceps that he was not a man not accustomed to having hot coffee thrown over him. I looked at the whites of his eyes and then back down at my shaking arm. Now it seemed to be all mine: the arm; from shoulder to fingertips, it seemed too much to be mine. I wasn’t sure I wanted it anymore; it was after all, guilty, a bit of an embarrassment, like an idiot friend who mouths off at a gang of thugs. I wanted to run and leave it on the table, leave it with the tea stains and the empty sugar packets and disown it. I wanted to fling it away as I had pondered doing earlier; against the wall, through the window, anywhere away from me. But its sense has been forced back. Revived and re-associated; unwanted wherever it had been. Now the arm, wholly mine, under the fluorescent lights of the café, waving at the customers and posing culpably before the large and scolded man, now the arm under all my control, was completely unwanted by me.
Only registered users can rate and write comments. Powered by AkoComment 2.0! |
||||||
 Previous item
|
Next item
|
|---|