by Claire Humphrey
Read by Julia Rios (of Strange Horizons and the Outer Alliance Podcast)
Originally published in Interzone #249, November 2013.

The chirurgeon’s knife severs my little finger from my palm, just above the mount of Mercury.

“You are permitted to look away,” the chirurgeon comments.

I shrug the shoulder that isn’t locked down, and keep watching.  The knife, obsidian, joints me like I’m a bird.

Somewhere inside my forearm I feel the pull of my tendon loosed.  Little blood, and no pain; the chirurgeon knows her work, and the numbness of the lockdown extends all the way to my breast.  In five minutes the chirurgeon has stowed the finger in its cooler, joined flaps of skin over the hollow socket, and healed it over with a couple of passes of a graft-stick.

“You’ll have minor pain for a few weeks,” she says.  “You don’t need to keep it covered.  The scar will change colour; that’s normal.  If you feel a loss of sensation or have any discharge, come back to me.”

She takes off the lockdown and feeling surges back through my breast, up over my trapezius, down my arm.  I flex my hand.  Sure enough, it hurts.  Nothing I can’t bear.

She walks me to the front desk.  The buyer waits there.  An attendant comes out and hands him the tiny cooler tagged with my name.

Rated R. Contains violence, disturbing imagery, and sex. (The sex isn’t disturbing.)

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