When it was done, the deacons stood and collected around the rim of the room. I lifted my arms from where they’d been pinned behind me and saw my stumps for the first time, pulsing blood with each heartbeat, almost black and shining like something lacquered. I couldn’t comprehend what was missing, only that it was something vital and natural and necessary. Something I didn’t even know could be taken from me.
The only sound I heard all those long minutes was the whomp, whomp of blood in my eardrums, blood pushing out of my body with purpose and sucked into the rough wooden floor.
The deacons flinched away from me and my wild blood, but the Prophet stood still, his eyes fascinated. He stepped forward, unconscious of the blood splashing his robes, and crouched.
“You will be my wife,” he whispered. “You will be my wife.”
I curled on my side away from him, watching my handless arms flail, the blood streaming off like ribbons. One of the Prophet’s wives stepped from the shadows and lashed twine around each stump, twisting it tight with sticks. This stemmed the blood, though I knew I had already lost buckets.
I lost consciousness a moment later, but not before catching an eyeful of them in the corner. The hands. The loose fists, curled like snails’ shells, in a pool of red.
? ? ?
I don’t glance at my stumps once while I tell this story. Instead, I watch Dr. Wilson, studying his face. I guess, with a story like that, I can’t help feeling I’ve earned the pinch of sympathy, the furrow that forms on people’s brows when I tell them. It’s a small kind of weapon, this story. I stab someone with it and they hurt, every time. But, the wrinkles fanning the doctor’s forehead are flat. His face doesn’t once crumple with concern. He has spent the past several minutes rolling the tip of his ballpoint pen back and forth over the red line running the length of his legal pad.
“Isn’t that a sad story?” I ask finally.
He looks up, nods. “Sad.”
“You don’t look sad.”
“Should I?” he asks.
“You just said it’s a sad story. You should look like you care.”
“I might express sadness differently than you. That doesn’t mean I don’t care.”
“I don’t buy that,” I say.
“What do you want? Tears?”
“Tears would be nice.” I nod. “Or at least a frown.”
“Like this?” He folds his face up in an exaggerated fake frown.
I grimace. “Nobody frowns like that.”
He leans back, rubs his eyes, and links his fingers at the back of his head. “Minnow, as a general rule, you shouldn’t try to control other people’s faces.”
“That’s good,” I say. “Should I add that to my affirmation wall?”
The bell sounds for afternoon rec time. He flips the rolled-up pages of his notepad back and stands.
“Until next time.”
? ? ?
I decide to spend my rec time in the visitors’ lounge. I never get visitors, of course, but I’ve gone there before with Angel to watch the girls with their families. They’re so different. The confident, brash ones lose all their noise when they sit beside bear-sized fathers, and the quiet, strange ones cling to their mothers’ necks like rag dolls and cry when they have to let go.
When I walk into the visitors’ lounge, a bunch of families are watching a show together on the big box TV because they can’t make conversation in this place. It’s one of those patriotic talent shows tuned about five times too loud. On-screen, a wheelchair-bound girl with a red crown of hair is going on about her father, who has bone cancer, and her mother, who died in Afghanistan, and her own extremities deformed by a childhood battle with spina bifida. She rolls onstage before the judges, and the beginning notes of “Wind Beneath My Wings” blast from her lungs.
The audience on the TV stands and cheers. In the lounge, some of the mothers cry. Even the hardened juvie girls watch with at least mild interest.
But I can’t look. I stand and ask Benny if I can go back to my cell.
“Rec time doesn’t end for another half hour.”
“I want to go to the library.”
“Once you’re locked into a room, you can’t leave until the end of rec time.”
“B-but, that’s a dumb rule,” I cry. “I can’t sit here and watch that show for a single minute more. I don’t want to be in this room anymore.”
“Why not?” she asks.
“Because—because I’m crazy!” I shout. “Velcro shoes, remember? Let me out!” I duck past her and try to lever the doorknob open, but she has me in a headlock before I can even touch metal. Her thick arm cinches around my neck, and I breathe harder and harder until darkness slams over my brain like a door in my face.
? ? ?
I come out of it when Benny sits me down hard in one of the office chairs in the assistant warden’s office.