Disarticulated Life: After the Hands
by William R. Soldan
After the Hands
You have no history, none that you know of. One day you will wish to explore the absence, but want for a road through it. Part of you will feel robbed. Part of you will be too busy getting by to care.
You look for signs of connection. Between yourself and yourself. Yourself and this disarticulated life. Severed. You know them when you see them. But sometimes you don’t.
You find one in a line in a book. Others in broken things.
Your mother works herself into a new hip and is still on her feet. Emptying trash and vacuuming floors. Cleaning people’s shit from bathroom stalls. Invisible. She eats her lunch on the move because there’s just never enough time. She chases it with pain pills she can’t afford because she can’t afford to stop.
The metal in her leg makes her ache. Her back aches. Her hands. So stiff and inflamed she can hardly make a fist to shake at the sky. And when the hands go, what then? You’re sure she wonders as much as you, but she doesn’t complain.
Just keeps moving.
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