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A very creepy, which was to hold up her stuers would be

"And they did surgery again And again The pain was unbelievable That and my back, and I was on these pills, pain pills every four hours and they e but those would wear off and I’d spend the last two hours counting theto live with either the pain or the puking and I kind of had to pick"

Antidepressants The thought of this girl actually being depressed rab the whole planet and throw it into the sun Well, more than usual anyway

"And I bit a teacher So eventually ain, al things They hadwith Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty and they were in the process of splitting up and they didn’t want urine, and Bill freaked out I mean it’s not his fault they didn’t want me but what could I do? He yelled, and anyway the doctors said we had one last shot, one last chance to get the hand to work because the nerve tissue was dying off"

She looked down and picked soery and I woke up in the recovery roo that one and I woke up and there it was Gone Just an empty space, white sheets where my hand should be It looked so weird I cried and cried and cried Just, bawling For hours They knew, David, they knew they’d have to take the hand off And they didn’t say anything And I was just lying there and I knew, all at once, that I’d never be able to blend into a roorunted

"And, no matter what I did or what I said, it’d always be, ‘Airl without a hand?’ Everywhere I went And the worst part is when you, like, ht away, they don’t see it and you sit there talking to the thatto notice That look in their eyes at the moment they see it Like they’re embarrassed for me"

She went quiet

I said, "This world kind of sucks"

"I left I went and stayed with Jim after that I can still feel the hand, you know It’s true what they say about that, ghost feeling in the li?"

"No, it’s, like, clenched I can feeland I can’t release it Isn’t that weird?" She held up her good hand, squeezed in a tight fist "Like this I can actually feel the fingernails digging into uess, so with the nerves And it’s like that all the time If I really concentrate, I can ht back that way a e of pain is always there, a couple of inches into space where ht about telling her ic story of the scrotal candle- wax incident, but figured it wouldn’t impress her She crossed her arms and rubbed the cold froun was on the floorboard

I said, "You knoas confused when I first saw you, right? At the house? I didn’t knohere your hand went--"

"Well, I still had it in school--"

"--but John knew"

"Well, yeah," she said "He used to co you need to know about John The reason I was surprised by your hand was because John never once described you as, ‘the girl with thehand’ "

5:36 AM

I don’t knohat John did in the intervening time bethen he left thesite, but from past experiences with John I will extrapolate that he told a series of humorous stories about his penis, drank some sort of off- brand alcohol and then had sex with yet another girl who I secretly had a crush on but never got the courage to talk to At so clothes, layers of flannel and cover-alls stained with tar

The semi accident scene had been neatly cleared away by the tiled tire tracks as evidence Steve the Roofing Guy was already at the rear of the building, talking to a security guard about roof access This was one of the guards John saw at the trailer crash site He didn’t know if the guy would recognize him or not, so he took a newspaper from the trash and held it in front of his face as he approached Again, this is just what John told me, so, you know Grain of salt By six o’clock, thirteen ed roof hole, working as snow and ice runoff poured mini- waterfalls into the Drain Rooter break rooed candy bar ot on the roof and i was flung upward, debris and boards and tile scattered on the roof like so blond Nazi Youth– looking kid who had jammed with John’s band off and on, made the same observation and said wasn’t that so sudden cold spells the war to partially explode for much the same reason balloons will burst if you fill them ar that shit up and John said that he could look it up, knowing he wouldn’t

John then took the stairs down to the wet break room, tape strewn across the hallways to keep e he noticed was that the break roolass sround While the guys were sto snoay fro wound, John wandered around and noticed a section of hallway that had been blocked off with the same black- and- yellow DANGER tape he saw earlier

For the second time that day John ducked casually across some DO NOT DUCK CASUALLY ACROSS THIS TAPE tape and saw another hole, one in the wall, again like soiant crab with a es of the hole, there were scars in the drywall like scratches Claw ed tear in the wall

He saw a room that was clearly not on the floor plan It was s room, and had absolutely no features Four bare walls Then John turned away from it and, as he did, saw a perfectly round hole in the floor as wide as the roo down Way down John said it was the kind of chas they have in all of the space stations in the Star Wars movies, for some reason The ones crisscrossed with catwalks with no handrails