Phantom Limb Pain
It's a bitch, truly it is, waking up out of a sound sleep with my right hand itching horribly. And then I try to scratch it, and I remember that, oh yeah, I don't have a right hand. There've been times when I wanted to go dig up the bloody thing and scratch the bones, just to see if it would help. But the itch is just foreplay. Then… I can't describe it. It's worse than cutting off my hand in the first place, and all I can do is stick my stump in ice, grit my teeth, and wait for the pain to go away. People have gone insane from phantom limb pain. Lucky bastards.
The attacks used to happen more often; the first few weeks after I settled back into normal life without a hand, it was almost nightly. Lately it hasn't been nearly so bad; it only hits every couple of weeks. It's just that each time seems like forever. But hell, at least I get to park in the handicapped space.
The morning after a particularly bad attack, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that even though I'd barely slept, I was still able to stumble into S-Mart in time for my shift. The bad news was that I stumbled into S-Mart. I should have used the door. I looked around. Nobody had been watching, so I moved a big SALE poster over the cover the crack in the glass, stepped a few feet over to the actual door, and walked in.
Something seemed odd that day. People kept staring at me, out of the corners of their eyes, averting their gaze as soon as they saw me looking back. And a few little children saw me and ran, crying. Well, I know I can be kind of awful looking when I haven't got much sleep and my grooming routine's consisted of running my fingers through my hair a couple times on the drive to work. Still, crying seemed a bit much. And then I realized. My hand. I'd forgotten to put on my gauntlet hand before going to work. Crap.
Wait a minute. I'd driven to work. Since my old Delta 88 died its tragic death, I've driven a cruddy white Subaru Legacy station wagon. No personality, but it gets me around, it hauls a lot of crap, and it's got a nice wide backseat.
It's a stick shift.
Suddenly I didn't care what the customers thought. I pulled my sleeve up, exposing my stump. There were stubby nubs of bone sticking out of the skin, past the spot where I'd severed my hand two months before. They were white and shiny, slick with clear fluid, and they ached, but not badly. And they were... wiggling. I wasn't moving them.
Well, I didn't need that kind of trouble. I folded my sleeve carefully over the nubs and resolved to devote all my free time to pretending they didn't exist. See, if I didn't see them, and no one else saw them, then, logically, they weren't there.
That night, I dreamed that I was back in the cabin, in the woods. Something was coming after me, and I didn't know what it was. I just knew I had to get away from it. But as soon as I tried to run, I tripped and fell face first on the floor, and I couldn't move. Couldn't get up and flee, couldn't even turn over to see what was coming at me, just had to lie there with my face in the floorboards while this... something rushed toward me.
I woke up soaked with sweat, the phantom limb pain worse than ever. I staggered out of bed, filled my kitchen sink with ice water, and stuck my stump in it. My stump. Only as soon as I'd uncovered it, I realized it wasn't a stump any more. It was a hand. The hand was thin and motionless, pale skin hanging loosely on toothpick bones without any muscles or blood vessels or anything. But God did it hurt.
Well, I wasn't about to lop it off again. I'm not that stupid. I gritted my teeth, stuck my new hand in the ice water, and waited for it to stop hurting. It didn't. But something was changing in it, visibly changing. The fingers thickened and gained shape, muscles snaking out from my wrist and attaching themselves to the bones of the new hand. Blood vessels crawled along the backs of the muscles and embedded themselves in the tissue of the hand.
And then the pain grew, grew to agony, until I was choking down screams and I wasn't sure if I could take it any longer. My arm spasmed and knocked the ice out of the sink all over the floor. I fell to my knees on the icy linoleum. I might have blacked out for a moment, but I don't think so. I lay curled on my kitchen floor, and realized what this pain was. The nerves. Nerves were growing back into my hand, and while they were growing their ends were raw. Then the pain stopped, and I had two hands.
I looked at my right hand, stroked it, flexed the fingers. It was real, it seemed normal, and it was mine. Mine to move and mine to feel. Pretty damn cool. It was like having my right hand back. Okay, it was having my right hand back, but you know what I mean.
I crawled back into bed and slept like a baby the rest of the night. It wasn't just the end of the pain, or even the relief of having two hands again. I just felt... good. It was a warm content feeling in my muscles, like I'd just finished a great workout.
I woke up early the next morning. Usually I take about eight and a half hours of sleep to not be a zombie, but that night I hadn't slept more than three. But I felt great, absolutely bursting with energy, from the moment I hopped out of bed to the moment I tried to shave.
Because there was nothing there. I mean, I still had a face and all, but there was absolutely no stubble. I've usually got a five-o-clock shadow by noon and near to a full beard by the time I wake up in the morning, but all of a sudden my face was as smooth as a baby's ass. Weird. But what the hell, one less chore.
Two less chores, as it turned out. I went to the kitchen for breakfast, poured myself out a bowl of Corn Chex, and realized I wasn't hungry. But not in the ordinary way that happens when I've had a big dinner or my stomach hasn't woken up. I was so not-hungry that it was like I didn't even have a stomach. Like I'd never need to eat again.
I took a bite of the cereal anyway, because sometimes you need to eat a little to realize how hungry you really are. I couldn't swallow it. My throat just wouldn't work. I felt ridiculous, standing there in my kitchen with a mouthful of Corn Chex, just chewing it over and over and trying to make myself swallow and being completely unable. Eventually I just spat it out into the sink and threw out the rest of the cereal. You know, sometimes I get lonely, but it's times like that when I'm really grateful I don't live with anyone. No one around to see heap big Deadite slayer yarking into the garbage disposal.
After that things were normal again, and stayed normal for a whole eight minutes, which was how long it took me to get dressed. Then I realized that something else was odd. The world was blurry, and everything farther than a foot away seemed to smear into one big mass of color. I wondered if this was more magic, another strange effect of my new hand. Then I realized I'd forgotten to put in my contact lenses. Oh.
I went into the bathroom, got out my left contact lens, held it up to my left eye, and glanced into the mirror to get the lens in. It wasn't pleasant; I jabbed myself in the eye when I saw myself in the mirror. Because my eyes had no pupils. Or irises. If that's what the colored bit is called. Anyway, I didn't have them. Just white. I didn't think you could see without those parts, but then again I didn't think that hands grew back after you chopped them off, or that dead people woke up and ran around trying to bite you. Live and learn, huh?
Well, I was learning. But was I living? I mean, most of the people I've seen with all-white eyes have been Deadites. Okay, not most, more like all. The thing is, Deadites are sort of ... you know, dead. So I must have been dead. Shit. That was probably going to suck in a whole bunch of ways. How the hell do you get a date when you're dead? "Hey baby, wanna put the 'feel ya' in 'necrophilia'?"
See, that's stupid. There are no good pickup lines when you're dead!
Plus, there was the whole work thing. It was seven by then. I had to be at S-Mart at seven forty-five. It was a half-hour drive. So did I go? People had taken the missing-hand thing in stride, maybe they'd do the same for the white-eyes thing.
Or maybe not. I'd told my good friends at work the real reason why I'd lost my hand. But to the manager, I'd had to tell the story my lawyer gave me. Something about how a freak gas explosion in the cabin that killed all my friends and blew my hand off and how sometimes the post-traumatic stress whatever made me hallucinate and tell weird stories about zombies and medieval wars and stuff. Dumb story, but it was kind of handy as far as not being convicted of multiple rapes and murders and sent to jail for the rest of my life, so I guess I had to use it. I'm not sure which story my coworkers ended up believing.
You know that last sentence? It was bullshit. They think I'm crazy and I know it. Doesn't bug me; actually, it's kind of nice since they can't fire me or I can sue their asses for discriminating against a disabled person. Plus if someone ever pisses me off, I just look at them a certain way, get a peculiar look in my eyes, maybe mutter something about chainsaws... instant respect. Never fails.
What the hell, I'd go to work. Couldn't do any harm, and if I was dead that would just make it lamer to hang around my apartment doing nothing all day. Probably no one would even ask about my eyes. The only reason to stay home I could think of would be the stuff I could say when phoning in sick. "I'm sorry boss, I feel like the walking dead this morning." Yeah, I kill me.
I put the contacts in anyway. They cleared up my vision pretty well, even though they were just sitting on empty white eyes. I didn't even try to figure that one out.