Weekly Writing – September 2 2023

“What do you mean, it’s got my soul in it?”
The doctor – whose credentials she should have been a lot more careful about examining, would have been, if she hadn’t been losing so much blood when she’d stumbled in the door – waved a dismissive hand. Fine-boned and slack-skinned with age, but a human hand, unlike the thing she now held away from herself like a snake that might strike.
“Just a small piece,” the doctor might have meant to assure her. “It was necessary, to make the limb move and feel like a part of your body.”
“It doesn’t feel like a part of my body,” she argued. The bolts that bound the arm to her were cold in her shoulder, its weight an alien strain on the side of her neck. The hand was black and skeletal, every knuckle set with tiny, rounded red jewels that glowed in the clinic’s homey light.
“Really? Make a fist. Rap it on the table,” the doctor instructed her, and stared, magnified, through their round spectacles until she did. “You felt that, didn’t you? As if you were knocking your own knuckles on the wood?”
“Yes,” she conceded. It was a harder feeling, like bone without flesh intervening, but the impact had been clear in her knuckles and the flex of her black metal forearm. “But it’s…you tore a piece off of my soul, though. You didn’t even ask.”
“Which should only tell you what a mundane procedure it was. Really, what difference is there, even? Your soul has always been housed in your body. Damage to your body has always translated, to some extent, to damage to your soul. If only in pain and trauma – so, just don’t let this arm suffer the fate of the last one, and you’ll be perfectly fine.”
“So, just don’t get my arm cut off again,” she echoed, flat as her hand on the table. “You say that as if I planned it the first time.”
“I say it as if I expect you to be much more careful this time,” the doctor said, with far too much of a smile for how much blood was still on the floor. “Once bitten, twice shy, and all that. Besides, it is much more durable than the last one. Top-quality materials. Which reminds me, if you’re feeling a little better acquainted with your new extremity now, it’s time we discussed the issue of payment.”
Her fist curled tight on command, just as the old one would have. “I didn’t ask for top-quality materials.”
“No, but I imagine a wooden toy of an arm strapped to your shoulder would have made it very difficult for you to continue in your chosen career.”
The doctor’s grin gleamed ghastly, almost as skeletal as her arm, under magnified blue eyes. The clock in the corner of the clinic, she could have sworn, ticked smugly.
“What do you know about my career?” she asked.
“Only that you stumbled into my clinic carrying what appears to be a genuine first edition of the Half-Severed Sorcerer’s Lament. Don’t worry,” they might still have been trying to assure her, but the grin made her doubt it. “I’ll gladly accept payment in services. There’s a certain book, you see, that only someone with your prowess and new tools might be able to acquire for me…”