Eli S. Evans
Listen to Eli read his story
I had developed a little wound on my right arm just above the elbow. I’m not quite sure how it got there, maybe it was an insect bite or some other sort of small puncture, but the problem was that every time it started to heal I couldn’t keep myself from picking at the crusty little layer of slough hardening atop it; as such, I would open it up once again, and to make a long story short I more or less managed, in this fashion, to turn the little wound into a semi-permanent hole.
“Stop picking at that thing!” my mother snapped at me when I stopped by to visit her in the midst of all this. “If you keep it up, your whole arm’s going to fall off.”
“Yeah, okay ma,” I said. My mother has always been a bit of an alarmist – when I was a child, I managed to overturn a table onto my big toe, and after watching me limp around on it all night she went out the next morning and got me a cane.
“I’m not an old man, ma,” I complained. “Actually, it doesn’t really even hurt anymore.”
“You might have a micro-fracture and if you put too much pressure on it, it could crack all the way through, and then you’d have to have surgery and we wouldn’t be able to afford the insurance co-pay, but at the same time I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the eye if I let you go lame so I’d have to sell the house and we’d end up living on the streets with the gangbangers and junkies and I don’t even want you to think about what I’d have out there to do to keep us clothed and fed.”
As usual, nothing of the sort happened, and the cane just ended up in the basement along with the rest of the clutter. On this particular occasion, however, the old lady turned out to be right: just a couple days after the aforementioned visit, my right arm – the one with the hole in it, that is – fell off my shoulder like an autumn leaf detaching from the branch, leaving me completely armless on the right side.
“I told you so,” observed my mother with satisfaction when she saw what had become of me.
As it turned out, however, the condition was only temporary. The lost appendage soon grew back in precisely the manner in which a worm sliced in two regenerates its missing half. And to be clear, I don’t mean that metaphorically: quite literally, what grew back in place of my missing length of arm was a segmented hydrostatic tube traversed by a schizocoel and bisected by an albumin-filled clitellum – or, to put it otherwise, an actual worm. As with most things in life, there have been both pluses and minuses associated with this peculiar situation: despite making it impossible for me to continue my career as an airport pianist, for example, it has proved altogether beneficial when it comes to fishing.
Eli S. Evans has published two books of small absurdities, Obscure & Irregular and Various Stories About Specific Individuals in Particular Situations, both with Moon Rabbit Books & Ephemera.
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