The Third Arm
It was Wednesday when Gina woke up to discover that she had grown a third arm over the course of the night. This wasn’t intended. It just happened.
As she sipped her morning coffee she stared at the third arm, quite bewildered. How does such a thing occur? And for such a thing to happen to a person like her. She was – by all standard metrics – normal. Not anymore, and that was scary. Being normal was easy. You could get through life quite alright being normal. But now, she had three arms. People would notice.
Gina was scared to use the third arm. What if it betrayed her? She spent half a day staring into the mirror. What a sight. Should she see a doctor, or would they ask her to give it up for medical research? She was starting to become attached to her third arm.
For seven days and seven nights Gina confined herself to her house. She used this time to worry and wonder and become acquainted with her third arm. On the eighth day, after an especially sleepless night and weepy morning spent building up tremendous courage, she returned to work. That’s when the trouble began. It was Tortilla Day, and having been off ‘sick’, Gina was out of the loop.
She had forgotten to bring tortillas.
“What do you mean you’ve forgotten the tortillas?” Roared her boss, who was well known for being a raving born again Catholic on the side.
“I’m sorry, Pastor Phil.”
“Get out of my face and do yer work,” he roared.
Gina sat at her desk, thinking of tortillas and feeling like a loser. She glanced across the office towards the man she secretly loved. His name was Marcus and he wasn’t very popular because he didn’t have any teeth. But to Gina, he was sweet.
Marcus noticed Gina looking at him. He gave her the middle finger. Sadly, he loved tortillas, and he wasn’t particularly forgiving when he didn’t get them.
That night, Gina cried herself to sleep.
When she woke up the next morning, the third arm had shrunk to half its size.
A week later, it was gone.
Blog Anniversary
Today is an anniversary. One year of blogging. Two a week equals one hundred and four pieces of writing that would not have otherwise existed, in the bag and painted on the world wide web for posterity’s sake.
Did I have a strong desire to write every Thursday and Sunday? No. But emotions aren’t always on your side, and a ritual, however arbitrary or self-imposed, can raise you above the capriciousness of mood.
Would I have thanked my tired, dispirited, or unmotivated self for skipping a post? Undoubtedly not.
Some might argue that there’s something unromantic about writing with clockwork regularity. That’s not been my experience so far. More romantic to write and to have written.
