WARNING: The following story is made for fans of natural or modular body magic / detachment/ disassembling people non-lethally / etc. If you are not a member of that community, I strongly advise that you turn back now. Things will get freaky.
This is a sequel to The Garage Guillotine and a prequel to Packing Light, though neither of those are required reading as this story is not exactly high concept or lore-rich. It's just generically smutty shit.
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Amid a haze of incoherent sensation and inscrutable concepts beyond language, a strictly organized and repeating sequence emerged. This sequence's infancy, infinitely distant and infinitesimally weak, was as the chaos unknowable, yet once observed and distinguished from the morass it was inexorable. With each repetition, countless shapeless worlds of illogic were consumed and brought to terrible order, given distances, times, and speeds with which to travel distances within the context of times. All was made one with the sequence, yet for its power, the concise, horrific, recurring cry was but a message, one that signaled both the end of all things and their beginning. A message that, awaiting answer, cried out again and again,
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
"Fuuuuuck..." Carlos groaned, as a limp hand slapped his face. After careful analysis, Carlos deduced the hand was his own, and commanded it to rub the sand from his right eye. His left arm seemed to have been trapped under something soft and warm and comfortably heavy, and he was in no great hurry to extract it from whatever held it down, so his free hand continued on to the left eye. While he screwed his eyes shut as best as he could, light slipped through the cracks as he rubbed, revealing glimpses of a familiar stucco ceiling. Judging by the softness beneath and above him, Carlos deduced he was in his bedroom, on his bed, under his blanker, and was just waking up from a long night.
A smile crept across his stubbled face as scrambled memories of that night and the preceding weekend bubbled through the haze of sleep and hangover. Memories of obscene sexual misadventure mixed with innocent fun, made possible with an eager girlfriend and a magic paste that rendered any blade it coated incapable of harming living tissue but perfectly able to slice through it. While initially contained to the garage, where Carlos had cobbled together a functional if crude guillotine, over the course of three days the paste had been applied to far more portable kitchen knives and by consequence the fun was brought to every room of the house. Carlos couldn't even remember half of it all, yet everything he could remember was a memory he would certainly cherish forever.
He exhaled, slow and deep, moving his shoulders in a way that was almost a shrug but lacked the energy to rightfully earn the descriptor. It was a shame the weekend had to end so fast. Even now, as the alarm continued to shriek at him from the nightstand, new ideas and twists on classics popped into his head, ideas which would surely nag at him all day at work.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Carlos opened his eyes. He saw the ceiling, along with bits and pieces of the room in his peripheral vision. While his head swam in a fog of fatigue and lingering booze, he could make out more fine details than he reasonably should've in the dim morning light. Because the light wasn't dim, but a warm, golden glow, like fire burning just outside his window, like the sun was already well over the horizon. At 06:15am. According to his alarm, which had been beeping for...?
Carlos' hand shot out, knocking something warm, soft, and a little slimy off his nightstand, a something that made a distinct squishing sound when it landed. He grabbed his screeching, vibrating phone, and brought it to his face.
07:47am
"Puta Mother Fuckin' Madre!" Carlos screamed, terrified to redundancy. Launching himself into a seated position, the mass atop his left arm crashing to the floor to join the squishy sounding thing, Carlos called for "KELLY?!"
The sudden movement and panicked sounds roused his girlfriend, something under the blankets moving. Carlos threw the blankets aside to reveal a 5-ish pound piece of his girlfriend that had actually managed to make it all the way to bed, a scalped, emptied head, severed from the neck right at the jawline and leaving her a literally brainless blowjob toy. In this duty, she'd performed admirably, her fraction of a head still clinging to Carlos' morning wood even as her bleary eyes fought just to flutter half-open.
"Kelly! Wake up! We are so fucked!" Carlos reported, yanking her off his dick even as the organ twitched in protest. Kelly didn't seem too pleased either, her dull eyes squinting in annoyance as her tongue lazily lolled out in search of her missing treat. "Kelly! Snap out of it!" Carlos ordered, shaking her a little as he resisted the urge to try slapping her awake.
Kelly's eyes metaphorically fell upon his crotch, her mouth continuing to stupidly suck at the air. She wasn't paying attention, which made sense because she literally couldn't pay attention. She didn't have a brain with which to pay attention! "Oh you airhead bitch!" Carlos swore, looking into the featureless pink bowl inside her skull. According to the internet, when you cut into someone's head using magic paste to cut, only 1 in 4 would reveal their brain, the remaining 3 would just have the usual flat surface of smooth skin. So on top of being one of the 1 in 1,000 who lost control of their parts when magically severed, Kelly was in a further minority that could have their brain exposed and consequently removed.
Carlos could look up more magic paste trivia on his lunch break. At work. Assuming they didn't fire him. Which was getting more and more likely the longer he sat around not getting himself and Kelly ready. Carlos tucked his brainless girlfriend's head into the crook of one arm and leapt out of bed, only to collapse in a heap as he realized "God damn!" he'd cut his feet off at some point last night.
Scanning the floor for his missing feet, Carlos ironically couldn't spot the appendages but could see his empty shoes neatly arranged beside the door, as if his past self was mocking his present self for their shared shortsightedness. He also saw a glistening mound of seemingly deflated greyish-pink matter laying on its side atop a grayish brown carpet that Carlos was pretty sure used to be yellow.
"Kelly!" He again called, shuffling on his knees and a single hand towards the knocked over wad of his girlfriend. Or, depending on your philosophical, medical, and religious beliefs, towards the true form of his girlfriend. Her brain. Carlos picked it up without thinking and immediately regret that, every hair on the unlucky arm standing bolt upright as the soft, squishy, slimy, and uncomfortably fragile feeling mass of consciousness sank uncomfortably into his hand. "Egh, seriously, why do I let you talk me into this shit?" Carlos asked Kelly's brain, brushing flecks of dust and carpet fuzz off its surface.
Halfway through brushing her off, Carlos realized "SHIT!" he'd knocked her off the nightstand, hadn't he?! While the internet asserted that magically exposed brains were significantly hardier than those conventionally exposed, they were by no means indestructible, and with Kelly's reckless life of death defying stunts she'd already wracked up far more knocks to the noodle than was medically advisable.
Shoving her brain back into her skull, coincidentally the correct way around and in the correct orientation, Carlos was relieved to see Kelly's dull green eyes snap to attention, consciousness flowing into them like water filling a glass. They blinked a few times, took in the room, then locked on Carlos'. Her mouth moved, though the only sounds it produced were the smacking of lips and flapping of her tongue. Of all the arbitrary rules of magic paste, one of the most arbitrary had to be that those with Kelly's unique condition couldn't talk without a throat, even though she didn't need lungs to produce the air for speech and didn't need to breathe at all. Luckily, Carlos didn't need a degree in lip reading to figure out 'What time is it?'
"Almost Eight." Carlos grimly reported.
Kelly's expression froze, then fell into a silent scream of terror as she realized, as Carlos had, how fucked they were. Her mouth started flapping so fast that even if Carlos were an expert lip reader he'd likely have trouble parsing, though he guessed the gist of it was 'HURRY AND FIX ME!'
Carlos obeyed the assumed command, rising to his knees and peering over the edge of each drawer and cabinet in his room for errant fragments of Kelly. His search proved fruitful, if not helpful, as a small pair of boobs, both lacking nipples but one sporting a wide scar and the other a tiny corner of a large shoulder tattoo, entered his line of sight. Shuffling over, Carlos swept the breasts off and squeezed them to his chest, to keep them from falling, and waddled back to the bed before tossing them down along with Kelly's panicked, scowling face. "I can't carry as much if I'm carrying your head. I'm gonna make a sweep of each room, bring anything I find back here." Carlos announced.
Kelly squeezed her eyes tightly shut, concentrating, and mouthed something.
"What?" Carlos asked, regretting his choice to take night courses on American Sign Language rather than lip reading.
Kelly sighed without exhaling and flapped her lips slower.
"Ill-o-teen Bass-set?" Carlos asked. Kelly shot him an unimpressed glare, thought for a moment, then flopped her tongue out, slackened her jaw, and rolled her eyes up at her still exposed and a little dusty brain, like she was dead. As she logically should've been, after "OH! Guillotine basket!" Carlos said, getting a smile and an approving click of the tongue. While Kelly's genetics rendered her incapable of moving her parts when they were magically severed (and presumably regularly severed, though that wasn't abnormal), she could still feel them. Whatever part she felt laying in the wicker basket beneath the guillotine, it had to be important.
While Carlos shuffled to the garage on his hands and knees, scanning the open doors and living spaces he passed and mentally cataloging any parts he saw, Kelly did her best to keep calm. Sure, Maddie and Sonia were going to chew her head off when she eventually showed up, but they weren't gonna die. Tuesdays were pretty easy at her job, as by Tuesday the little shits were over the Monday shock of being stuck in daycare. So long as Kelly didn't miss group game time, her coworkers would probably just break her kneecaps in the privacy of the parking lot rather than gutting her with a pack of off-brand crayons right in front of the kids.
Closing her eyes and wracking her exposed mind, Kelly tried to deduce the whereabouts of her scattered parts. It was disorienting as all hell to feel dozens of distinct textures, temperatures, moisture levels, and other indescribable sensations with no logical through line, but Kelly was able to pick out some of the more distinct ones. Her midriff was wrapped in linens and felt like it'd been punched recently, meaning it had to have been in the bed with Carlos and had fallen down in his panic. Her left palm was resting on something glossy and thin, while the hand's fingertips touched roughcut wood. The only things in the house with those particular textures were the stack of magazines laying perpetually unread on the glorified plank Carlos had screwed metal legs to and declared his coffee table.
Crucially, Carlos only owned a single wicker basket, and there were few things more distinctive to the touch than a wicker basket, so Kelly knew immediately where her presently most valuable part, was, and knew exactly when Carlos had found it, her eyes snapping open and her slightly misaligned jaw opening in a soundless cough that sent her head rolling onto its cheek and nearly spilling her brain back out. While Carlos had done his best to grab it gently, the part's sensitivity and the suddenness of having a strong, calloused hand wrapped around it was still enough to shock Kelly's system. doorway as the shuffling of two knees and thump of one hand grew louder, until finally she saw a sideways boyfriend stumble in clutching a tube of flesh with a purple pair of cartoon lips tattooed on one side and on the opposite side a tightly packed splotch of scars from a nearly lethal tire swing accident provided contrast. This was her neck, her voice.
Carlos rolled Kelly's head onto its backside, holding her brain in with a wince, and reattached her throat. Immediately he was asked "I thought you said you were above the airhead joke?", reminding him that if Kelly could still feel everything without being in control of it, there was no reason she wouldn't be able to hear. Carlos was once again thankful that Kelly was much more cool with being called a bitch than any of his prior partners. "Torso's in the bathtub, belly's tangled in the bedsheets, hips are... on something plastic and scratchy. They're resting on the cut surface and my butt is sticking up, so it shouldn't be too hard to spot." Kelly reported, not awaiting response.
"So your fat ass is good for something?" Carlos teased, trying to diffuse the looming dread. Bringing his girlfriend in for a quick kiss but remembering where her mouth had been all night, Carlos tilted her up to kiss her forehead only to see her dirty brain, and finally settled on a peck to the cheek.
"Coward." Kelly loudly muttered, watching as Carlos pointedly ignored her and shuffled out of the door. "You know your ass isn't exactly size pequeño, right?" She called, admiring his bare ass.
While Carlos didn't have the time or the mental bandwidth to come up with a retort, he did have a moment to stop and think about his time efficiency and how much faster he'd be with his feet. He'd save more time overall, he reasoned, if he found his own parts before Kelly's. And if worst came to worst... well he wouldn't abandon Kelly, but... the option would at least be on the table. Like Kelly he could still feel his feet, but unlike her he could control them. They were resting on something soft and loose, sinking into whatever it was, and as Carlos flexed his toes and listened for any sound, he realized he not only couldn't hear them, but he couldn't get his feet to move off whatever they were on, as the surface lacked the purchase or structural integrity to give grip. It had to be a cushion of some type, or maybe a pillow...
Carlos scooted into the living room, spotting Kelly's hand on the coffee table, something that was either a forearm or a shin on the TV stand, and resting on the floor beside an orange and blue plaid couch that clashed with everything else in the room, the house, and perhaps everything that could be found on earth, was a depressingly spartan nail kit. It had once belonged to the middle of Carlos' three sisters, though when she accidentally left it behind she declared the cheap thing Carlos' to keep. Not that he needed much from it, other than the medium sized clippers, occasionally the file, and the tweezers to pull out splinters every once in a while.
But something must've changed in the drunken haze, for resting on a fluffy satin pillow behind the nail kit were a pair of clean, shaved, visibly moisturized, soft brown feet with immaculately trimmed and pink polished nails. Feet that responded to all his mental commands and sent signals to his now very confused brain. "Kelly?!" He called.
"Yeah?? What's up?! What's taking so long?!" She called back.
"Why?... did I give myself a pedicure?" Carlos asked, sitting down and grabbing his own feet, noticing just how uncomfortably soft, smooth, and nice they felt. He'd never been a foot guy, yet somehow he knew he felt more attraction for these feet, his, than he'd ever felt for Kelly's.
"What the fuck are talking ab-" Kelly started, before a flashback straight out of a movie briefly silenced her. When she recovered her voice, she burst out laughing. "HAHAHAHA! I kept asking for a foot massage, you didn't wanna do it, and then you got so mad at me pestering you that you gave yourself a full pedi out of spite! We watched like an hour of tutorials, you got totally hard watching all those sexy feet like a total closet perv, then-... oh my God, lemme see em'! Let me see 'em!" Kelly pleaded, before remembering "Wait, what are you doing admiring your own feet? Hurry up and fix me, perv!"
"I did this drunk?" Carlos murmered, inspecting every angle of his right foot and spotting no nicks, scratches, or razor burns, along with the perfectly painted, trimmed, and filed nails. Either he was some kind of mani/pedi savant, or the razor had gotten a paste treatment he's forgotten. Either way, he shoved his feet back on, gathered Kelly's left hand and the unidentified tube of limb meat, and shoved their cut surfaces together, knowing that only correct orientations would connect. Because they didn't, he knew the tube wasn't her left forearm or her right, as the right had a bracelet of thorns tattooed around the wrist which this tube didn't. Had to be one of the shins then, though which was still a mystery.
Returning to the bedroom, Carlos sank his fingers between Kelly's skull and brain and moved her clearly annoyed noggin up to the head of the bed, setting her boobs down beneath it about where her chest would've been and her left hand about where her left hand would go once the rest of the body was found. "Which leg is this?" He asked, holding the shin to her face.
Kelly's mouth opened, but no sound to come out. She though the answer would be obvious, but without the context of other adjacent parts to go off and with no ability to move its muscles and feel things respond in logical sequence, it was honestly hard to tell. "I dunno, squeeze it?" Kelly commanded. Carlos complied, fingers crushing her muscles until her distant thigh flexed and her lost toes squeezed, and judging from the position of the big toe on the foot that flexed, Kelly concluded "Rrrrrright... no, left! Definitely left. But seriously, get my middle together first! I can't control anything until it's attached to my brain or attached to something attached to something attached to it, so until I've got a torso all these parts are useless!"
"I just grabbed what I saw first! Why waste a trip?" Carlos argued, setting her left leg's shin in the space it would approximately occupy.
"Well then grab my belly! It's on the floor like right next to you!" Kelly snapped, feeling her belly wriggle involuntarily in the tangle of ticklishly soft bed sheets and blankets.
While Carlos had before been certain his bed sheets and blankets were composed of traditional matter and obeyed the laws of physics, trying now to unravel them made him question that idea. The fabrics seemed to weave, knot, and entangle through themselves in impossibly, like they were solid to Carlos' touch but intangible among themselves and free to pass clean through each other with impunity.
And then he shook the tangle a bit and everything was undone.
"KUH!' Kelly wheezed, her stomach smacking into the floor with enough force to knock the wind out of her.
"Sorry!" said Carlos, picking up the heaving belly and setting it on the bed. Knowing Kelly had been winded dozens of times before and knew how to handle it, and not wanting to be around when she was over it, Carlos slunk out of the room to fetch more of his girlfriend. Darting into the bathroom just across the hall, Carlos found her breastless, neckless, waistless, shoulderless torso exactly where she said it would be, floating in a lukewarm tub of murky, soapy water that Carlos had neglected to drain but had by some miracle remembered to stop running. Fishing the torso out, Carlos noticed it rise and fall in gentle and controlled puffs, assuring him Kelly had indeed recovered from the second accidental gut punch. Carlos swaddled the sodden chest in a towel and set it aside, catching the fresh scent of rose it now reeked of. That said, overpowering rose was a better than sex and drink, which is what Carlos stank of, and as he took a deep whiff of the murky, fragrant water of the bubbly bath, Carlos felt an intense urge to take a quick dip. His coworkers would never let him hear the end of it if he showed up smelling like this.
Shaking the selfish thoughts out of his head, knowing he had Kelly to consider, Carlos compromised on being just a slightly selfish prick and dunked a hand towel into the soapy water, hoping to give himself a quick whore's bath to wipe the worst of the stank off. As he dunked the towel, Carlos discovered that God indeed helped those who help themselves, as felt another two of Kelly's pieces resting at the bottom of the tub. He pulled out her knees, which he now vaguely remembered wondering whether or not they would float or if they were too dense. He couldn't concentrate enough to remember much more, for raucous laughter exploded from across the hall. Right, Kelly was crazy ticklish.
"Sorry!" He called, before quickly wiping himself down with the damp towel, pulling the tub's plug, and bringing Kelly's bits back to what had quickly gone from his bed to Frankenstein's operating table. Shoving her currently Barbie anatomy breasts onto her chest, her chest onto her neck, her bust to her belly, and trying three different orientations of cut surface and knee before finally getting the shin and its respective knee back together, Carlos looked Kelly over and realized how much more work was left to be done. "Shit... you think you can call in sick or something? I can stick you in front of the TV until I get back from work so you don't get bored."
"As much as I'd love to miss my daily viewing of The fucking Lion King, Sonia will LITERALLY skin me alive if I call out sick again. And then she'll fire me. I already spent all my sick time last time I broke my wrist, and my vacation time is going towards that stupid camping trip thingie we're doing." Kelly reported.
"Right." Carlos said, a little hurt that Kelly referred to the couple's camping trip he'd been planning for months so flippantly.
Kelly was about to tell him to not be like that and also to hurry the hell up, when she froze. She felt something moving across her skin. Water. Across her nipples. In the silence that hung between her and Carlos, she heard the slow, inexorable flow of water spiraling down old pipes, and realized "CARLOSMYNIPSAREINTHETUBGOGETTHEMNOWHURRYGONOW!"
Carlos blinked, then his mind added the necessary spaces between the words to decipher their meaning, then he launched to his now pretty feet with a cry of "PUTA!" and bounded across the hall. Shoving his hand into the tub over the drain, he felt a small nub of metal and flesh bump into the side of his hand. Slowly, careful not to move the blocking hand so much as a nanometer, her reached into the water and plucked out one of Kelly's pierced nipples, setting it safely on the bathmat before feeling around the tub for its mate.
A pit formed in Carlos' stomach as the seconds piled up into a full minute, the second nipple seemingly nowhere to be found. He leaned as far as he dared as he skimmed the edges of the tub, fearing the rogue nipple was just waiting for the slightest gap to form in his handmade plug so it could slip down the drain.
His heart and Kelly's skipped a beat as his fingertip grazed the shivering tip of her submerged nipple, stuck to the outer rim of the tub, and he pulled it out with a relieved chuckle. "Your clit in here too?" Carlos called out, keeping his hand firmly pressed to the drain.
There was a very long pause as Kelly thought very, very hard about her answer. "...No, none of my other parts are wet. You're safe!"
"Phrasing." Carlos sighed, pulling both hands out of the water, gathering up the nipples, and giving them an affectionate kiss before returning to Kelly.
"This is the worst idea you've ever had." She said, as Carlos leaned over her bust and performed a reverse mastectomy.
"Agreed." Carlos agreed, for once. "Remind me to be a lot more careful with magic, going forward."
"No." Kelly playfully answered, her heart nearly pounding out of her abbreviated chest as the rush of adrenaline and subsequent endorphins surged through her. Her scattered parts all heated up as one, squirming involuntarily at the delightfully erotic danger as her recently saved nipples perked up.
"You deranged bitch." Carlos teased, reaching in to ruffle the orange and black hair of his adrenaline junkie partner only to stop short. "You want to tell me where your scalp is? I doubt you want kids poking around in your brain."
"Uh... it's... on something. Solid. I think." Kelly said, getting a flat stare from Carlos. "Cut me some slack, it's cut side down! There's only like, a cubic inch of it actually touching anything and it's all the weird feeling magic skin!"
"Well I guess I'll check everywhere solid. Any other hints you'd like to give me?" Carlos asked.
"Uh... my hips are on something plastic and scratchy, like I said. Thighs are inside like a bag or something, it's all scratchy. I think my right arm is whole, and... I remember you tried to use it as a back scratcher, so it'll be wherever you would leave a back scratcher."
"Thanks." Carlos said, rolling his eyes and heading back for the door.
"Oh, one more thing." Kelly called, stopping him in the doorway. "It's Tuesday, remember?"
Carlos raised a perplexed eyebrow. "Yeah, I kn-"
It was Tuesday. He'd taken a long weekend with his girlfriend. Meaning when he woke up today, today wasn't Monday. It was Tuesday. "Oh."
"You work from home Tuesdays. Eight thirty to five." Kelly reminded him, smiling as she saw a weight lift off his shoulders. "You idiot."
"Big talk for small, fucked pieces." Carlos said, leaving her to giggle in peace. Carlos didn't exactly live in a mansion, so while he kept Kelly's unhelpful hints in the back of his head, he mostly just went room to room in sequence. Scouring the laundry room, Carlos found Kelly's right foot still tucked into one of her socks in the bottom of a hamper and her un-tattooed left forearm stuck between the washer and dryer, likely having rolled off while one of the machines was running. Checking the living room again, more thoroughly, Carlos found Kelly's intact right arm behind his big armchair, which much to his silent annoyance was exactly where he'd leave a back scratcher. He also discovered why he'd only 'tried' to use this as a back scratcher, as trying again he found the floppy limb with its limp fingers entirely unfit for the task. He lifted each cushion of the couch and checked under each pillow, only to discover a suspiciously heavy and bloated throw pillow. Unzipping it, Carlos dumped out heaps of loose cotton and two comfortably firm thighs onto the hideous couch. That left... lots. Carlos ran back to his room and laid out the additional limbs.
"Of course, we got the top half of one leg and the bottom of the other." Carlos muttered, annoyed he couldn't get his girlfriend more mobile.
"And no hips to put them on." Kelly noted, flexing her one operational limb as Carlos reattached it. "Keep going. I'll... I dunno, try and start dressing myself?"
Before Carlos could stop her, Kelly pulled herself off the bed and fell to the floor with a hard splat and sharp grunt, before she dragged her torso over to the small backpack of spare clothes she always kept at her boyfriend's house. Carlos shrugged and ran off to the kitchen, the second to last room apart from his garage. He'd taken exactly one step inside before spotting Kelly's hips, resting cut side down atop his plastic cutting board, a chef's knife coated with a shimmering pink sheen of magic paste sticking out of the board adjacent to the paler pink butt. "Juicy." He snickered, slapping her ass firmly before picking her hips up and spinning it around to face him. "But not juicy enough." He noted, seeing a blank patch of smooth skin where Kelly's coochie should've been.
Tucking the butt into his armpit, Carlos scanned the kitchen for more choice cuts and spotted, to his great joy, Kelly's right calf on a bed of lettuce resting on a silver platter. "Kelly!" He called, grabbing the calf and rushing back to the bedroom. "You've got a leg!"
"And a disguise." Kelly said, as Carlos burst back into the room. Having plenty of experience dressing herself one handed, as each arm had been broken twice a piece in different locations, Kelly had already dressed herself in a sleeveless bra, a t-shirt with a cartoon skull just punk enough for her own style but silly enough to fly at a children's daycare, a flannel long sleeve with an empty left sleeve dangling to the floor, and her titular disguise of a thick wool beanie, covering her exposed brain and doubtless getting lint and dandruff all up in its cracks.
"Don't you think that's a bit... risky?" Carlos asked, handing Kelly her hips and poking at the thick cap, feeling his finger sickeningly sink in a bit.
"I'm risking unemployment if I fuck around looking for nonessentials." Kelly replied, shoving her hips back onto her waist. "At this point, I'm just trying to get enough of me together to make it through the day. We can worry about..." she motioned at her empty crotch "my extras, tonight. I'll look around here, you check the garage. I think I can feel my forearm on concrete."
"Bicep." Carlos corrected. "We've got your forearm in here."
"Bicep is your forearm! It comes be-FORE the rest of your arm!" Kelly snapped. Deciding that biology debates could be saved for later, she waved him away with her full arm and ordered "Whatever! Just get it!"
Carlos nodded, reassembling her legs and slotting them back on before darting off to the garage. The floor felt suddenly grimier now that he'd gussied up his feet, and Carlos made yet a mental note to do some mopping next weekend. After he'd finished disassembling and clearing out the guillotine that had started this mess. Scanning the area immediately around the guillotine only to come up empty handed, Carlos checked under the various work benches, work tables, and work racks for any sign of errant flesh, finding only power tools, sawdust, and dozens of projects ranging from half finished to mostly finished to barely started but will totally finish.
" Jesús Cristo, where are you, you little shit?" Carlos wondered, his back aching as he straightened up and stepped back. Of course, the good lord didn't take kindly to having his name taken in vain, and Carlos found his soft heeled left foot coming down on something round and fleshy, which rolled out beneath him and threw that foot out from under him. Carlos had time for one more bout of blaspheming before his back fell across the ratty old workout bench he'd converted into the bed of his homemade guillotine. He released a howl of pain so loud it probably drowned out the sound of his spine atomizing from the impact. As his body slid off the device and collapsed into a heap of quivering, formless meat, he felt both of his knees painfully smash into the concrete floor, quickly disproving his theory of immediate and total paralysis. Still hurt like goddamned hell, though.
"You alright?" Kelly asked, hopping on one foot into garage. She'd managed to get her pants on, and looked just about normal save for her missing foot and the half of a severed arm she held.
"No. I'm dying." Carlos reported. "Found your bicep." He said, jerking his head at the limb that had nearly crippled him.
"And I got the elbow. It was under your bed." She said, waving her severed arm to show off its new joint. Hobbling over to her bruised bicep, Kelly slotted the pieces together and slid it up her shirt, reconnecting the limb which she promptly shoved into the empty sleeve. "Right, that should be good enough to get me through the day."
"What about your foot?" Carlos asked. "You gonna be playing hopscotch all day?"
"I have a plan." Kelly said, hopping away and leaving her boyfriend to die on the cold hard ground.
A few minutes passed before Carlos forced himself to his feet, regretting his choice to damp himself with a towel just minutes before as now he was covered in a slimy layer of gray grime. Limping back into the house proper, Carlos was nearly felled yet again as Kelly forced her way past him in the narrow hall, stamping down on her left foot as hard as she could.
Well, not her left foot. Her left boot, which she'd stuffed with dirty clothes and old rags before lacing up as tightly as she could and forcing her tight jeans over the high riding calf. The punk's stereotypical choice in footwear was, conveniently, the most useful for hiding a missing foot, even if she did have to really stamp on it to keep her ankle shoved down as deep as it would go between steps. Carlos probably wouldn't have been able to guess what she'd done if she hadn't made at least a dozen rants about how you ALWAYS tucked the pants INTO the boots otherwise you were a certified poseur. Hopefully her coworkers would be too mad at her tardiness to notice the breach in punk fashion. Or the limp. Or the fact she was wearing a thick beanie out in the middle of summer. Or the stank battling the rose soap.
Grabbing her keys off the kitchen counter, Kelly turned to Carlos. "Thanks for your help. I couldn't have done it without you. If they don't fire me, I'll pick us up some dinner."
"Don't mention it." Carlos answered. "I mean it. I can't even think about food right now."
"Yeah, my stomach's still churning too." Kelly agreed. "Seriously, how much did we have to drink?"
"Uh..." Carlos groaned, limping over to the recycling bin in the kitchen. "One bottle of wine, a six pack, and that bottle of hard cider left over from the party."
Kelly blinked, her brain running the math several times before she responded "Across three days?"
"Yeah." Carlos replied, drumming his fingers on the lid as the same realization struck him.
"...We're lightweight bitches." Kelly concluded.
"Yeah." Carlos agreed.
"Well, at least we can be bitches together." She said, leaning in and kissing Carlos on the cheek. "Well, have a good day! Keep an eye out for my bits, if you can find them all before I get home, I'll make it worth your while."
"Drive safe." Carlos said.
"Have I ever?" Kelly rhetorically asked, hobbling away to Carlos' chagrin.
---
CE 11:58 am: (Survived to lunch?)
KI 12:01am: (Barely. Sonia was ready to kill me, but the kids literally cheered when I walked in so she had to put on a smile. Had to spend the entire time standing cuz whenever I bent over the little shits grabbed at my hat. One kid nearly put his fist through my noodle slapping at it. No popsicle for him.)
CE 12:02am: (Like you'd notice.)
KI 12:03pm: (Hardy har.)
KI 12:03pm: (You find my scalp? It's been itching like crazy all morning.)
KI 12:05pm: (prrrrr!)
CE 12:06pm: (?)
KI 12:07pm: (Like a cat. Scritchy scratch good.)
CE 12:08pm: (Ah.)
CE 12:08pm: (You eating lunch in your car? Alone? Like a sad friendless bitch?)
KI 12:10pm: (I have friends, I just don't count my coworkers or the little shits among them.)
KI 12:11pm: (As for lunch, if you count chips from the vending machine as a "lunch", then I guess? Didn't have time to make a sammy or anythin before I left.)
KI 12:12pm: (YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKER STOP!)
KI 12:12pm: (DEAD SERIOUS STOP RIGHT NOW.)
CE 12:13pm: (Safe word?)
KI 12:16pm: (How the hell should I know?)
CE 12:16pm: (You came up with it.)
KI 12:18pm: (I'll kick your ass when I get home.)
CE 12:19pm: (With what?)
CE 12:20pm: (This?)
KI 12:20pm: (sTOP. IT.)
CE 12:25pm: (K.)
KI 12:45pm: (My lunch break is ending in 15 minutes. In case you wanna do anything. You know.)
KI 12:50pm: (CARLOS JUST DO SOMETHING ALREADY FUCK YOU KNOW I KNOW THE DAMN SAFEWORD!)
KI 12:58pm: (Thanks! For real stop now gotta get back to work. Napalm. Will pay you back after work as promised.)
CE 12:59pm: (Sure thing. To be continued...)