I had just come back from the magic shop and I was getting pretty excited. I knew Betty was going to be waiting for me and the potion back home so that probably didn't help to calm my visible excitement.
I opened the door and snuck my head inside.
"Guess who's baaaaack?" I shouted out to her.
She gasped. "Finally! I couldn't wait for you to get here, I just couldn't focus on studying anymore." She had left her room and was now standing in the doorway.
"Well you can go in peace now since I have..." I paused for dramatic effect. "This!" After shuffling through my bag, I presented her with a vial full of a translucid liquid.
"So what did you get?"
"Well I couldn't chose between 2 or 3 so I asked the guy to pick one without telling me, that way it still gets to be a surprise for both of us! He also removed the label, see?"
She took the vial to inspect it. The label had been meticulously peeled of the bottle so not a single piece of information remained on it.
"Only thing he did tell me was that the effects will last between 1 hour and a whole day depending on the number of drops we drink. 1 drop the hour." I said, taking off my shoes in the process and heading towards the living room. "I don't know about you but I have nothing planned until sunday afternoon so a whole day could definitely be an option."
She pressed her lips together. "Yeah I mean I am meeting friends tomorrow afternoon but depending on what it does I'll see if I cancel or not."
I smiled and slouched on the couch. "Isn't it even more exciting not knowing what's waiting for us?"
"I think it is!" She handed me back the vial and grabbed two glasses from the cupboard before setting them on the coffee table before me. "So. Are there any instructions?"
I cleared my throat. "Thank you for purchasing bla bla bla, take notice that the testing of bla bla bla, the duration of...... Ok here's the interesting part. The effect of this vial will be most effective if initially diluted in a glass of water." At this, Betty bolted again to fill both glasses and sat back beside me. "If this is your first time using our products, be assured that you are in a safe environment and that help can be called upon you if needed. Drink the desired amount in one go. The effects should manifest almost immediately."
Betty cracked her knuckles and bounced on the spot. "Alright, I'm ready. So we say a full 24 hours?"
"I guess so."
Drop by drop, we meticulously counted 24 for each glass, using about half the amount contained in the vial. Then, we lay our phones on the table and cheered. Right before the glass could touch our lips, she stopped me.
"Just before we get started, can you at least tell me what were you hesitating between before the guy stepped in?"
"Oh, uhm..." I thought about it for a second. "It was either a sex change, a shrinking potion, or a detachability one."
She raised her eyebrows and we finally drank the mixture to the last drop. We set our glass on the table again and waited a few seconds. The water was ice cold and I could still feel it going down my throat and into my stomach. But nothing else. Betty raised her hand and flipped it a few times, trying to notice a chance that didn't come. She reached into my cleavage and pulled my shirt towards her.
"Hey, what was that for?" I asked, quickly pushing her hand away.
"Just checking if you were morphing into a boy. You don't seem to be. And we're both still the same size as before."
"Well something tells me it's the last one, then."
"Does that mean I can unscrew your head off your shoulder?" she said with a grin.
"Well", I answered, "it certainly does mean that I can slap your hand off your own arm."
And I did, just now, when she reached for my boobs. I hit her hand so hard that it flew off to the other end of the room. She gasped and raised her right arm, which now ended in a round stump just above her wrist.
"HOLY SHIT THIS IS WEIRD." She shouted. "I can't feel my hand anymore, like it's gone numb times a hundred!"
"It's numb alright, look at it." I pointed at the spot where it landed. Her eyes looked at it then back at her new arm.
"I thought I could still control it but..."
"I mean it's not like it's detached or whatever...."
"...I can't seem to be able to move my fingers!"
The muscles in her forearm shifted when she tried to do so. I could see she was struggling to find muscles she used to be able to move. When she stood to pick it up, she couldn't feel it either.
"This is so fucked up."
There she stared, first at her empty wrist, then at her hand being held by her left one. Then, without any warning, her detached hand desintegrated into a fine dust.
"Uhhhhhh, what happened there?" Her remaining hand still holding the air where her hand used to be.
"Yeah the guy still told me some stuff about each potions, so if I remember correctly, we have only 1 minute to reattach the parts to ourselves to undo the process. If we don't, they'll vanish for the whole duration of the spell."
"Maybe you would've like to tell me that beforehand?"
I repressed a laugh. Nothing gets me more than a good hand pun.
"It's not funny Isabelle!"
I scoffed. "Yes it is, come on. That's the whole point of this. Oh and finally, the detachability wears off after 30 minutes whatever the length of the spell is. So in 30 minutes we'll stay the way we'll be for the remaining 23 hours and 30 minutes."
"Alright, fine. I can get used to this. Maybe." She inspected her round stump again. "I say we take turns at taking parts off each other. What do you say?"
I grinned. "I'm in. Go ahead, it's your turn. I say we keep our heads on though."
"Agreed."
Following this, she decisively grabbed my left leg with her hand and stump and gave it a yank. With a resounding thump, foot, calf, and thigh fell to the floor. There was hardly anything left of it on my hip. She was right, this is so weird! Just like she did, I tried to move my foot and bend my knee but I couldn't seem to remember how to do so. All I managed to do was contract the short muscles in my remaining leg or move around whatever piece of bone was still attached to my body.
"I... I can't seem to wrap my head around it." I said fankly.
"I KNOW! How is it to have something left to wriggle? I can't try it out with my wrist."
"Feels normal now, I guess. Maybe your hand is gone but you still have most of your arm to move around." I stood up brieftly to adjust my position on the couch. My lack of thigh on my left side made me sink lower on that side. "Here, let me try."
She approached a bit more and I plucked her left arm from her shoulder, being careful to take the whole thing off without leaving a stump. Her mouth opened and closed several times before letting it produce any sort of sound.
She finally spoke again. "Wow!"
Her collarbone was still as prominent as before, but at the spot where it met with her shoulder blade, there were no arm anymore. Her shoulder moved in all directions trying to find a limb to extend but could find nothing. Betty sank her teeth into her lower lip while testing this new side of her body. She felt it using her stump while I threw her arm on my thigh, which had just started evaporating.
"Wait, I gotta see this." She leaned forward as she stood up and almost smashed her head on her knees. She laughed. "Gosh I was trying to lay my hand on my knee to help me up!" She went into the bathroom, her empty shoulder still balancing back and forth in sync with every steps. She shouted : "Don't my boobs look bigger?"
"That's probably just an illusion because your arm is gone." I said, looking down to inspect mine. " You're used to seeing them with an arm right beside them, I'm pretty sure these potions have no side effects whatsoever."
"But look at them." She had come back in the living room and was struggling to reposition her bra, trying to push her breasts upwards with the round end of her forearm. Her other shoulder instinctively extended forward as she kept on poking her breasts. "Gosh this is so hard! One of us has to keep at least one hand if we want to make sure we can eat until tomorrow evening."
"Fuck that, we'll manage I'm telling you." I said, looking at where her arm used to be a second ago. She was still gorgeous, and that empty shoulder did nothing to lessen the perfect hourglass shape of her body. "It's your turn again."
"Yeah I know", she said, leaning towards me with an inquiring look. "Since you want nothing to do with hands, I'll start by taking this off of yours."
She grabbed my right arm about midway between the shoulder and elbow and pressed it against her chest. After a few grunts and wheezes, my bicep had been cut in half, causing me to lose all sensations in my forearm and hand. Then, when my arm slipped from her frail grasp, I instinctively attempted to catch it with the remains of my limb, causing nothing more than it moving upwards abruptly. It was much more lighter, now, as well as terribly short. Before I could weep too much on that loss, I quickly dove and grabbed Betty's feet and detached them one after the other before throwing them across the room.
She gasped yet again, her eyes opened wider than I thought it was possible for them to be. Since she sat on the floor in range of my remaining leg, I promptly pushed myself away from her and hopped to the other side of the appartment. Balancing was harder than I thought it'd be since I was lacking limbs to act as counterweights.
"Oh no you didn't." She muttered.
"Oh but I think I just did."
She first tried to get back to her feet before they could vanish, but encountered lots of problems when she attempted to walk. Without feet, she didn't have any balance and her stumps even seem to hurt if she tried standing directly on their ends, and she couldn't exactly go on all fours since she was lacking the entirety of her left arm. She ended up crawling towards me but I simply hopped back to the couch when she got too close for my liking.
"Alright, alright, come back here." I waited for her to return then spoke again. "I think I'll leave you like this, with most of your limbs still attached but nothing on them to grab onto things. If you ask me, they'll end up getting more in the way than the usefulness they'll give you in return."
"Cool, then I have two last hits?" She asked, her arm raised, ready to karate-chop-me-down.
I swallowed my saliva. "Yup. Go ahead and hit." I closed my eyes for dramatic effect.
"I see you've made me pretty asymmetrical. I'll let you know that I prefer symmetry."
The first thing to go was my other leg. With my eyes closed, I couldn't see it coming and the unsuspected vanishing sensations were breathtaking. As I was reaching down to compare the lengths of my legs with my fingers, Betty's stump struck again. My hand never made it to my stump. In fact, I was so eager to see what was left of me that I immediately opened my eyes following the last cut. I saw Betty pushing my limbs aside on the floor where they fell heavily. Just like she had told me, I was now pretty much symmetrical. Both legs cut short near the pelvis as well as my second arm being just a brief as the first one. I couldn't imagine how I was going to live like this for an entire day.
"Jesus", I sighed, "Pretty good jo... woah!"
Without any limbs of respectable length, my balance had gone too far back and I fell backwards on the couch. We both laughed. She climbed on the couch and helped to bring me sitting back up properly.
"That's going to be one hell of a day, isn't it?"
"Yeah, talk about new activities." I blew on a rogue strand of hair. "Are the first 30 minutes over yet?"
She reached for her phone and pressed the button using her stump. "Only 5 minutes remaining, but I think we're good as we are. Gosh how do I even.... Ughhh."
She tried to pick up her phone with her stump but couldn't, of course, and neither could she use her absent second arm for support. She ended up bringing it halfway off the table and pinching it into her elbow pit.
I sighed a few more times. "Ok, so since the store is extremely underground and illegal, we should make sure that we don't get seen by people who don't know about the shop or know the regular us or else they'll freak out."
"I guess that means no Instagram or Snapchat stories?" She made a pouty face.
"Of course not, idiot. But we can always save some pictures elsewhere for later if we want."
"Yeah, yeah", she waved me off with her shortened arm. "I'm hungry, what should we order?"
I stuttered. "Wh... Wha... What did I JUST say?"
She scoffed. "It's not like you know any delivery boy personally! Nothing bad can happen. He'll arrive here, and he'll think: Oh, look at those ridiculously heavily handicapped ladies, how it must suck to be them while we're just going to have fun with it.
"Yeah, I guess that's true. So, what can be easily eaten without hands? Get off that site, stupid!"
She had begun looking at the menu from Mario's Spaghetterio. No hands and she wants to eat spaghetti? She can be so dense sometimes...
"How about pizza?" I propose. "There's nothing better than pizza, and it should be pretty convenient to eat if you ask me."
"Good idea."
--------------------
Another 45 minutes had passed. There was a knock at the door and we both froze. We slowly turned to face each other with puzzled eyes.
"Shit! I didn't think about what to do when he actually arrives!" I said, starting to get anxious.
"Ok, uhm, go ahead and get it while I setup the table."
"Yeah, okay."
I exhaled and began my way through the corridor that lead to the appartment door. Without legs, all I could manage to do was to rotate my hips one way then the other to walk using my buttcheeks, using my arms as counterweights. I was progressing at a ridiculous pace and I knew it. I would have been at the door drenched in sweat 5 minutes later. But what else could I do? Swing my left hip, swing my right hip, constantly trying to keep my body in this precarious upright balance. About 30 seconds must have passed already, I hoped the guy wouldn't lose his temper. I put my stumps on the sides of my mouth and shouted :
"Please be patient, I'm almost there!"
Suddenly, an idea struck me. I could probably walk on all fours like this and be much more swift on my limbs! I swinged my arms forwards and dropped on my stumps while bringing my legs perpendicular to the ground. If I moved my opposite limbs in synch, I could walk just fine! Of course my legs were shorter so that meant I had to do puny steps, but that was still better than waddling my way accross the floor. Now up at the door, I pushed myself up again and looked at the knob. I almost melted in tears.
"Shit shit shit shit shit shit."
A muffled voice came from the other side of the door. A man in his 20s, 30s maybe.
"Is everything okay, 'mam?" It asked.
Of course not you shithead. "I can't get to open the door, give me a minute." Even standing on the tips of my leg with both my arms fully extended, I was still short a few inches from the knob. I turned around. "BETTY! I can't reach the door help me!"
She explosed in laughter. "Oh my gosh, yeah, okay stay put I'm coming over."
I dropped on the ground again to move aside from the entrance while she came in full throttle standing on her knees. She was wiping tears from her eyes with her stump when she passed by me and easily opened the door.
The guy's gaze dropped a few feet when he noticed we were stupidly sitting in front of the door before he realized the extent of the situation. His eyes grew wide before narrowing again, probably not trying to offend us.
"Sorry for the wait", Betty said. "It's her first time being......." I coughed. "...here. Yeah it's her first time being here and she thought that she...."
The guy interrupted her. "Hey 'mam that's really no problem, it's past rush time and you're my last stop." I sat back up, slightly out of breath and offered him a kind smile. "Umm that'll be $34.56 please."
"Sure, by debit please."
She reached into her bra and, after a few seconds of struggling and skin on skin action, she brought the card up her shirt and bit onto it. She craned her neck towards the man who delicately retrieved it from between her teeth. When he handed the terminal back to her, he held it in place while she completed the transation. When it was done, she grabbed her card between her forearm and bicep and swung it back loosely into her shirt. He began to extend the pizza towards us before reversing his movement, then hesitatingly spoke.
"I don't mean to be rude, 'mam, but would you like me to put this on the table? I mean... I really don't want to..."
Her turn to cut short to his words. "Yes, it would be very nice of you thanks!" Using her arm, she pushed herself against the wall to let him through then pointed towards the living room. "On the small coffee table, please, it'll be perfect." Sitting on the folded remnants of her legs, she looked back at me, feeling her empty shoulder and moving it around again. The man passed through again.
"Thanks again for the tip and have a great meal, 'mam."
"Thank you!" We said in unison, waving our shortened arms as goodbyes.