As I gradually feel my brain wake up from this long night, I remember pieces of dreams I had. Having a conversation with a friend in an incomprehensible language, walking around a shopping mall filled with nothing but H&M stores, and being cut into pieces lying on a butcher's counter. I shiver and put that last one away. These are the kind of nightmares that usually wake me up and make me afraid of opening my eyes. I try not to think about it.
Clouds of slumber drift away from my mind and I risk opening one. Lying on my back, I can see rays of sunlight filter through the blinds and splash the opposite wall. A quick look at my alarm clock tells me that it's 9am, which is great considering today is saturday. I close my eye again and arch my back until it's about to snap to stretch the sleep away from my muscles before letting out a long satisfied sigh. I raise my hand to clear the tangled hair in my face but nothing happens. I try to do the same the other arm without any reaction either. I probably slept all contorted until they got numb and now I can't feel them. I turn my head towards Roxanne and see she's already awake , browsing her phone facing away from me. Her red hair are bundled up in a messy bun which lets me see the side of her face. Using my legs, I push down into the mattress with my heels to bring me closer to her for a morning cuddle. However, just like my arms, my legs just won't answer. I try to point my feet to stretch my calves but I stay perfectly still. I frown and start to sweat. I've heard of sleep paralysis before but while it never occurred to me, people always seem to say it's a terrifying experience. I'm not exactly frightened but I'm starting to feel concerned.
I hear Roxanne lock her phone and she turns around to face me.
"Morning beautiful." Her green eyes are locked into mine as her lips stretch to form a grin. "Did you sleep well?"
I wrinkle my nose. "Lots of weird dreams actually. But other than that, yes I did. Right now though I..."
I stop and think about telling her about my current state. I try to move my limbs again but to no avail. My hands and feet don't... Wait! I think my arms moved. Yes! My upper arms are definitely back in business as I can feel them move around again the fabric of the sheets. Their contact feels different somehow... But still, I can't feel my hands.
She raises her brows expectantly. "You...?"
My eyes come back to hers. Her hand reaches out to touch my cheek and stays there. I breathe in.
"...I could really use a trip to the bathroom. But I can't seem to... work up the courage to get up."
"Well since I have to go also, I'll let you meditate on that and I'll be right back."
When she gets up, she drags the blanket off the bed and leaves it on the ground before disappearing inside the bathroom, leaving me totally exposed on the bed. The morning air chills me and I try to bring my limbs in fetal position without success. Then, I look down and repress a scream.
I'm limbless. All my four limbs have been entirely amputated. The shirt I wore to sleep last night is still the same, but my entire body fits into it. It ends abruptly before it can even exist outside of the shirt. I tense my abs and use all the muscles I know to try and get up, without any success. I clearly remember going to bed by myself last night, typing on my computer, walking all the way from the living room, and even brushing my teeth using my hands. Hands with freshly painted nail polish. What could've happened last night? I close my eyes and picture myself running as I copy the movements trying to locate remaining muscles but it only makes me squirm. However, I think I felt some movement in my arms again...
Roxanne exits the bathroom at that moment and comes to tower over me. She thinks nothing of my obvious lack of arms and legs, of the anxious look on my face, and rests her hands on the sides of my head. We kiss for a moment and she asks me if I'm ready. Ready for..?
"Uh.. I uh... I guess..."
She slides a hand beneath my back, puts the other one on my butt and
"WooOoOOAAaaAH!"
she picks me up without any difficulty just like she would a potato sack. The speed at which I take off scares me and I swing my arms backwards trying to regain some balance. She secures my body against hers and before I can say anything she sets me on the toilet for a quick morning pee. I inspect myself while I instinctively let go of my sphincters. The sleeves of my shirt hang loosely and my arms are seemingly too short to fill them completely. I bring them together just above my breasts and they're barely long enough to reach each other. I hardly notice when Roxanne clothes me again and the lift-off takes me by surprise once more.
"How about a quick hairdo before breakfast?"
"Why not?" I say with what I think is a convincing voice. "I think I... left the hairbrush it in the top drawer......." The end of my sentence gets lost in a whisper as I realise I couldn't possibly reach that drawer like this, or even hold on to the brush now that I think of it. How would I comb or brush my hair like this?
Holding me with a single hand, she grabs a stool I never knew we had and sets me up on it. Without legs, my butt continues all the way to the front of my body, which allows me to sit on the spot where my limbs used to be. I expected it to feel bony but it's quite the opposite... Like additionnal padding has materialised since yesterday. Watching me from that close in the mirror is the freakiest thing. I am so... brief. When I raise my arms perpendicular to the mirror, I can see my stumps clearly. My arms end a few inches down from my shoulders in two round stumps entirely devoid of scarring. My sleeves dangle loosely as I examine them, joining my arms again to pull the fabric up slightly. Feeling my arms this way sends tingling sensations through my body, like my brain has trouble processing information. The skin on their ends is soft and smooth.
"What are you doing?" Roxanne asks. I straighten myself on the stool. "You're not usually so agitated, is something wrong?"
I let my arms fall back to my sides and look down to my pelvis. "No, everything's fine really." If I had legs, they would probably be shaking right now. But my bottom ends sharply, as if my legs had been cut-off in a magic show.
"I was thinking Tony's for breakfast, feeling up for it?" A particularly tangled knot of hair keeps her busy for a few seconds before she starts her brushing motions again.
How am I going to eat? I shrug. "Yeah, why not. Let's invite Cynthia, too."
"Great idea!"
A silence lingers for a few seconds. Then, I talk again.
"I had a weird dream last night... Dreamt I had limbs my entire life. Walking around, feet, fingers, and stuff. Pretty crazy, huh?"
"It would, only if you didn't have it several times a week", she answered.
"It just seemed so... real. Like I could give you great details of it, like how to place your feet when dancing the waltz, or describe the chords needed to play Let It Be on the guitar."
She drops the hairbrush and braids my hair. "I'm sure you could, baby. But later, okay?" She kisses me on the cheek. "Now let's get prepped up."
She leaves me on the bed while she's getting dressed. I would usually just stare at her body while she does so, but I'd rather stick to mine for now due to the circumstances. I squirm and contract my abs to take a look at my hips. Still the same grey panties I wore yesterday evening, but the muscles and bones that protruded from my pelvis to build my legs are now nowhere to be seen. My body just... stops. Left behind is nothing but a patch of skin similar to my arms'. Just like earlier, I try to move my legs around or raise my thighs in the air. Nothing, not even a wiggle, not a single muscle moving beneath my skin. Instead, I just kind of.... lay there.
I twist my thorax to one side and my hips to the other, contorting my torso to try and flip myself over on my stomach, but I simply roll back on my back. I try again, but this time alternating from left to right in a rocking motion until a final push manages to turn me over on my belly. I can feel drops of sweat form on my back as I inch like a worm, alterning between holding on to the bed with my short arms while pulling my hips closer to my face and jerking my upper body forward, hoping to gain a few inches of distance. My cell phone rests on a table set directly next to where I slept. When I reach it, I prop myself up on my arms, my face only a few inches above the sheets, and poke the screen with my nose to enter my password. Navigating using the very muscles of my neck, I access Facebook and my profile picture.
My jaw drops. The picture is almost identical to the one I remember uploading, expect my limbs have vanished. Sitting next to my girlfriend on a beach in Varadero, wearing the same blue bikini, the same shades and the same hat... But no limbs to speak off. I notice I have the same short arm stumps, of course, but do they count as limbs at all? Taken from up front, my lack of legs is obvious. I swipe left. I'm sitting deep in a beanbag, sunken further down than I would imagine possible, wearing an oversized sweater that covers my empty hips unequivocally. The long sleeves lay flat and empty around me like deflated balloons.
I can't believe it. Surely there was an accident I don't remember.
I go back to the menu and open Instagram. Go back a few weeks, press play on a video. Clip from my birthday party, it's me taking shots with some friends. I'm in bra and panties, just like everyone else, except I'm still limbless. My torso is in constant motion as I laboriously walk around the coffee table, rolling my rump and swinging my arms back and forth with every step before grabbing the shot glass between my teeth and raising my arms in victory. I shiver. Two videos earlier. We're playing cards. This is where I remember clothes starting to come off. I pluck a card out of my deck, which rests on a little wooden stand, using my lips and flick them away with a swing of the neck. When I lose the round, people start chanting for me to remove my top. After lots of struggling of stump against fabric, unable to get a hold of the seam of my shirt, a hand finally extends to hold my collar while I drop on my belly and slowly back out of my shirt, one hip rotation at a time. After standing up again, I swiftly replace my bra using my stumps and strut back to my place beside the couch.
Switching to the pictures on my phone, I quickly scroll up looking for... HA! An old picture of me at summer camp, in fourth grade. Surely this would've been before the accident, if accident there was. But there I am, lined up with ten other kids, each with clear disabilities. One or two miss a leg, another one's limbs are locked in weird angles, here's one holding on to a walking stick and I'm.... Sigh. I lock my phone again.
"Hey Roxanne," I say as I flip over on my back, "did you notice anything different this morning?"
"Different about what?" She leans over to grab a clean pair of pants from the bottom drawer and puts them on.
"I don't know..." I say quizzically. "About the way I look maybe?" I roll my shoulders back to try to gain some height on the pillows nearby."
She gets closer and reaches beneath my shirt. "Did you shave yo.."
"NO!"
I try to cover myself with non-existent hands and my ensuing fall forward is as pathetic as it is inevitable. I land face first on the mattress and wriggle my hips to the sides in feeble attempts to help me breathe. I can soon feel her delicate hands on my body as she takes off my shirt and puts me upright again, helping me balance by holding my stumps in her palms.
"Ok then. I'll have all day to try to figure it out."
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Even Cynthia doesn't notice. She doesn't care that Roxanne has to carry me from the car to inside the restaurant, she doesn't twitch when I struggle to flip the menu's pages with my mouth, she doesn't stare when my stumps move and point as I speak, she doesn't judge when I almost fall on my side from laughing too much from one of her work stories. I can't imagine how I'd manage to eat without hands or longer arms stumps, so I simply order a proteinated milkshake instead of my usual eggs and bacon. Considering the weight I've lost in my limbs, and thus my drop in caloric needs, I should be stuffed with this shake alone.
The shake is good enough. Everytime I take a sip, I have to crane my neck to meet the extended straw the waitress was nice enough to bring me. I instinctively clench my butt cheeks by fear of falling forward when I do. As a matter of fact, it happens once or twice, but I simply end up gently leaning against the table, my breasts absorbing what little impact there is to mitigate. I let the girls talk since I don't really feel like chitchatting at all... I feel so tired. All the remaining muscles in my body ache from constantly having to keep my balance and swing from side to side to move. I could almost fall asleep... I bet noone would notice, I'm too small, too insignificant, I'll just close my eyes for a bit and see how it..
"SARAH!"
Someone yelling your name has to be the worst way to wake up from a nap, especially if you're not entirely sure you actually were falling asleep. They startle me so much I jump on the spot and hit my knee against the table as well as spill Cynthia's seemingly freshly filled glass of water with my hand. I mumble an excuse while I reach for the napkins and machinally place them in an attempt to absorb the liquid.
Cynthia's the one to talk : "We we're thinking about going for a run on the beach, feeling up to it?"
My brain races twice around my head before it allows me to frown. "Well, I wouldn't want to get in your way, it's not as if I could actually..."
The throbbing pain in my knee comes back to slap me in the face. I let go of the napkins and grab it with both hands, then inspecting them and turning them over before my eyes. I brieftly grab my biceps and go back to the mess on the table.
"...keep up with you two," I continue hesitantly. "But, uh, yeah, sure."
"Great!" Roxanne says. "So, let's head home to change and meet up again at say, 1pm?"
"At the hottest hour of the day?" I whine.
"Don't be a party pooper, Sarah. We'll go slow." Cynthia adds.
As Roxanne and Cynthia go to pay the bills, I go back to my limbs. What in the actual hell?! I click my nails together and feel them sink into my fingertips. Yes, those are real fingers. And the way I'm standing up on those legs confirm that they're also real. So what was all that shit about being limbless? I'm getting dizzy just thinking about the whole thing. I snatch the bill from Roxanne's hand and look at our meals. There are no trace of my shake. Looks like I ate an entire belgian waffle topped with fruits and crème fraiche.
Okay, let's summarize all of this. Last night : All limbs present. The next morning : Helpless as a baby duck. And then in the middle of breakfast I go back to my original self? Everything suddenly clicks into place. I took a nap! I fell ASLEEP. Sleep is the key! Does sleep trigger this transformation now? Everytime I'll wake up I'll switch between two forms? Or are there even more things I can turn into? Let's make sure I stay wide awake for the rest of the way, I don't want to experience this, or anything different, anytime soon.
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When I feel myself waking up, I try to stay calm. Deep breaths, eyes still closed, peace of mind. Loud beeping, that's Rox's alarm clock, which means it's morning, around 7am. After hitting it hard with her fist, she turns towards me and reaches for my hand with her own. YES!! Arms! and legs too! I put one over her own and embrace her as she falls asleep again. So, I slept through the night but didn't change back to being limbless. Was this even real? I look on my phone and see today is thursday, which means yesterday actually happened, I didn't dream an entire day's worth of crazyness in a single night. Could I have dreamt only the part where I was missing my arms and legs? A dream so vivid and so clear it felt real enough and replaced my memories? Highly unlikely. But again, I remember it just as well as the afternoon run. Maybe I'm going crazy. I think that would be the easiest possibility to swallow. My body involontarily forgot sensations in my limbs and made it as if I they were lacking. Yeah, that seems logical enough. While I meditate on that, I slip away from the sheets and go into the kitchen, relishing the feeling of walking and having legs at all, where I allow myself the pleasure of pouring my own bowl of cereal.