She pushes her hair back to reveal the empty sleeve of her white top and smiles at the camera. She rolls it up to showcase the stump of her left arm and runs a hand over it. Squeezing some lotion in her hand, she slathers her short arm in it, pushing her abbreviated flesh between her fingers, massaging the featureless skin.

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She grabs a fork between forearm stumps, her longer left, the right crooked, handily flicking a piece of chicken in her mouth, smiling wide. # In front of her mirror, she uses her stumps to blend her makeup, running it in circles against her cheeks. Satisfied, she sets her elbows on the table before her and her lips start moving. I care not for them. She ever so slightly adjusts the angles of her stumps as she speaks.

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Setting her crutches against the wall, she drops her skirt to the floor, leaning against the desk to hop out of it. Staring down at the bottom view camera, she turns sideways to showcase her bum, ever adjusting her balance on her single leg. She leans towards the bed and arches her back, butt in display again, and her short thigh peeks from behind her leg to meet the mattress first. It disappears in its softness, her hip almost squared against the surface, while her left leg is bent at 90°, hiding most of her black panties from view. The obvious lack of her limb stirs my brain counterclockwise. # She sits on her foot, leg folded beneath her, arms raised, fixing her hair. Her blouse is gone. Her hips are leveled, not putting any weight on her stumped leg, which slumps softly against the sheets. Leaning on her elbow, she pushes her brief thigh upwards, biting her lip.

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Head raised towards the camera, the picture shows her on all fours, mouth open, like halfway through her sentence. The face is cute, kawaii even, and the hair unnaturally perfect, clear from her face, wavy. Her limbs are slender but strong, the muscles well defined, and her stomach is flat. Her legs are missing close to her pelvis, and her arms somewhere before her elbows. Even in the rigidity of the still image, I imagine her having an improvised conversation with the person holding the camera, or sitting down to relax, tiny legs open wide. Her arms would shuffle through her hair with a sense of imprecise purpose, unable to control it exactly the way she would want to. She would shuffle forward like an animal, alternating opposite limbs, her humanity so close to the floor, confined to the ways of the beasts. The image blinks back to the AI generated version, painfully still. I focus on the stump of her arms and how they smudge against the floor, clearly ending. There's nothing more intoxicating than the clear absence of a limb.

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A woman sits on a park bench, legs crossed, hands on her lap. Her calf is propped against the knee of her opposite leg and hangs in the air, footless. She jumps up and the loose flesh wobbles angrily.

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She leans over the table top reaching for a pillowcase with her stump, mere inches below her shoulder. The other is even shorter. She tugs it towards her and mouths it around until she finds one of the corners. She leans her entire body to flip it over to the left, throwing it as hard as her neck muscles allow it, and it crumples a few inches from her. She frowns and waddles to it, stretching her arm as far as she can, her armpit pressed against the edge of the table, but it's simply too short. Mentally switching her balance to the back of her rump, she flicks herselfs rightwards twice and starts waddling again. She can feel her heart beating faster, now. Her pants, already fitting tight against her legs, feel tighter as she progresses forward. Although they each bear the semblance of a femur, they have no clear shape of their own ; a rounded bundle of muscles and flesh is all she sees her legs as. They smudge on the floor when she swings her hips, at least providing her with a bit of support. At the far edge of the coffee table, she hooks her chin around a short wooden stick and raises her shoulder to secure it, initiating her laborious trip back three feet in the other direction.

She uses it to bring the pillowcase back towards her then before setting it on the table and mouthing the fabric again. When it has finally been folded to her liking, she uses her chin to drag it onto her arm, lifted perpendicular to the floor. She plumps her right hip back to look at the laundry basket and, as she loses focus on her masterpiece for a split second, it slips and falls onto the floor beside her leg. She rotates back to the table and clamps her teeth on the wooden stick. Rounding her back to keep her balance, she strains her neck forward to get a grip onto the pillowcase and slowly brings it back on the table. She sighs, starting her waddle back to her spot. It's okay, I have all day to get these done, she tells herself.

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Her handwriting is bubbly, energetic. While a little slow, her movements are confident. The pen sits awkwardly in her hand, the thumb being its only complete finger. As for the other two, they end prematurely at the first knuckle without even the chance to grow a nail. They hold onto the pen like dulled claws on a bird of prey, always on the verge of slipping out of their grasp. Yet they never hesitate, tracing delicate swirly line after delicate swirly line. But suddenly, her paper crinkles and she scoffs, tapping the page impatiently. She rips it off and starts again, her three fingered hand laying flat as she thinks about what went wrong during these exercises. She resumes, using her second hand to wedge the pen in place before setting it on the page to steady it. This one has no fingers at all. A thin excrescence takes the spot where her thumb should be and offers no articulation, while the rest of her hand comes at a complete stop about a third of the way through her palm. Her wrist bends as her focus shifts onto the paper.