“You mean the store that appeared overnight? The one with the creepy looking dude at the counter?”
“That one!” Green pointed up the street and emptied the contents of her bag on the living room table. Knick knacks of all shapes and sizes tumbled out of it.
“Come on, how much did you spend on all that crap?” Blue facepalmed and reached out for what looked like a regular rubber ball. “What does that even do?”
“Oh, gimme. Here.”
Holding the ball level with her eyes, she let it fall to the ground and to Blue’s surprise, it bounced back just as high, not losing any kinetic energy after the first bounce, nor after the second or third.
“They said unless we physically grab it and set it down, it continues bouncing forever! Isn’t that cool?!”
Blue shrugged. “I mean yeah, but it’s still just a bouncy ball…” She grabbed a pen from the table. “And that one?”
“That’s a timer pen! Whatever you write with it automatically disappears after the time you have set near the grip. Useful for secret notes! Or to lend it to someone you don’t like right before an exam!”
Seeing as something had gotten stuck on the inside of the bag, Blue reached inside it and grabbed something that looked exactly like a TV remote. “Let me guess… magical too?”
“I thought you could help me figure that one out, because they didn’t tell me what this one actually does.” As Green extended her hand to grab it, Blue dashed out of reach of her friend. “I didn’t even pay for this one. He just told me to try it out and bring it back in 48 hours.” Green turned around to grab the pen from the table and it slipped out of her grasp, clattering on the floor between them.
Blue lowered her head at the remote, turning it over in her hands, and pressed Pause absently. “Maybe it’s just a universal remote that works with any television or appliances. There’s no way everything in that shop is magical…” Her last words trailed silently out of her mouth as she looked back at her friend. “Green?!?!”
Halfway between standing and crouching, Green had been perfectly frozen in time. Right arm stretched towards the pen on the floor, legs bent, leaning forwards, she was as still as if she had been made of stone.
Blue took a step forward. “...Green?”
There was no answer. Her eyes, although still lifelike, were fixed on the floor and did not move a millimeter. Neither did her chest or her hair, the latter suspended in the air like an imitation of Dali’s melting clocks. Blue walked around her friend, amazed to realize that this wasn’t a trick. She had actually Paused her friend.
She hit Pause again and Green sprung back to life as if nothing had happened and picked up the pen before standing back up. “Blue? Where the hell have you gone?”
Blue chuckled. “Um, back here.” She waved at her with the remote.
“How the fuck did you do that? You were right in front of me a second ago!!”
“I Paused you!!”
“What do you mean you Paused me?”
Blue mimed something in the air between them. “You were on pause, frozen in time, like in a movie! Could you not see me?”
“Holy shit really?” She looked back at the remote in awe. “I didn’t see anything! You were right in front of me and by the time I stood back up, it’s like you had teleported around back!”
Blue smiled again. “I gotta admit, this remote is pretty fucking cool. Especially since you didn’t pay for it.”
“I do have to bring it back in two days, though.”
“Yeah but that leaves us a whoooole lot of time to experiment with it.” Blue stepped back as Green tried to swipe the remote out of her hand. “Wait, let me try again.”
“No fair! It’s my
Pause
Eyebrows furrowed, mouth agape, Green stood there like a living statue, her left foot lifted in the air trying to take a step forward. Blue simply couldn’t believe it, even though it was the second time she had done it. She inspected her friend from up close. The pores on her nose, her long ashen hair, the ripples in her shirt, the saliva on her tongue, partially hidden between her lips. She was perfectly preserved in time and had no notion of it at all. Alive, yet immobile like a rock. Blue’s eyes lit up with an idea.
In a matter of minutes, she had picked up a bunch of random stuff from their shared apartment. A cowboy straw hat, a jean jacket, a feathered boa, a soup ladle, she laid them on and around her friend, occasionally adjusting her stance, moving Green’s limbs as easily as if she had been a puppet. For the final touch, she bent her arm on itself and stuck her index finger up her nose, giggling like a 5 year old. She hit Unpaused.
Turn!!” As confused as ever, Green’s mind raced as she tried to understand what happened to her. In the blink of an eye, she had been dressed in all sorts of weird accoutrement and on top of everything else, her finger was shoved deep inside her right nostril. “Hey!!” She laughed good heartedly while discarding one at a time the various objects her friend had put on her, her smile widening each time. “Okay, my turn now, please??”
“Yeah, yeah, but go easy on me, alright?” Blue reluctantly handed her the remote and shrugged her shoulders, as if trying to warm herself up.
Hiding the remote from her friend’s view, Green hit mute. “How long was I Paused for?”
The first time was a minute tops, but the seco… Blue stopped in the middle of her sentence and brought her hands to her throat. Did you Mute me?!
“I can’t hear a thing you’re saying!!” Green answered, laughing.
This is weird!! Blue knew she was talking, she knew she was supposed to hear herself, but she simply didn’t. Air gushed out of her mouth without a sound. Green Unmuted her. “Thank god my voice is back!!”
“I told you that this shop was cool! Okay, what else is there to do here… What about this?” Said Green as she pressed the red button at the top.
As quickly as if she had been shot in the head with a gun, Blue collapsed on the ground like a wet rag. Limbs splayed around her, head resting on the floor, it looked as if she was sleeping. Her chest rose slowly, rhythmically. Phew, Green thought. At least I didn’t kill her. She pressed the button again. Blue’s eyes popped back open instantly and Green shrieked in surprise.
“What the fuck was that?”” Blue shouted.
“I think I powered you off!” Green laughed. “How did it feel?”
Blue reached for the back of her head where it had hit the ground. “It’s hard to describe… I was standing before you and in a flash I felt really really tired and everything around me went black. And then everything came back at once.”
“It looked like you were sleeping. Did it feel like it?” Blue shook her head. “Interesting…”
Blue extended her arms towards the remote. “Okay, my turn again!”
“Not so fast, young lady!” Green stepped back herself, inspecting her options on the remote. “There are so many buttons… Which one should we try?”
“If Pause pauses us and Power puts us to sleep, I’m guessing Rewind and Fast-forward will work the same way. But I say we’ve played with speed plenty already. Anything that could change things about ourselves? What about changing the channels?”
Green clicked the up and down channel buttons but nothing happened, even toying at four other buttons labeled A, B, C, and D without success. “Maybe they just don’t do anything.”
“Or they shuffle through stuff we haven’t, like, programmed yet…”
Green eyed another series of buttons tagged like functions on a computer. Cut, Copy, Paste.
“Cut like… erase?” She asked aloud, catching Blue's attention.
“Don't point that at me!!” Blue stepped aside but to her dismay, Green kept her right on target. She lifted her hands defensively in front of her. “Wait! What if you hurt…”
Green rolled her eyes and hit Pause for the first time herself.
Just like she had done herself without her knowing, Blue was now standing perfectly still, hands still in front of her, eyes halfway closed, her hair suspended in the air as if encased in Jell-O. Green walked around her friend to inspect her every detail and even poked at her cheek. To her surprise, it felt soft and lively, unlike the statue-esque allure she now had.
She looked down at the remote and at the feature she had noticed before. Cut. It was the perfect time to try it, she thought. If it indeed hurt her friend, if blood started gushing out of a gaping wound, then she could simply undo it and prevent her from feeling any pain. And if it didn’t… Well… How would she even know? Pointing it at Blue’s right hand, she took a deep breath and pressed the button.
Nothing happened.
Or at least that’s what she initially thought. After closer inspection, she noticed that a small hole had been dug straight through Blue’s palm where Green had pointed the remote. She tried it again and the same thing happened, as a second hole now joined the first one. Since Blue was still frozen in time, she hadn’t reacted to any of it, so there was no way to know if it was painful in any way, or if she would even bleed.
“That’s not a cut, that’s a hole!” Green said out loud, frowning. “Wait a…”
Turning the remote in her hands, she stared directly into the glass bead at its tip, where, in old TV remotes, the signal would usually shoot out after pressing a command. It was the same size as the holes in her friend’s hand. Could it be that, when pressing the Cut button, it turned the remote into a sort of… knife? Or drill? She looked at her own hand, then at the remote again, and at her friend’s hand again.
Then, holding down the button, she swiped it across Blue’s wrist.
If Blue had been made of wax, the result wouldn’t have been any different.
Blue’s hand had been cut cleanly from her arm. It fell on the floor with a soft thud, with the sound of a piece of thawed raw meat. Green’s eyes grew wide and she stepped back, unlike her friend, who had stayed terrifyingly still. In the same posture as before, Blue’s right arm now ended in a flat stump, covered in a layer of skin as if it had instantly healed from being hacked off. Fumbling with the remote, Green pressed Undo and the hand magically flew back to its owner to reattach itself without issue, although still bearing the holes she had previously done. She corrected them with two more Undo presses and looked back at her friend once more.
Blue was back the way she had been before Green’s experimentations with the Cut command. Her hands were where they were supposed to be, and she still hadn’t noticed anything.
She thought back about Blue’s arm after she had Cut off her hand. About the skin at the end of her arm, on her… stump… She shook her head, staring at the complete arm again. She was now able to magically turn her friend into an amputee, as well as reverse it whenever she wanted it… How crazy was that remote? Blue almost Unpaused her friend before noticing the lettered buttons at the bottom of the remote and a plan hatched into her mind.
Her current hypothesis was that the four big yellow A, B, C and D buttons were some sort of Shortcut for preprogrammed states, or options, offered by the remote, like people would assign TV channels to them back in the day. She pressed and held the A button aiming at her friend and after 3 seconds or so, she felt the remote give a short confirmation buzz. Green nodded and used the Cut feature about halfway down Blue’s right forearm, making the severed limb fall to the floor like it had done before. Then, being careful not to slice her friend completely in half, she adjusted the new stump of her arm so that it looked less like a block of cheese and more like an actual disability, not unlike if she had been born with a congenital limb difference. Then, she pressed and held the B button, again getting the same confirmation buzz.
Finally, she hid the dismembered hand and the flesh shavings of the forearm underneath a couch cushion and Unpaused her friend.
Blue’s eyes lingered on the empty space before her, where Green had stood 10 minutes ago, before realizing that she had been a victim of a Pause herself. She forced herself to laugh through her anxiousness.
“Okay… You got me!” She stood back up, recollecting herself and finding her friend standing behind her. “Did you try anything funky?”
Green smiled internally. “Nothing interesting, no. I’ll give you back the remote. But first, hands behind your back..!” Blue rolled her eyes but did it anyway. “Now, close your eyes and give me your right hand.”
“Why do you have to go and make things so complicated? Also? You’re not funny.”
Green felt a rush of adrenaline course through her veins when Blue’s right arm reappeared before her eyes. Her arm was still the way she had left it, ending halfway down her forearm not with a hand, not with fingers, but with a stump. A rounded, narrow, smooth stump. It seemed like the muscles inside her limb had melted away, more so than Green had trimmed herself, like to accommodate the newly formed shape. Impatient as ever, Blue wagged her stump up and down, the atrophied tendons and fibers shifting in unpredictable ways underneath her skin. On the tip of the stump, part of her skin wrinkled under the slight effort, as if connections that were once tied to the bones of her wrist had been rewired to tug at her truncated flesh instead.
“Well??” Blue said commandingly, completely unaware of her missing hand for the time being.
Green didn’t think the subterfuge would go this far. But since her friend hadn’t noticed the absence of her hand yet, she followed through. “Okay, okay, there you go…”
Holding her breath, Green balanced the remote perpendicularly on Blue’s forearm, prepared to have her ears blasted with the loudest shout of her life. It never came, however, as her friend opened her eyes, unconcerned.
“Thank you!” She scrunched her nose and smized back at Green. “What now…”
In an amazing feat of dexterity, Blue flicked her shortened arm upwards and the remote landed in the nook of her elbow, secured between the bicep and the atrophied muscles of her right arm. Her movement had been so natural, so effortless, it seemed like she had practiced it a million times over.
She lifted her arm to eye level and grabbed the remote with her remaining hand. “Have you tried the Cut command while I was Paused?”
“Ermm..” Green scratched her head. “Actually, I did. I Cut off part of your arm…”
“Where? You don’t think I’m lacking enough?!” Blue chuckled and pinched the skin of her stump. She gasped. “Oh my God!!! Maybe I can Cut off your hand and Paste it on me!! Please, Green!! Please, let me try it out! You know I’ve always wanted to know what it feels like to have two hands!”
Green frowned, her confusion growing by the second. “No, no, no! You had two hands, like a minute ago! I Cut it off while you were on Pause! Can’t you remember?!”
“Shut up! I was born like this and you know it!” Blue cocked her right arm as if to punch her friend before realizing the absurdity of her movement. She frowned and lowered her gaze in disbelief. “Why… Why did I try punching you with my nub?”
“Because you WEREN'T born like this!” She stepped forward and grabbed Blue’s stump, as if trying to find a flaw to explain her maddening statement. “Wait wait wait, I can prove it!” Walking around Blue, Green fetched her friend’s discarded hand where she had left it. “See? I used the remote to Cut it off!”
“I…” Blue’s mouth was agape. “I want to believe you but…” She rummaged through her souvenirs, but they only seemed to get blurrier the more she kept looking for the truth. “Ok.. let's imagine that I do believe you for a second… Then it must mean that you can reverse it, right?”
“I think I can! I tried the lettered buttons at the bottom to Program you, or something like that. Try hitting that A button.”
Doing exactly as Green commanded, the remote buzzed in Blue’s only hand and before the girls could notice, the disembodied hand had flown back to Blue’s stump, reattaching itself like nothing had ever happened.
Blue squealed like a pig. “I REMEMBER!!!! HOLY SHIT!!” She clasped her hands together and almost let go of the remote. “HOW COULD I FORGET I EVER HAD TWO HANDS?!”
“Maybe it’s because I did it while you were on Pause…? You weren’t conscious per say when the changes happened, so your brain couldn’t compute the modifications.”
“So, you think that if I reverse it now, I’ll remember that I initially have two hands and missing right will now feel weird?”
Green chuckled. “That’s an extremely well put way to say it. Go ahead and hit the B button.”
Swapping the remote to her right hand, Blue did as she was told. An intense yet painless heat sliced through her left forearm and the distal portion of her arm thumped to the floor along with the remote, shielding the latter from a harder fall. She squealed again.
“Green!!! My hand is gone!! What the fuck!!” Astonishment and glee fought for the control of her expression as she wagged her nicked limb through the air. “That’s amazing!!”
“I guess we’re done playing with Pause, then?”
“Fuck Pause, seriously. You have to try it!” She knelt before her friend and reached for the remote with her nub, bursting into a fit of laughter. “It’s almost like when you wake up after sleeping on your hands and they’re all numb. I’m doing the motion in my brain but nothing’s happening.” With the remote secured in her remaining hand, she lifted it close to her face. “So how does it work exactly?”
“You have to press and hold the Cut button, then the remote turns into a lightsaber, kind of. If you only point and click, all it does is bore a hole straight through the flesh.”
“Yeah, I get it… So, what if I do…”
Biting her lower lip, Blue Paused her friend instead. A familiar tableau had unfolded before her, as Green was now as still as a 3D painting. Now that they both knew that making modifications while someone is Paused would make them unaware of any changes, Blue was interested in exploring exactly how far she could push this…
She started by hacking off her friend’s left leg clean at the hip, higher even than where her short shorts stopped, making it look like a congenital stump before hiding the discarded limb in the bathroom. Blue took back her spot but as she was about to hit Pause, she facepalmed herself with her new nub.
Fuck, she’s looking straight at me, she’ll know I Paused her for sure, she thought to herself, before noticing her friend’s eyes were halfway closed, in the process of blinking. Using the rounded end of her arm, she forced her lids shut. That’ll give me half a second of buffer.
Unpause.
“This?” Blue looked back up at her friend, who brilliantly adjusted her balance on her sole right leg. Green looked down at herself.
“I… Did you do anything?” She tapped down her shirt. “I don’t feel any different...” She hopped twice towards Blue, one hand extended towards the remote. “Are you sure you pressed the correct button?”
“I must’ve done it wrong, what about this…”
Pause.
Blue sidestepped and Cut off the hand Green had used to reach over, once more turning it into a stump quite similar to her own. She hid the hand and closed Green’s eyes again.
Unpause.
Green smacked her lips. “Again, not much on this side…” Lifting her stump to her head, she scratched her temple and hummed to herself. “Do you think you could’ve broken it when it fell on the floor?”
“Let’s try.” Barely suppressing her amazement, Blue pointed it back at herself and popped her hand back on before promptly removing it again. “See? I can still cycle through my presets. Thanks again for the handicap, by the way.”
“In 2025 we call them disabilities, honey. Walk a day in my shoes, right?”
Blue smiled wide. “You can’t even walk!”
“It’s an expression, dumb dumb!” She leaned forward to lift the empty leg of her shorts with her stump, hooking the shortened forearm underneath the hem. A smooth patch of skin appeared where her leg had been a minute ago. “If at least my mom could’ve left me with some leg I could use a prosthetic.”
Pause.
Blue reattached Green’s hand and leg and Unpaused her.
“Ok, ok, let’s stop quarreling. Let me get a hang of this…”
Finally done playing without her friend’s notice, Blue activated the Cut feature and carefully sliced away Green’s left leg again before asking her to sit on the floor. From there, she removed the second one, leaving absolutely nothing for Green to stand on. It wasn’t perfect work, however. The knife-like Cuts in Green’s body could still be guessed at, and the disembodied legs still lay beside them, discarded like unused material for a DIY project.
“How is it?” Blue asked, seeing as Green had stayed silent throughout most of the procedure.
“God, it's like…” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, setting her hands on the floor at her sides. “So calm all of the sudden.”
“Calm?”
“Yeah… You know how you don't notice the refrigerator buzzing until it shuts down in a power outage? And then it's just…” She closed her eyes. “Like a thousand whispering voices had just been silenced.” She looked down at herself. “Talk about a new look, huh?”
“Yeah, no shit..” Blue took a closer look at her friend’s hips. “Can you still move your legs?”
“I don’t think so…” She tensed the muscles of her abdomen in search of ways to move her lower limbs to no avail. “I think you cut all of them away.” Green lifted her torso a few inches off the floor with a grunt and let herself down slowly again. “I don’t hate it to be honest.”
“Nothing is forcing us to reattach your legs right away, the clerk told me to bring it back in 48 hours.” Blue sat cross-legged in front of her friend and fit the stump of her arm in her remaining palm. “It does weirdly look good on you.”
Green scoffed. “What? Having no legs?”
“Yeah!” Blue leaned pressed her fleshy stump on the floor and poked at her friend’s abs through her shirt with a finger. “I bet your cross-fit training is going to make moving around almost effortless. I remember seeing a reel of a dude born with no legs that swung his bum forward like it was no big deal.”
“I’ll take that bet.”
Rotating away from her friend, Green anchored her hands to the floor and pushed herself up again, carefully swinging her hips forward before landing a few inches further than she had started. She leaned backwards, feeling for the underside of her hips where her legs would normally be, and shrugged.
She repeated her maneuver a few times, gaining confidence with every stride, and walked around Blue with surprising ease. What intrigued Blue the most was how little sound her friend made when she landed on the floor. Green usually stomped around the apartment on her heels but this was miles away from what she was used to. Instead, her hips thumped mutedly every time they hit the floor, like a cushion that falls off the couch almost unnoticed.
“Honestly, I like it a lot.” She looked up at Blue, who now towered over. “Don’t you want to try something a little more intense?”
“I mean, on any other day of the year, deleting my hand would be considered pretty intense on its own.” She rubbed her cheek with the rounded stump of her wrist, eyeing the remote in her hand, and tried to imagine what it would feel like to have no hands at all. “If I give you the remote to cut off my other hand, do you promise not to completely fuck me over?”
Green put a hand over her heart and lifted the other beside her head. “Scout’s promise.”
She thumped forward to grab the remote and, as naturally as someone who would’ve done it all her life, shifted her weight over to her left side and pushed herself backwards using only her left hand. Without any legs being in the way, she had leaned over where her limbs had been cut off and had shimmied her hips backwards like it was nothing.
She now stood, or rather sat, on her legless rump, studying the remote once again, and another button caught her attention. Refresh.
“What do you think the Refresh button does?”
“Revert us back to our original bodies, probably.”
“Or maybe it resets our minds? Like when I had Cut your hand while you were on Pause and you hadn’t noticed?”
Blue pondered for a moment. “So if you point it at yourself, you would think you were born this way, while still retaining your memories of us playing with this… thing?” She shook her head. “That wouldn’t make any sense though, would it?”
“I mean, it’s pretty much what happened earlier when I…” Green suddenly remembered that she never told Blue about her whole dismembering bit earlier. “Well, there’s only one way to find out, is there?”
Closing her eyes like expecting an explosion, Green pointed the remote at herself and hit Refresh.
A delicate warmth slowly traveled through her body, from the roots of her hair to the underside of her rump and the tips of her fingers. It faded away, leaving behind a feeling of renewed fervor and strength. She opened her eyes carefully to stare down at herself and frowned.
“Did… did something happen?” Blue took a step forward. “You’re still legless..”
“What do you mean, still? I was always…” Green shifted on her right cheek, rotating the left side of her hips to take a teeny step back before gasping out loud. “Blue!!! I NEVER had legs!!”
“What?!” Blue shielded her eyes from her friend, who had yanked her jean shorts away from her booty. “What the fuck are you doing?!”
“Can’t you see?! There’s nothing left of what you did with the remote!”
As the girls inspected Green’s hips, the difference from before was subtle yet unmistakable. The imprecise laser-like Cuts that Blue had hacked through her friend’s legs were all gone, not even the semblance of an unnatural angle. Instead, the underside of her hips now had a rounded, almost spherical shape, where even trying to socket a leg would seem utterly illogical. The shape of her buttocks curved forward uninterruptedly only stopping near her groin, nestling her privates into a triangular nook between the slight bump of her stomach and two firm and boneless pads of flesh. Even the bones of her hips seemed to have shrunk a bit, narrowing her figure by an inch or two.
It truly looked like Green had been born with a congenital deformity, like her legs had never grown at all. Her sitting position had shifted as well, making her stand taller than before, more at ease on her legless rump than before.
“I can remember that we’ve been playing with that remote and that you Cut my legs earlier but now?” She walked around the room on her hands once more, testing her adjusted anatomy, and felt at her arms. They had grown in size noticeably, and offered her a more secure grip on the floor. “I bet Refresh actually resets our bodies to fit whatever its current configuration is.”
“You do look pretty confident in your new skin, I have to admit.” Blue said, again fidgeting with the stump of her arm, pondering. “Should I try it on me, then?”
“Honestly, yeah! Why not? Maybe you'll stop playing with your arm like a teenage girl discovering herself for the first time.” Blue's face turned bright red. “Did I strike a chord, Bubu?”
“Don't call me that, Gugu.” Both girls chuckled and Blue turned the remote towards herself. “Okay.. Here goes nothing!”
She felt the same wave of warmth envelop her like a blanket, and the imbalance of her asymmetry blew her away. On her right side, everything felt as it had ever had been. On her left however, the longing of a hand that had been taken away had instead been replaced by a soothing emptiness.
Blue no longer felt like she was missing part of her body, which was particularly bizarre. She could see the stump at the end of her left arm, feel the difference between her right and left sides, and yet…
“Weird, huh?” Green had thumped her way further down the living room, turning away from Blue.
“That's certainly one way to describe it.”
“Think fast!”
Shifting most of her weight on her left side and pivoting on her opened palm, Green grabbed a cat toy that laid on the floor and hurled it towards her friend at full speed.
Like a scene out of an action movie, Blue reacted in the blink of an eye and caught the projectile only a few inches away from her face.
What she hadn't noticed, however, was that she had caught the falling remote with her stumped arm without a second thought. Pressed against her chest this way…
“Hey!!” She threw back the jingling toy. “What was that for?!”
“See how fast you did that??” Green swung forward a few paces, gaining more and more confidence with every passing minute. “It’s crazy how your brain has rewired itself!!”
Blue lowered her gaze to look at her hand and shortened forearm, turning them before her eyes. “Crazy indeed…”
“What do you think we should do now…”
Green’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock and the door of the apartment door swinging wide open. A man’s voice echoed in the corridor singing an old 90s rap song.
“Fuck!, it's Red!! He can't see us like this!”
“WE'RE NAKED RED, DON'T COME IN!” Shouted Green.
“Oh shit! Don't threaten me with a good time!”
They heard his pace quicken and exchanged a panicked look. Green leaned forward, with one hand on the floor and the other extended towards her friend.
“Give me that!, no, wait!, do something!! Quick!”
“What?!” Having returned the remote in her hand once more, Blue leaned halfway towards her friend before halting abruptly, taking a wobbly step back. “Me? But what?” Aiming it at herself, she accidentally Muted before slipping on Green’s discarded shorts on the floor. She mouthed silently : Oh, fuck!!
Like a pedestrian on a sheet of black ice, she flailed her arms around and about to regain her balance and the remote escaped her.
After an impossibly long curved arch through the air, it smashed on the ground at Red’s feet right as he stepped into the living room. Millions of shattered pieces lit up like stars and shimmered into a trillion different colors before vanishing as quickly as they had appeared.
The scent of burnt metal hung heavy in the air and stung the girl’s nose, sending their brain reeling in shock like the world’s coldest brain-freeze. They sneezed one after the other before looking back at their newly arrived friend with water in their eyes.
“Shit, Green! You weren’t kidding!” Red chuckled and stole a good look at her naked hips before lifting a hand to hide them from his field of view, peeking through his fingers nonetheless. “White suits you well, my friend.”
Hand splayed with only her middle finger bent halfway, Blue touched her head before pointing back at Red. She punched him on the shoulder to get his attention. That’s sick, she mouthed. She tapped her wrist with her stump and signed the letters separately. W-o-r-k?
Red shrugged. “Slow day, they decided to let me go early. I thought maybe we could grab a beer and nachos together for lunch, but I can see you’re already busy doing…” He gestured at Green, sitting in her panties in the middle of the living room. “Doing what exactly?”
Blue and Green stared at each other in utter confusion. A few seconds ago, it felt like the girl had been engaged in something so mysterious and secret that it would’ve felt illogical to even think about sharing it with others. Now, however, no matter how hard they racked their brains, they could not even remember what it was about.
Flexing her muscular arms, Green scooted forward to grab her shorts and waddled into them without a second thought. “We… Um…” She looked up at Blue, who wore the same look of confusion as herself.
Blue’s eyes were fixed on the spot where the magical remote had evaporated, unable to recall why she had looked there in the first place. She thumbed the stump of her forearm out of habit and stuck it halfway down her pocket.
As if picking up an invisible grape, Blue pinched the air with her first two pointer fingers and twisted her hand back and forth. Green… She looked at Red, brows furrowed. She… Blue frowned and scratched her head, moving her hand and stump precisely together. What were we doing…
“You girls sure look like you’ve been day-drinking.”
Walking past Blue, he fixed a strand of hair that had fallen across her face before joining hands with Green and hoisting her onto the couch in a seemingly practiced motion. He joined her and passed his arm around her shoulder as he often did with his friends.
“Okay soooo… Nachos, right?!” Slowly but surely shaking themselves out of their torpor, both girls nodded. “Good. Are you taking your chair or your suspenders then, G?”
“My what?” She had blurted out her question like someone spitting a mouthful of beer after feeling a fly in their mouth.
“The café is pretty packed at this hour. If you want to leave your wheelchair here and use your suspenders, when we get there I can carry you inside like we usually do.”
The clouds were slowly dissipating inside the girl’s minds and an image started to form in Green’s. A dark brown varnished cedar wooden plank, about 10 inches wide but three times as long, onto which had been bolted straps salvaged from a heavy duty backpack.
Thoughts made their way into her mind like reconstructed souvenirs. She would wear the straps over her shoulders and use the contraption to walk in public where her chair would’ve been an inconvenience. If for a moment the idea seemed completely absurd, she found herself remembering what it felt like actually wearing them. Sweat collecting between the padded fabric and her skin, or the weight of the wood weighing the straps down on her shoulders the moment she lifted herself off the ground.
A periodic, rhythmic sound echoed at the back of her mind ; The bottom of the board hitting the cement with every step she took, like stilettos on a tiled floor, preventing her hips from touching the ground.
Kethunk
Kethunk
Kethunk
All of this suddenly became very familiar to her.
She straightened herself and shook her head as if she had just woken up from a dream and her legless hips sank deeper in her seat.
“That’s a good idea, actually.” She locked eyes with Blue before talking, unconsciously exaggerating her pronunciation. “Are you in, Blue?”
Why not? She mouthed, shrugging her shoulders.
“Great!! Because I am starviiiing.” Red promptly stood up and powerwalked to the entrance hall to retrieve Green’s suspenders, setting them on the floor of the living room. He then stepped aside and gestured towards the hallway. “Girls…”
Blue chuckled silently and punched him in the shoulder again. Meanwhile, Green skillfully climbed down the couch and slipped the straps over her shoulders and fastened a clip down at her navel.
As she had reached the front door, however, a thought ran across her mind, like she was forgetting something important. She turned around and thumped back to the end of the hallway, looking directly at the spot where the remote had landed and sealed their new fate.
There was a loud knock on the door frame. Come on! Blue mouthed energetically, rubbing her stomach.
Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, Green shrugged off the thought and blamed it on her growing hunger. “I’m coming!, I’m coming!”