Irenosen Okojie - Butterfly Fish

We stopped on a bridge by the river for air. A fox was taking orders from something unseen. Rangi lit a cigarette, took a draw and began to pace the small area we’d resigned ourselves to. An empty bottle of Australian Pinot Grigio rolled nearby. My hands trembled, suddenly accosted by a memory; my mother running barefoot across a bridge, crying about inheritance being inescapable, fleeing down metallic stairs. My small frame rooted to a spot at the edge. I’m reminded of hovering above the river with metallic corners, afterwards searching for answers in my mother’s expressions, before the water inherited them forever, of chasing the changes, the timeline of when it all begun.

I woke up on the train tracks not remembering the walk up. Everything seemed to be in slow motion; the stream of night commuters, the last train announcement ringing in my ears, a crushing weight on my right arm so painful my eyes watered. Half stars blended into the mocking glints of the tracks. The train wheel against my arm was unbearable. I lay there clenching and unclenching my left fist, grunting, reducing to small parts mice would scurry over. Faces swam. Voices came from a distance. Broken, silver light danced above like shrapnel flying. I’m not sure how much time passed between coming round and finally being lifted but a slow pained breath left me and the shrapnel had begun to reassemble in my body as a siren wept.

“What’s happening?” I asked the faces blending into one, my voice faint, hoarse.

“There’s been an accident but you’re alright now dear,” a kindly, male voice said. His slim hands moved like quick sparrows. I vaguely registered his green uniform.

“I can’t feel my arm anymore!” I said, desperately attempting to grab his elbow with my left hand, clutching the moments before the accident I couldn’t remember. Fragments had attached themselves to the announcement sign, the boot imprint of an ambulance man, a baby tugging its mother’s white collar.

I spotted Anon in the crowd holding the brass head as I was wheeled away. She looked calm. One wheel from the bed squeaked as she moved her mouth. I felt myself slipping into the dark, away from the weight of her judgement. The blurring of those lost moments before the accident became the unlikely half children of the stars.

During the ride to the hospital, the sound of tires on the road was oddly comforting. My eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lighting overhead. For a moment, I thought it was a scene from a movie maybe. That the van would flatten into a stage, the players disappearing into their corners. But the pain in my right shoulder indicated otherwise. Blood on my shirt had smudged. The lower part of my arm hung on tenuously, joined at the elbow. Light-headed, the van shook. Its ceiling became a bright, foreign sky. A drumbeat rattled the doors, faster and faster. Red earth bearing footprints with water covered the floor. Blue petals fell gently. A woman crying interrupted my thoughts, loudly at first, and then quietly, followed by the sound of a shovel in the soil and the soft murmurings of a man. I ran towards that sound, reaching the moments before the accident but I couldn’t remember. I ran in slip roads going nowhere, began to scream so loudly, my throat hurt. The van screeched to a halt.

My numb arm dangled in blind spots.

I came round again in the hospital bed aware I’d lost time. I felt sick and slow, the same feelings you got following an adventure ride, knowing that the angle of flight had reassembled things inside you. Most of my right arm was gone, hacked off by surgeons. I no longer had a right hand. The right hand I stole with, masturbated with, and caught a butterfly fish from a pool with. They’d had to amputate. It must have been pinned beneath that train wheel for longer than I realised.

I knew Anon was partially responsible for the state I’d found myself in but why did I deserve this? Hadn’t I suffered enough? Why had I inherited one punishment after another? I thought of calling Rangi or Mrs Harris but I’d left my mobile on the kitchen counter. I was in a world of strangers, listening through stethoscopes tapping against a God’s chest. Nurses’ smiles wavered as they lied to patients out of kindness. This was a country I came from. I knew the language of the damned. Through the rage, helplessness and despair, I spoke it to the ceiling.

I drifted in and out of consciousness, wrung my hand in the light bedcovering listening to an internal clock ticking. I cried when a silhouette from the ceiling leapt into black train tracks. Doctors and nurses came and went; cut-outs travelling on ripples. They hovered by my bed checking the stump. Pain medications with names I could not pronounce slipped down my throat. The withered old man in the next bay coughed out his insides, arms outstretched as if to retrieve them.

Pangs of jealousy shot through me. I’d been envying other people’s movements, the fullness of them, their lack of concern that they could one day be taken away. Even a simple action like coughing involved the arms. I worried about the road ahead, learning to use my left hand. Who would be there when I landed awkwardly, couldn’t put an item of clothing on properly or dropped things? I felt truly alone. The nurses changed my bedding, smiled patiently. “Is there anything you need? Anybody you want to call?” I looked beyond them, holding the gaze of my old body, trying to stop it from betraying me.

Once I’d seen a busker outside Angel tube station. He’d held his guitar like a lover. There was light in his eyes as he stroked the strings, voice cracking with emotion. He seemed rich with the complexities and shades of a human being collecting pennies. I’d envied his ability to connect with people so effortlessly. One day, I wanted to hold a lover the way he held his instrument, to know the notes they had within, to lose my fingers finding them. Now I grappled with the knowledge my embrace would be clumsy, unsettling and perhaps unknowable.

At night I dreamt of my missing arm. I longed for it, deep pangs that ricocheted through my body. What had the hospital done with it? What kind of instrument did they use to chop it off? I pictured Doctors wielding small axes beneath the sleeves of their white coats, trying not to drop it into their strides. Was my arm in a freezer somewhere? With limbs from other bodies, long lost to the echoes of their previous lives or buried in the soil, travelling through the undergrowth towards a fragmented new earth. Under instructions from the land, it could conjure the rest of me for a new, less troubled existence. I saw my arm in the ambulance siren, catching old scenes of me able-bodied. I saw it on empty café seats, in window displays between mannequins. I saw it on routes lined with broken signs. I felt ugly. One day I’d make love beneath a low watt bulb. This was the inheritance my mother never warned me about. My arm floated in the sea of aftermaths, between murky objects that needed to be reclaimed. I shook in the bed, my absent hand wet from touching the sea.

Dr Krull came to visit. He sat at the end of the bed looking unsure, holding a paperweight of a woman standing reaching for snow, then sitting down as the season changed.

“I know you like these,” he said, placing it on the cheap looking set of drawers beside the bed. He cleared his throat unbuttoning his green suede jacket.

“I wasn’t sure what to bring or whether to bring anything at all. It’s difficult in a situation like this.” I liked him all the more for not bringing flowers.

Funny, despite the pain and discomfort I was in, I was conscious of how I looked. No matter the circumstances, women always wanted to look their best in front of an attractive man.

“The hospital called me,” he said. “They found my credit and debit card in your possessions.”