There Are 206 Bones In the Human Skeleton and to Love You Only Requires Most of Them
by Sahalie Angell Martin
Today his ankle is gone. As days go, it’s a good one. He can’t bend his foot but he can hobble on fused bone. He’s in a good mood: he makes me breakfast before work. Our kitchen is scattered with aids, the kind of stuff you order off of late-night television, long hooked claws and one-push apple slicers and automatic can openers. Some days all Nick is missing is a fingernail or an echoing nodule of inner ear, and on these days he likes to cook, German-style pork chops and vegetable soup with snap peas. Some days he does not have a tongue.
Our insurance does not count what happens to Nick as a disability because they can’t code it correctly. There is no shorthand for phantom flesh.
I make excuses to my family about why they haven’t met him yet. My mother doesn’t believe he exists. She refers to him as “Cheryl’s shadow boyfriend” in texts with extended family, as if I spend my nights snooping through my own bedroom, trying to find the Peter Pan lost half of me.
I never think he’s ugly, even though he asks. There are days he’s missing his hair, bald at twenty-two, and he tries to hide it from me under hats and hoodies. When he is missing one eye I focus on the other one and tell him how blue it is, like a brush stroke on china, like a shining breakable thing.
We stole his wheelchair from a retirement home on a day his whole face was missing. We wrapped his head in bandages and held his hands under the sink to wrinkle them, pushed him out like a resident on a day trip. The next day, when he’d recovered his mouth, he told me to kill him before leaving him in a place like that. I asked what he meant since he hadn’t seen any of the wispy residents or smelled the stale box spring scent of the place.
It was too quiet, he told me, like a church.
It is more of an impediment to our sex life than you would think, this constant re-arranging. Sometimes I reach for him and he is soft and smooth as a doll. It’s not just about his dick, though, which can soften or disappear completely inside me, but also the knee he bends to steady himself on the mattress, the fingers pressed into my shoulder blades, the release of pressure when it has barely begun to build.
Overall, I’m calmer when the deformity is obvious. Some days I run my hands over his sleep-warmed body and find everything in place, and that’s when I begin to worry – is the missing thing inside of him? A vanished liver, a tendon cut clean? How much of your body do you need to breathe?
So far, Nick’s condition has not proved fatal. He thinks it must be deliberate, a shifting not designed to kill. “I’m always still me,” he says as he shaves. In the mirror I can see a missing rib like a chink in armor. “I’m never fully gone.”
But, I want to say, you’re never fully here. If I can never have all of you, are you really mine?
Sahalie Angell Martin is an Oregon-born writer currently residing in Columbus, OH. She received her BFA in Writing from Emerson College and is a current MFA in Fiction candidate at Ohio State University. She has published or upcoming work in Stork Magazine, the underground, Cleaver Magazine, and the Archipelago Fiction Anthology. She blogs about living with chronic illness at sahalieangellmartin.com.
