DATALOG 2023:08.07 A.M. My first stop is a housewife on the north shore. She doesn’t ask me about the arm, and I’m pleasantly surprised. Most do. I like to mix it up. Sometimes it’s a factory mishap, my arm torn off in a conveyor belt, the concrete slippery with oil and blood. Other times it’s something more rural, a thresher that ripped it from the socket, the cornfield splashed with arcs of pumping liquid. Truth is I lost is to a needle, the golden sap my only life, my addiction, shooting up until the sores and pus disintegrated my arm at the elbow. They cut it off with lasers while I watched, the stench making my stomach buckle, and at the same time, hunger for a charred filet. The job is the usual digit work. I open a few jars and crimp a few pipes. I lift a piano, an armoire, the back end of her minivan—her two boys running around to rotate the tires, sweaty and laughing at the idiot lying there, his arm a piston powered jack.
P.M. These are always the tricky one, the ones at night. It’s never anything that they want done in the light of the day. At the apartment on the edge of the city I find an empty room with a single bulb lit and barely swinging, suspended over a naked man tied to a metal chair. His eyes bulge when I enter the room and he shakes his head from side to side, the gag in his mouth restricting his words. I know better than to let him talk. They’re never innocent.