severed

by Chelsea Cutler

We buried his hand under the willow tree in his back yard. It was an intimate ceremony; Link hadn’t bothered inviting his parents. Their tumultuous divorce had been finalized that morning, so he figured they were all grieved out. Link still wanted to have the funeral that day, since I was leaving in less than a week.

“It’s always just been the two of us anyways,” he said, as he draped his arm around my shoulders. I could feel his fingers wrapping around my upper arm but when I looked, his residual limb hung slack. Phantom limb by proxy.

My fingers felt suffocated by the dirt under my nails from digging the small grave. I rubbed them against the front of my dress, feeling the gritty dirt smear on the black fabric. We used to dig in this dirt to find wood bugs and worms. But that was a long time ago, and the dirt felt different now.

We stood like this for a while. The late summer breeze circling us and the willow branches. I had glued a few spotted rocks together in a pyramid of sorts, creating a pint-sized headstone, or what we called a handstone. They were Link’s favourite rocks that we used to collect at the beach when we were kids. I looked at the handstone now, thinking of the hand resting beneath it. The first hand I ever held in kindergarten the day we met. The first hand I went to second base with when we were thirteen. The first hand I witnessed severed from its root.

I swore I could still taste the iron of blood mixed with the earthy water. The hand was bobbing along the lake’s surface, strings of sinew rippling from the wrist. I should have known better than to take Link out on the water that day; the day his father had moved out, leaving Link distraught. But wakeboarding was Link’s favourite thing to do, so I thought it would cheer him up. And how many hundreds of times had we gone wakeboarding without the cable wrapping around and severing a wrist?

“Thanks for being here,” Link said, bringing me back to the funeral. “And for finding that jewelry box. It made for a lovely casket.”

“Of course,” I said, leaning my head into his chest. “I knew that macaroni-adorned box from Grade Two art class would come in handy at some point.”

Obviously, I didn’t think the art project I made when I was eight would end up a casket for my best friend’s hand. The hand that held my hair back while I vomited through my first hangover. The hand that high-fived mine when I got accepted into a university halfway across the country.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t save your hand,” I said quietly.

“We sure as hell tried,” he said with a chuckle. “I wish I had been coherent to see the look on the doc’s face when you brought him a cooler with a bunch of beers and my hand on ice.”

I smiled. “It was all we had on the boat! I thought it might work.”

“Thank you for trying,” he said, then he sighed. “I just wish our last summer before college had been different.”

“We still spent almost every day together. Isn’t that what we wanted?”

He let my question linger before it blew away with breeze.

“Promise you’ll call me,” he said.

“Every day.”

“I want proper phone calls, none of that voice memo shit.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“How do we end this?” he asked, nodding toward the grave.

“Whatever feels right to you,” I said. “Any final words?”

“I don’t know. I guess I never really thought I would have to say goodbye.”

I nodded, looking at Link. I never really thought that either.

Photo of Chelsea Cutler

BIO: Chelsea writes to get lost in fiction and sometimes found in the characters created.