When Philip had woken up this morning, he’d found that his arms had disappeared.
“Well, this is no good,” he said, examining the smooth skin that now covered the place where his torso should have met his shoulder. He had no idea where they’d gone; he didn’t remember lending them out to anyone or leaving them somewhere. They must have either been stolen in the night or had walked off on their own—as much as arms can walk, anyway.
I just wanted to thank-you again for auditioning me in your upcoming sure-to-be-a-Blockbuster hit, Stretch Armstrong.
I don’t want to jump the gun or anything, but I think you’ll agree that besides a few minor hiccups, it went perfectly. I feel like I was born to play “Guy Sitting Next to Stretch Armstrong in the Diner”. The character just comes so naturally to me, it’s like I’m not even acting, I’m actually that guy, sitting at the diner beside Stretch Armstrong. And the stand-in and I had some real chemistry going, wouldn’t you agree? I could tell he was really feeding off my positive energy.
“I’ve bought you something,” she said. She looked excited, like a puppy eager to please.
“Oh really? What could that be? A season ticket to the opera, or a year’s supply of anti-depressants?” he said and shut the front door.
“Ow,” said the door. “Not so hard.”
“You’ll like it, I think,” she said. Her tongue was hanging out and she’d cocked her head to one side so that her ear flopped in a cute way over her left eye. “It’s to help your recovery. Come through.”
She led him into the sitting room.
“It’s an aquarium,” he said. “It’s just what I’ve always wanted. Is there a sunken ship?”
I first felt pure hatred in kindergarten, when I met a boy named Travis. He was humanlike in appearance, jelly-stained and sticky like the rest of us, but in reality he was a putrid beast, crafted out of pure malevolence and hellfire. He probably hated me for the same reasons most people did—because I was the annoying little chunker with big glasses and blunt-cut bangs—but I’d like to think that he was just intimidated, acting out of fear. That, perhaps, behind my huge glasses were eyes so full of wisdom and truth that it pained him to be in the same room as me. Maybe he knew that I was destined for greatness, and despised me for it. Maybe he had never encountered such an electric energy before. Either that or my stupid haircut.
Every once in a while, Eileen and Andrew knock me on the shoulder with their billy-club of friendship and say, “You’re up!”, and I fire up the world’s worst video-editing software, Abridge some Classics, and mortify the English professors who only ever tried to make me appreciate literature. Obviously, I am not here to tell
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