Charles, Author

He told it like the arm was fated to be lost. It was never clear if it was just the stories he told or if he'd actually felt the phantom tingling up and down the arm of its future absence alive in its presence. He didn't know how else to put it in the telling. The inability to explain, the fervency with which he attempted to, lent credence to the fact that he had felt those minute shivers in advance of the loss. While cutting vegetables for the pot, he said, he'd experienced some advance knowledge of the wounds that would be inflicted. As if it didn't matter then if he'd slipped and cut himself because the arm was already gone somehow. He liked to call it a little slip in time, or attribute it to the works of some minor deity letting him in early on his own fate, not to forestall it or make it easier when it did rightfully arrive, nor vindictively however. Perhaps some idle amusement. Whether the stories were for him or to aid the ease of those who his lack of arm seemed to set ill with, it was necessarily indeterminate. He told on.