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Quotation of the Day for September 29, 2011... She turned away from the edge, and that's when she saw a hand poking out from behind a rock. While the others listened to the tour guide, she went over to the hand. The hand was attached to its forearm, and there was a clean torn cloth wrapped around the end that would have been attached to the rest of his arm. There was no blood on the cloth. Shandee picked it up and felt it. It was warm; the fingers moved a little. The hand pointed urgently at her bag, so she stuffed it inside and went back to the group and listened to the rest of the tour. When she got home she pulled the forearm out and laid it on her bed. It was strong, with sensitive fingers and a blue vein traveling up along the muscle on the underside. She lifted it and whispered, "Arm, can you hear me?" In answer the arm caressed her cheek with two fingers. It had a gentle touch. Shandee said, "Are you comfortable? Do you need anything?" The arm made a handwriting gesture. Shandee found a pen and handed it over. The hand wrote, "Please unwrap the rag and feed me some mashed-up fish food in an electrolyte solution." "Where?" Shandee asked. "Funnel it into the little hole with the green rim," the arm wrote. And then: "I'm glad you found me." She unwrapped the towel and saw that the arm was capped with a sort of power pack made of black rubber. There looked to be a place for a battery and a place for waste to be discharged, and a place for nutrients to enter. She had an intuition. "Are you Italian?" "Half Italian, half Welsh," the arm wrote. "I'm known as Dave's arm." - Nicholson Baker, from his novel House of Holes. Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk Sep. 22, 2011  |
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