"tell me what you know about dismemberment" (bhanu kapil, the vertical interrogation of strangers)

The morning after the fair the father takes the girl to see his mother.

She has the stuffed monkey he won for her, although she’d wanted a goldfish: those were too hard: you had to land a tiny ball in the tiny fishbowl. She swore every time it looks like it should have gone in: it bounded away instead.

Better luck next time, says the person running the game, a teenage boy (scary).

It is dark and chill and her father trades dollars for chances to play games and for rides on the giant slide. He thinks she likes this but really she is terrified.

She goes on it every year at the fair with him: they climb the metal stairs—really just a ladder—and she tries not to look down because she can almost imagine falling.

The threads in her knees get tight, her brain begins to wobble and the people below are so tiny: as tiny as the ping-pong ball her father couldn’t get into the fishbowl!

At the top she will sit in his lap, on top of a burlap sack and they will fly down the steep yellow curve. Her mother and baby sister at the bottom will take a picture.

She pretends this is fun.

Show Mimi what you got at the fair, her dad suggests. It’s a crispy October morning that smells like the day it is (Saturday). The grandmother and her friend are sitting at the dining room table, smoking and drinking coffee.

The friend is a normal old lady who wears a sweater and a skirt. But the grandmother is too shimmery. She coughs and laughs at the same time.

There are lipstick prints on their cups: fuschia and coral. She has learned these colors from the crayon box, which has enough crayons in it to need its own sharpener.

You have to peel back the paper to sharpen them, though, and then they look ugly. Not like crayons anymore, but used to be crayons.

It’s important to color very gently. Markers are better. If you marker too hard the tips will get flattened. This is a baby sister thing to do. Also to make a wet hole in the paper.

She holds up the monkey and the grandmother and friend say something nice about it, in those slow fake voices for talking to children. How nice!

What a SWEET monkey. Did your daddy win that at the fair for you? she nods. Why don’t you go color, sweetheart?

She nods again and goes to the office/guestroom. The crayons and scrap paper are kept in a special cabinet of things for visiting children.

the paper has real estate on one side. The crayons are the worst kind: always stumpy and some of them are missing their papers entirely.

Lying across the bed is a leg.

A big leg with a white sneaker and a blue sock.

It doesn’t move.

She wants to run away from the leg but knows that nobody must know she saw it.

Also she’s frozen and prickly like the time she saw aliens in the hallway.

A certain sense of the world leaks out of her scalp like draining the ice water out of a cooler, after the beach. The juice boxes and egg salad sandwiches of known facts about the world rattled around.

It must be for something. Her grandmother wouldn’t just have a leg in her guestroom. She’s not a witch.

A huge wet hole: the spot where the leg isn’t.

This is a sad time.

There is no time for being sad. She does not want to be alone with the leg. Returns back to the dining room and crawls under the table as if to play with the dog. she is Too Old to be crawling—grownups seem to think once you can walk, that’s all you’ll do—but these old people have no idea how kindergarteners are supposed to act.

Her father has a cup of coffee too. She does not try to listen to them.

Under the table she counts legs. Five

an odd number.