Yasmeen was always a bit of an over-achiever. I suppose you could attribute the competitive streak in her to her mother, who was herself a very ambitious javelin-thrower. She began her short-lived career in high-school and went on to participate in various regional tournaments across the country. She won gold once, bronze twice, never silver (at least, that’s what she’s always told Yasmeen, and the breadth of my knowledge is limited to the breadth of hers), and stopped competing a few years after her marriage. She (Yasmeen’s mother) has always cited her marriage to a man named Ismael as the domino that fell splat over her career. I have always found this reasoning more than a little unfair, since I have always known Ismael to be a mellow banker whose life’s bravest act was contemplating divorcing the woman who had once thrown a dinner plate at his neck with the intent of scoring high on his larynx (he never did, and she missed). Yasmeen’s upbringing had been domineered by her mother, and, as such, she was a budding javelin-thrower. Her mother had started her young, having two-year old Yasmeen throw toothbrush-spears at bubbles floating over her bath, and toned her small arms by rubbing them with lavender infused oils via various kinds of massages. Yasmeen had a complicated relationship with her father, who she felt mostly sorry for and oftentimes scorned, but she idolized her mother, who had brought her up with single-minded passions and pursuits: a thirst for competition and victory and a realization of all that made her thoroughly, wholly capable. She was a javelin-thrower with an axe to grind. It was always our dream to aid her in the friction.
Me and my brother have, well, obviously, been with her from the start. We helped her grip her first bar, a wooden cylinder that was one of a number that lined the side of her cot at the time, and were instrumental in her heaving and pulling it out clean from its fittings. We were present during Yasmeen’s first fights, were held up and knocked down fifth-graders with superiority complexes, and gripped the handles of her first bicycle so strongly that she couldn’t let go even as she toppled. I have always been there, albeit not in the role I would have preferred. I was there when she and my brother flung their first knife, their first stick, and finally their first javelin, and watched on as each projectile soared through air and made sorry anything and everything that came in its way.
The story of how Yasmeen lost her Right-Hand does not really bear repeating, but for the sake of the reader who insists, I shall attempt a brief recap of the unfortunate sequence of events that led up to the loss of limb.
It was an overcast day, of the sort where the ground is dark and the air pregnant with warning of rain. We were jogging down an elevated overpass, Yasmeen’s tracksuit slick with sweat for she had been running for more than long. A short, rust-ridden banister ran along the footpath we were pacing, overlooking a busy highway from quite far up. Seeking rest, Yasmeen leaned against it, and the railing gave way with alarming ease. She twirled in mid-air and we managed to gain purchase against the pavement, right arm outstretched, shortly after which a cyclist going too fast to stop rode over her right wrist. The cyclist toppled with a yelp, but not before she withdrew her hand with a scream and we fell back through the gap in the safety-railing. After tumbling through air for a short period, we collided against some downward-arching electricity cables suspended in the air by a series of tall poles. They did not provide much resistance to our weight, snapping free from their holdings and whipping through the air. Yasmeen managed to grab one of these and it wound around skin with great friction, until it was lassoed around her wrist-bone and she continued descending with the steel cable bracing her arm. Her body leaned backwards and the cable slackened, to a point a couple meters or so above the ground. Yasmeen and her arm jerked upwards violently at the end of the cable’s span. She oscillated vertically a few times and then her wrist loosened and she dropped to the ground on shaky feet. She twirled dizzily and nearly fell into oncoming traffic. A passerby pulled her towards himself before she could be run-over by a Shell tanker, but he was unable to retrieve all of her before the vehicle’s crossing. As a result, her right wrist was left in the path of the tanker, which braked only half-heartedly before smashing into bone. Yasmeen passed out on pavement, just before it began to rain.
All three of these things, on their own, might not have meant for amputation, but the combined effect of being run-under a bike-wheel, nearly dislocated by cable whiplash, and finally collided into near-full force by the weight of an oil tanker, unfortunately meant that Yasmeen would have to bid farewell to her arm lunate upwards.
To be honest, I viewed this entire, admittedly morbid, sequence of events with a sense of guilty hope, an ambitious sheen to my fingernails. The whole affair was an opportunity to me, really, and I’ll concede that maybe that wasn’t the most empathetic way to receive it. After all, Yasmeen was in tremendous pain, and I had lost a brother, though admittedly one I seldom touched. All the same, I couldn’t help but see in these storm-cloud times the silver-lining of my own ascension (horizontal, to the right).
For my brother, you see, Yasmeen’s right-hand, was the sort of right-hand that war-veteran amputees dream of in their time off from PTSD. He could have served as the slender instrument of a pianist, the exquisitely limbered tool of a calligrapher, even the well-veined model for a watch commercial (perhaps his supple frame could have served as digital substitute for the barren spot-scape that Daniel Craig calls a hand-back). As it was, he was a javelin-gripper like no other. His knuckle-line balanced ridge and plateau gorgeously, and he had astonishing grip strength and control, which proved invaluable for Yasmeen, in her nascent javelin-throwing career. He was so steady that if placed on a body of water, he would have shifted to point north. His fingers were shapely styli, nimble enough to thread ten needles in ten seconds with but one length of string, powerful enough to never let slip even the slightest of implements. He was the best possible candidate for the “hand” in hand-eye coordination. I hated him dearly, for he left me little to do other than the requisite: two-handed operations and intimate matters of a physical nature. And so when the Unfortunate Incident resulted in my brother, the inarguable appendage legend, having to be chopped off and probably incinerated, I had few pores to flare. What do they do with the leftovers from an amputation? I imagine a hand being enclosed in a palm-sized casket, buried in a small hole in the ground, a small hand-painted board bearing an epitaph: Here lies Yasmeen’s Right-Hand, Unpleasantly Severed, Dearly Departed etc. I confess, the thought gave me spasms of mirth.
Now was my time you see, with Yasmeen. She was still but a young 20-yearold and there was plenty of time for her to adapt to the left-handed way of life, resume her professional throwing career after a brief hiatus wherein she would learn to handle the world with the other hand. I was sure she would come around to it sooner or later, and so it was to my dismay that we encountered quite a few roadblocks in our re-contextualized relationship.
It wasn’t Yasmeen’s fault, no. She was being tried at the time, quite mercilessly. Her parents, for the first time in her life, seemed to come together and supported her in her recovery. Her mother remained by her side as her rounded wrist healed and her father cooked all her meals for her. Both were uncommonly sympathetic, even moreso than you would expect a parent to be after such a tragedy. It appeared to them that Yasmeen’s Javelin-throwing days were over before they had even really begun, and they had accepted this, though her mother felt twice the anguish since this was the second time she was having to give up this dream. Yasmeen, for her part, was not quite ready to give it up, not without an attempt at hand-habilitation. She attempted to use me as she had my brother, but there was a shakiness to everything we did together. Water rippled in glassware, clothes danced as they were pulled on, and (of course) pens squiggled lines and lines of gibberish. Still air seemed to have the buffeting power of a gale. I would wrap my span around something, and feel weakness invade the very edges of my digits. Nothing seemed to work as it once had.
I’m sure there was some amount of trauma involved in Yasmeen’s inability to adopt me. The phantom of my brother still weighed her arms. He had been such a winner, in every respect imaginable. To expect me, a left goon, to take on his legacy of greatness, match his remarkable grace, was a laughable notion. I would simply never be able to offer Yasmeen what he had, at least not in the form I held at the time. I wanted everything that he had, you see, which is unreasonable when you’re as to the left of the spectrum as I was. And I wanted it immediately, so I realized quickly that in order to match him, I would have to attempt a morphing, a transformation of sorts, something of a change in perspective. And so I pulsed messages through nerves to Yasmeen’s prefrontal cortex.
The operation was a newfangled procedure, and a very expensive one. I had remembered reading about it, thumbing the letters of an ad in a newspaper that Yasmeen had been perusing back before the accident (she always read to her right). I quietly reminded Yasmeen of it again, and made sure to stress upon the nature of my involvement in the plan. That was, of course, vital. The inception of the idea was built around what I could offer her. In the end, her insistence upon using me as a candidate somehow ended up saving the family money, as they did not have to pay for an illegally sourced right-hand hacked off of an illegal immigrant looking to make ends meet. In the end, they used me, removed me via calculated incision, for a most opportune hand-transplantation.
I became Yasmeen’s right-hand. Due to my left-disposition, she ended up having to settle with a freak-inversion of my brother. Fingers in the wrong order, palm-lines converging inwards, a rather gruesome line of mottled skin where I was grafted to the stump of her right-wrist. This didn’t matter. Once again blessed with righted implement, Yasmeen was able to overcome the temporary hurdle of needing a mirror to see the back of her hand as she had once known it. I became the ultimate javelin thrower, and my brother was soon forgotten. Indeed, after she won her third championship, she was even able to afford a new left-hand, Indonesian by descent. The new-hand envies me, I can tell. I know how he feels, or I did once. I cannot remember now what it was like on the left. I don’t suspect it was much of worth, certainly not compared to what I have now. I don’t perfectly fill the shape of my brother’s absence, but I suppose I’m my own kind of beast. I have five fingers, and I can split blades of glass down their length with the throw of a javelin. I am my own hand now.
Sentient Exhalation 