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Wait. Haven't I told you I'd had nothing to eat for four days? And that the only help I could look to in the matter of replenishing my sapped vitality was my own body? Above all, haven't I told you, over and over, that survival is a business of the mind? The superior mind? I won't justify myself by saying you would have done the same thing. First of all, you're probably not a surgeon. Even if you knew the mechanics of amputation, you might have botched the job so badly you would have bled to death anyway. And even if you had lived through the operation and the shock-trauma, the thought might never have entered your preconditioned head. Never mind. No one has to know. My last act before leaving the island will be to destroy this book.
I was very careful.
I washed it thoroughly before I ate it.
Survivor Type- Stephen King 1982
When they find you, you’ve amputated your arm halfway up the bicep.
Your sister still hugs you despite the blood caked in between your feathers, and she clutches you delicately and doesn’t at all seem put off by your one-armed response. The pain from the injury has faded to hunger and delirium long ago, a distant sort of pain, as if it’s happening to someone else while you look on. Your own pain, but a little to the left. Disconnected. You hold onto her fiercely, even as it sends staticy pins and needles up your damaged arm- but it’s real, that proves to you her arms around you are real. You’re filled with an urge to confess suddenly, all the sins you’ve committed, and you want to fill her head with the horrors and atrocities you’ve been forced to act on to survive- but you refrain, tongue bone-dry other than sea water that made the world kaleidoscope and flash when you drink too much.
The blue triplet- your mind too frayed and loose to pin down a name, elusive like your sanity- yells at you for something you think is unimportant but the world is too greyed out to hear it properly, and you can’t focus long enough to actually do anything to defend yourself. It doesn’t matter.
(It doesn’t matter you think, cupping handfuls of salt water with both hands, I’ll be fine.)
You come back to yourself in their presence, humanity crawling over your flesh like a disease, feeling out of place in the presence of people who understood reality and had proper morals and standards. You trust your boys, and when they start making a plan of attack, you let them. You can’t crouch on the sand fluidly, you drop to your knees like a rock, unflinching at the harsh contact. You are jerky and taut, body unresponsive like before, a corpse reanimated as a joke. You'd like to laugh.
(The shrapnel of the golden bullet is sharp, sterilized with hell-fire from crashing from the sky. It’s important that it’s sterile, you shouldn’t risk infection.)
Your cousins show up suddenly, or maybe they were always there? Your mind can't keep up, half-formed thoughts crashing a burning, anger flaring and fading, uncooridinated and janky. Gladstone touches you and you think about jerking away but by the time you convince your body to react he’s already led you to a bathroom so you can clean up. You don’t want him to touch you because his suit is so clean and you’re dirty, sand grinding underneath your feathers and crusted blood caked to your sides, making your feathers stiff and brittle. Your arm is a mangled mess, no one has said anything yet. Politeness? It doesn’t matter. You drink the shower water without thinking, opening your bill under the spray and letting it fill up, running out the sides of your mouth like drool. You drink until your sick and then you wretch up fluids, clear tinged water, and suddenly you’re starving.
(You’re so hungry it’s clouding your thoughts, fat sliding off your bones until it feels like you’re made up of nothing as the days yawn endlessly around you. Desperation making you stupid, reckless, stripping you of something akin to rationality- except you'd rationalized it to yourself plenty of times, haven’t you? It had to be this way. There was no other way. You’re losing pieces of yourself mentally, might as well let your body reflect that.)
The shower water runs an ugly rust brown.
Your sister wraps your arm with expert precision, and doesn’t say anything while you wolf down food as she’s doing it. You eat like an animal, never pausing to savor the cooked meat- (so much better than raw.) while she works with hands that, to her credit, barely tremble. She’s got experience, and you look at her leg and wonder if she’d been forced to the same length you had to survive. You wonder if she can see it in you, if she knows what you’ve done, like the wickedness is branded across your skin and burned into your feathers. Like it’s sewn into the ugly hap-hazard thread stitched at the end of your arm, dead flesh stretched and wrong.
You want to tell her you were rotting, that taking that piece of shrapnel to your body was the only way to save the rest of your skin, that sawing back and forth until you got to the bone (and then clamping your shaking hand between two rocks and twisting and twisting until you felt that tell-tale crunch-snap) and then sawing and sawing and popping veins and tears muscles and gouging out sinew and bone shards until your knife finished it’s path, and how you had made sure to sew up your wound, first, and how you’d taken your severed limb and washed it to diligently before you-
You swallow a bite of steak as your sister finishes up, it’s rare- you’ve never liked it rare before. It’s practically bleeding. You take another bite and cut through tender meat with brutal efficiency.
(It was your left hand. You were practical, after all- you still needed to walk, the ocean was your drinking water, the edge of the jungle your reprieve from the sun. You made you SOS first, before you did it, because it would be easier with two hands. You wrapped your other wounds carefully, while you still could. Your right hand is your dominant hand. You’d been smart about it.)
They take you to the doctor after everything is all over, you lose the rest of your arm up to the shoulder and barely resist asking if you can have the meat after the operation is done. Painkillers make your life fun and hazy, and you eat your fill every night- gorge yourself on breads and cakes and meats, swallowing raw hamburger when you think you can sneak it from the fridge, but you’re still hungry. It gnaws at you, an emptiness that refuses to fill. Your sons stay by your side as you heal, you and your sister reconnect, your uncle subtly pries about what happened on the island. You can’t tell him, can’t verbalize your failures, can’t begin to lend words to your violation of what is holy.
There’s something out of place in your mind, in your soul, a puzzle piece that withered and cracked or lost altogether. You’ve stained yourself with your transgressions against humanity, and the world is grey-tinged and sideways since you left the island, since you partook in forbidden fruit.
Your Uncle and your Sister invite you to tea, at night, after the boys have gone to bed. It’s a regular thing all of you have together, ever since she came back, and you all get along. No sensitive subjects are brought up, it’s all surface, and as you watch the fire crackle and glow you feel bile rise up your throat. You think you should tell them, lance the wound, purge the impurities, bleed out the sin until you are cleansed again. You tea tastes like saltwater and gore.
“I wasn’t injured when the golden bullet crashed.” You don’t look up from the fire, transfixed by it’s warping shapes that imprint themselves on your eyelids when you blink languidly, “Scrapes and bruises, nothing serious.”
Della blinks but you don’t bother to look at her, “But you said your arm was trapped…” You’d told them that, when they’d asked, and she'd related to you. There's dread in her voice, rising as she looks at you with too-wide eyes, afraid suddenly of the can of worms you'd spilled across the floor and spat from your mouth. Your Uncle sits up in his chair, placing his mug aside.
The tea in your cup caught the light from the fire and turns blood red, “No. I cut it off later," There's a serenity in this, "Because I was starving.”
The moment you admit it they start screaming, raucous noise, tears and disbelief. They ask you to deny, beg of you that it's a joke, and your uncle holds you and whispers things you don't bother to listen to. (I'm sorry you had to go through that you did it to survive it's okay I love you) You let it wash over you like seawater, swaying in the push and pull of the ocean, blank eyed as he cards his hands through your feathers. Your sister clamps her beak shut as if willing away vomit, disgusted and horrified beyond words. They’re worried about you, but it doesn’t matter.
(You threw up the first bite, gagging and sick. You kept the rest of it down, counting backward from 100, 99, 98, 97 to distract yourself. Your hand had been a good start. You’d cut off even more before they found you.)
When they leave you alone, finally, after the shrinks have passed you and they let you out of protective custody, you find you’re hungry.
(Starving. Nothing fills you up, like there’s a perpetual emptiness in your body, a chasm of craving. You eat leaves and grass and sand, swallowing it dry)
So you pick up a knife and start on your left leg.