She needs to take pictures to document my injuries, so she leads me to a plastic bin of clothes the color of dishwater and lets me choose underwear. I lever up a beige pair of underpants and, though I can tell they’ve been laundered, somehow they hold the shape of other girls still, the ones who came through here before me.
Behind a blue paper curtain, she tugs away my trousers and shirt till there’s nothing left but skin, naked feet on tile, my body a sliver of white. I’ve never seen it like this before, so bare, blotches of blood still stuck to my skin. She doesn’t know it, but the blood isn’t mine.
They haven’t told me yet if the boy from the bridge is dead.
The woman eases the underpants up my legs, fits a bra over my chest. I roll my shoulders beneath the tight elastic as she lifts my trousers from the floor. With a soft clatter, an object falls from the pocket. We stare at it, a skeletal hand held together at the joints with golden wire.
“What’s that?” she asks.
I hold up a stump to show her.
Her mouth drops so low, the bags under her eyes go taut. After a tick, she fixes her features back to normal, just the same way I remember people in the Community doing after witnessing some everyday atrocity. We didn’t linger on those things. The cows needed milking, and the daylight was wasting, and somewhere there was always a baby wailing for one of its mothers.
The policewoman reaches in my other trouser pocket, lifts out the second hand, and places both on a silver tray.
“Will I get them back?”
Her head tilts to the side again. “That won’t be possible.”
“Why not?”
“They’re human remains. There are laws about things like that.” She clears her throat. “They’ll be held as evidence, and when they’re no longer needed, they’ll be incinerated.”
“Burned?” I choke. Not burned. Anything but burned. “You can’t do that. They’re my hands,” I shout, trying to shove past her. “Give them back!”
She rolls her fingers into a fist and blocks me with an arm across my chest. “If you force me, I will subdue you.”
The skin around her mouth is bunched with lines deep and thin as needles. When I don’t move, she picks up the tray and leaves the room. She returns a minute later, the tray empty.
And it’s then that I realize the Prophet’s not the only one capable of taking a girl’s hands away.
Chapter 4
When I’m marched to the police car, the two cops from earlier are already inside, eyes tight and sleepy. They’re eating from bags in the front seat, some food I don’t recognize, bright colored and crunchy between their molars. They hold the food in their meaty hands like fragile things they’re afraid to break.
When they’re done, they shrivel up the bags with a scritch sound and throw them to the floor. We drive through the snow-clotted streets to a huge white building that they tell me is a hospital.
In an exam room, the doctor waves for me to show my stumps, but I hold them behind my back, and one of the cops has to wrestle my arms into the artificial light.
The doctor’s face turns grim. My stumps are smudged black with fingerprinting ink.
They open up my stumps when I’m sleeping, with small knives and needles, and pack them with bright white cotton until they can steal a patch of skin from my leg. Days later, they cut them again, putting me to sleep with chemicals in suspended plastic bags. It’s a while before I figure out they’re not making me new hands. They can’t do that, the doctor says like I’m slow, and I turn away to glare at the wall, eyes burning.
Growing up, I believed in miracles. I guess I don’t anymore.
? ? ?
In the morning, a woman dressed in a mauve suit drops her briefcase on the linoleum in my hospital room and introduces herself as my public defender. She sits heavily on the side of my bed, glancing down at my stumps wrapped in layers of bandages. Beneath the blankets, I shift my feet over a few inches.
“My name’s Juanita,” she says. “And you must be the famous Minnow Bly, yes?”
I watch her out of the sides of my eyes.
“I’m here to provide you with defense counsel during your trial. I’ll also be making sure you get everything you need until you’re transitioned to the next stage.”
“What’s the next stage?” I ask. “Jail?” I’ve heard of jail. The Prophet told us it’s full of people so bad, even the Gentiles don’t want them. They’re angel murderers and God deniers, and some of them can kill with a single touch.
Juanita smiles in a way that isn’t cheerful. “We don’t need to worry about things like that right now.”
She takes me for a walk around the hospital hallways. I can barely get traction in the lambswool slippers they gave me after they stole my boots, and my chest burns when we go more than ten steps. I wonder what’s in my lungs that’s making this so hard. Blood? Smoke? Or something heavier?
Juanita asks if I want her to hold my elbow, but I shake my head. I slide my shoulder down the wall, holding the balls of bandages gingerly before me.