Prayers to the God of Progress
I was busy massaging the kale for my lunch salad so I didn’t have a free hand to jiggle the mouse to make the little yellow dot on my screen go green so my coworkers could see I was being productive. So I attached a third arm to my ribs on my left side. Contrary to what you might think, it didn’t start trying to jerk me off right away; it took a couple hours. I tried brushing it away with my right hand, but after a minute there it went again, stroking my thigh and fingering at my zipper. I’d always had a rule to not jerk off at work even though literally no one would know. Plus anyway my mom was in the other room folding laundry and watching her daytime talk shows—I’m living back at home temporarily—and I worried she might overhear.
So as a workaround I attached a fourth arm and instructed it to stand guard over my crotch. It got bored with its assignment quickly but found it enjoyed playing thumb war with my horny third hand and that was enough to keep them both occupied. By this point Mom had finished The Drew Barrymore Show and was talking to her mom on the phone, repeating every third word louder and with more articulation. Grandma insists on keeping her landline right next to her TV, which she always has on full volume.
My original two hands were now busy exaggerating then de-exaggerating the contrast on photos and occasionally replying with laughy face emojis to memes my coworkers shared. I was getting pretty overextended so I installed a fifth arm to wipe the sweat from my brow and a sixth to order me a venti iced coffee from Postmates. Unfortunately these two arms immediately began slapping and pinching the shit out of each other. It was almost quitting time—and I tell you, I was watching the clock close that day, imagining the smooth Black Label bourbon I was going to pull from Dad’s special store as soon as the hour hand hit five—when the sixth arm suddenly took the third arm hostage and threatened to break its thumb if the fifth arm didn’t detach itself and run along. I sighed and gave my fifth arm a little nod and it did as it was told. I followed as he scrabbled pathetically down the carpeted hallway and out the front door, which Mom had left open when she went to go water her flowers.
I never saw that fifth arm again, though every time I hear a news report about a severed arm being found in the woods, or near the wreckage of a multi-car pile-up, I wonder if it was him, that arm I never really got to know, distracted as I was when he was a part of me.
For now I was left standing on the front porch, watching Mom struggle to wrestle the kinked garden hose toward her hydrangeas with one hand while trying to keep the wind from ripping away her canary yellow sun hat with the other. Her pink Skechers kept slipping in the wet grass, mud freckling the knees of her pale capri jeans.
None of this was necessary. Didn’t she know they sold arms custom-built for gardening? Better yet, Dad could pay to have one of those automated sprinkler systems installed, the ones controllable via an app on your phone. Then Mom wouldn’t even have to set down her sangria glass.
The flick of a finger would be enough to open the heavens.
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