The Mermaid Girl Read Online Free PDF

could pull it straight up, straight through. The pain of removal was worse than the punch. He remembered his hand being lifted, his arm held above his head.
    Someone—Curtis?—shouted, “Watch it, he’s gonna drop!”
    Rocco caught him. There was so much water in his ears, thick water, he couldn’t hear right and everything stung and throbbed.
    â€œHey, you okay, buddy?”
    â€œYes. No. I think my wife’s sick,” he said. He didn’t sound like himself.
    â€œOkay, Dan. We’ll call her,” Rocco said. “Tim, keep his arm up. Don’t let him look.”
    She was in the emergency room. He was in the emergency room. She squeezed his good hand. He had a good hand, now. That much he knew.
    â€œHey, sleepy.”
    The overhead lights trailed. She looked like water again. “I fucked up, didn’t I?”
    â€œNo,” she said.
    â€œWhere are the kids?”
    â€œWith Frank and Leah.”
    â€œThe guys told me not to look.”
    â€œYou should look,” she said. “You’ll feel better if you can get your eyes around it. I’m here.”
    He took it in small glances, down the arm, to the wrist, to the giant clubbed white bandage. His sleeve had been cut away and he couldn’t feel his arm below the elbow. He pressed the forearm with his right hand. The skin was warm, but also distant, like it wasn’t his. It felt like wood putty somehow, or Play-Doh, something to be shaped. “I can’t feel it?”
    â€œThat’s the nerve block,” she said. Then she told him he would lose his finger. “Not even a whole one, just most of a finger. What happened?”
    He tried to find words. Something about the time he’d have to take off work, what he’d do. “My ring,” he said. It was probably stuck in the metal, with the punch, his glove, his flesh and bone. His sweat felt strange too, cold and slick on his right side, just a tickling on the left. When they started using the press again, there’d be little bits of him and his ring scraping into the metal, fusing together. Parts of him would be everywhere.
    â€œThey cut it off when you got here,” she said. “I’ve got it in a baggie. We’ll get it fixed.”
    Paulina pulled her chair as close as the bed would allow. She leaned in. She tapped his nose with her fingertip. Her left hand. She tapped his forehead, his lips, then trailed her finger down his arm until she reached where he seemed to disappear. “Hey, it’s just a finger. I can’t even feel with the tip of this one at all,” she said.
    He’d never known that.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œFrom sewing that fucking fish tail,” she said.
    â€œHow much sewing did you do?”
    â€œMore hours than I can count. The stuff we used to clean the tank made it so the water would eat through the threads.” She leaned over the bed rail. “Can I climb in with you?”
    He nodded. She fit against his side. If he could see them from above, he knew what they’d look like, love and worry, the sweet foolishness people tended to envy. Inside felt cottony, like morphine, like being thirsty, like hurt. “What about your skin? How’d the water not hurt your skin?”
    â€œVaseline,” she said.
    He’d fallen in love because she’d shone, because she tried to keep the water from eating her, because she’d sewn so many sequins she’d lost herself. “Did your fingers get any feeling back?”
    â€œYes,” she said. “It hurts at first.”
    *   *   *
    He knew that Simon was afraid of the stump. Was it a stump if it was just a finger? It was more a not, a sudden absence, as though someone had stopped just shy of completing a hand.
    Simon watched it at dinner. “What’s it feel like?”
    â€œIt doesn’t feel like anything,” Daniel said, which wasn’t true. He didn’t not feel