Break them in. [Zoe & Vesper]

She wished she could outsmart time. She wished she could bend it around her little finger, manipulate it, and mould it like a lump of dough. She wished that she could even split the ends of seconds; because she knew better than what she perceived as anyone that seconds could change everything.

The weather had turned suddenly. A cool ocean breeze salted the city. The journey she was making- from the families’ apartment to her father’s boat which was docked just across the street- was not long, but she had pulled a cardigan over her shoulders anyhow, to keep out a sliver of the cold. The sleeve hung loosely on her stump, and produced no hand where a hand should be. Iosanna had recently learned that the hospital incinerated limbs that it no longer needed. She liked the idea of that. Her missing arm may no longer be attached at her elbow, where it should be, but at least particles of it where around her, inside her, everywhere, all the time. It comforted her to know that it wasn’t frozen in a laboratory somewhere, or that some rich freak hadn’t purchased it to use as a back scratcher. Just that morning ‘Sanna had watched a tribute feed someone’s amputated arm to a snake. She was glad that her arm wasn’t snake food.

The reaping had unnerved her. It was the first time that she had seen many of her training partners since she had had the accident. They hadn’t changed. She could still see the excitement in their faces, the hope that maybe it would be their chance to escape the mundane, to have their shot at the glory that being victor brought. It was stupid. Stupid, stupid, because these kids had spent their whole childhood training for something that, chances were, was not going to happen. And, in a skip of a heartbeat, or an unattended second, that dream could be squashed and amputated right before their eyes. She knew that now. The removal of her arm had made her grow up, made her stop living in a stupid fairytale.

The pavement morphed into dock under her feet. This was where it had happened. She swore that, if you looked carefully, you could still see the blood stains, but it was more likely that some poor fish had been slaughtered in the same place as Iosanna’s arm. She didn’t like being here, but there was nothing she could do. She had been instructed to tell her father that dinner was ready, and she didn’t like to disappoint her mother nowadays. If there was anything that came close to loosing a limb, it was having your kid lose a limb. And so she watched the ocean beneath through the cracking in the planks. It swirled and growled and glimmered like wet black skin. Black skin that looked awfully like dolphins.

In the district, dolphins in the bay meant something special. The only reason they would navigate through the plethora of set nets that zigzagged for kilometres out to sea was to chase fish. And fish only came into the harbour in plentiful reasons. Dolphins- especially now, in the murky floor of winter, were a sign of a plentiful season to come.

She sat down on the dock, folding her legs under her like a wetsuit going into the cupboard for the summer, when the water was warm enough that it wasn’t needed for deep-water diving. She liked the way the mammals belonged in the water, owned the water. She was like that once. Before everything was taken away from her, before she lost her arm. Once upon a time she would dive in with them- indeed, as she glanced to the shore she saw some of the braver boys stripping off their shirts and wading in to join them. Now, she could only admire them from a distance, the three quarters of her body that still belonged to her safely on land.

But she watched them whistle and fly and eat the water, and imagined that still, she was like that. She lost herself watching them glide; she lost herself in her imagination. She liked to get lost nowadays.