After losing the lower half of his arm in an accident involving farmyard machinery usually used for murdering animals, Archie made the most of his misfortune.
It started at a children’s party, when a goggly eye from a birthday card became stuck to his stump.
Archie’s young niece pointed out the goggly eye – the first time she had been able to look at his severed appendage without grimacing – so he stuck the other eye on his stump and made up voices for his new character.
Soon, all the children at the birthday party gathered around to watch the show. Their faces, waiting in wonder at what the stump would do next, were a sight for Archie’s eyes. And just like that, with no plan or ambition to, Archie had unwittingly reinvented himself as a children’s entertainer.
It was like the stump had a force of its own, beyond Archie’s grasp. Not only did it have a wonderful singing voice, his stump, but it could perform magic tricks, and it told the best jokes.
That was very well, but Archie was puzzled and perturbed. For Archie was not an entertaining man. He couldn’t sing a single note anywhere close to pitch, and was generally considered by everyone to be about as funny as an industrial accident.
And even more unsettling was the fact that Archie’s lips didn’t once move, not even a quiver.
But here the stump was, using Archie’s voice like it had never been used before, employing his good arm for its tricks, always making Archie the butt of its jokes.
Before an audience, some other power seemed to take control of Archie, enforcing its will upon him while his body rippled with anxiety, fizzing with unbearable streams of adrenaline.
Even as the stump brought Archie fame and fortune, dragging him around the world on tour, performing in the biggest venues, he soon began to resent it.
Entertaining a party of children was all very well, but it had turned Archie into something he never wanted to become.
He couldn’t take it anymore. The time had come to regain control of himself; to put an end to this madness.
Browsing online in his hotel room, following a sold out performance at a concert hall in Kyoto, Archie stumbled on a potential solution. A hook. He was a farmer. With a prosthetic, he could return to the life that he knew. The life he was used to; the one he loved, was born to do . . .
*
Back home a few days later, holding the new hook in his good hand, Archie looked down upon his famous stump.
“You’re not . . . ?” said the stump — spoken in Archie’s voice, using its unknown alchemy — “You’re not seriously thinking about replacing me with that, are you?”
Just like it did on stage, the stump started laughing at him, laughing, such cruel laughter. Without need of further reasoning, Archie plugged the hook onto his stump, muffling the taunting appendage.
Satisfied with the fit, Archie walked out through the farmhouse door, into the fields he knew so well . . .
*
A few days later Archie’s body was found. Everyone assumed that he’d suffered another unfortunate accident, the poor and hapless man. And perhaps it was an accident, to later be discovered with his new hook buried deep into his forehead.
vss #62
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Phillip Drown 