I woke up with only eighteen arms. The creator is kind to some and merciless to others. I guess I was the hair ball that cleverly grows in the corner of a room and blows it’s own cover once it grows too large. The creator’s hair ball, in the creator’s living room. What sensible tasks could I hope to accomplish with eighteen arms? Hold eighteen tools at once or hold one tool with eighteen handles? But never have I seen a wrench designed for less than thirty hands. Copy-editing eighteen consecutive novels is just wasted time, and sculpting would be more like playing with molasses. What tasks exist where less is more in the world of the great long appendage?

Shape Suprise-Me is a game show on national television. Contestants are bombarded with walls that have holes inspired by samples from the geometric universe. I once saw a contestant – one with eight-hundred arms – manage to fold themselves into the cross-section of an adult multon. There was global contention because one arm grazed the underside of the wall. Despite the media hysterics I am boggled by the feat of contortion to this day. Ten of me could fit inside the shadow of an adult multon and not an elbow would bend. Shape Surprise-Me would be an unsurprising feat for an anomaly such as myself and the media response would be a wind tunnel that no one bothered to plug into the power outlet: noiseless. Therefore, game shows are not the calling for one as effector-deprived as myself.

Perhaps a job that is “arms-free”, I hear you say? A manager of those who flip this, or move that, or hammer there? A storyboard officer who delegates what and who turns when and what pages? Or how about a COS, chief of scents, who hones the olfactory senses and rummages through smells both narcotic and nasty so those who wish to sniff for leisure don’t have to go through the trouble themselves? Here, I have been dealt against by the great creator, the creator who deals across from me at a table for Jax ‘Em Nines and hands me twelve cards all bearing snickering upside-down doodled faces. I am being mocked for some prior life incident I have yet to be made aware of. To be the prodigy of a soul as unfortunate as mine, the previous owner must have abused their array of hundred-fold arms in manners both sinful and sickly. You think I could take charge of smelling? My friend, let me hold up to you one of my hands for inspection. See here a mouth mounted on my palm. Look there, two eyes squinting at the sun. Spot now a set of ears mulling over sounds. And cast across a nose, in the center it is found. Eighteen arms sums up to the grand total of eighteen mouths, thirty-six eyes, forty-eight ears, eighteen-hundred freckles, and a paltry eighteen noses. How embarrassing to be only capable of engorging oneself with eighteen different smells at once, to be deprived of the cacophony – the harmony – of a palette of smells in the order of hundreds. There are more degrees of smell in a block of cheese than there are nostrils on my body. To expect my perception to be rich is to expect a strawberry cake to be bitter, it is ambitious and naive.

There’s a tale of a young, bright fellow who went by the name of Shmelon. Shmelon was born with only two arms and the doctors who birthed him had originally considered killing him on the spot out of pity. The image of someone hauling themselves through the mud of a two-armed life was enough to turn a sogropper pale. On the morning of Shmelon’s birth, the creator must have been brewing a practical joke of sorts, for Shmelon was spared and reared for fifteen rough years until he reached adulthood. Shmelon had always dreamed of being a shoe-mender when he was a small boy, it was the trade of his father and his father before him, both whom brandished eighty arms a pop. Some back-of-the-napkin math left Shmelon at a disadvantage that made even a great berlap whale feel small. But something miraculous happened on the day that Shmelon reached maturity, the day that he first stepped foot in his father’s old shoe-mender store. Some say it was a holy place, destined for producing such magical transformations. It’s name is now a phrase of warm greeting between travelers, generally meaning “How do you do?” or “May the wind blow on your back as you walk forward.” Shmelon’s grandfather had called his shop, A Soul for a Sole. Long story short, Shmelon found himself with four-thousand six-hundred and twelve arms on that fateful day. Written out that number looks like this: 4,612. Priests of old and new have dissected digits, discussed decimals, and exchanged exponents, but little other than psychotic correlations have surfaced from this behaviour.

I turned fifteen yesterday. I am now an adult. Today is Schmelon Day, a day celebrating the great four-thousand armed rebirth of Saint Shmelon. All my life I’d been led to believe, and believed, to put my faith before everything else. Give and you shall receive. I hope Schmelon and his merry band of blind believers rot in a thorny grage bush and all that is left is a soupy pile of flesh. Yes, mother, these thoughts are sinful, and I may pay for these words in lives hereafter. But, what purpose do I have left to serve in this world? What is there for this body of mine to do that other bodies with tenfold more appendages cannot execute in the blink of eighteen eyes? It’s Shmelon Day. I woke up with only eighteen arms.