Reassembling

by Sarah Kaplan-Cunningham

David Underland

My father holds my left breast by the nipple, pinched between thumb and forefinger.

“A little help,” he says to my mother, who is crouched on the floor gathering my fingers and toes, scattered across the wool carpet.

She says nothing, hands him a handful of fingers and beckons to him for my left breast. My father drops it into her open palm then wipes his hand on his T-Shirt.

“Heavy,” she says. Her voice is thin, wind blowing through reeds.

My father shakes his head. “Never trust a kid with half his head shaved,” he says.

“You’re the one who let him in the house,” my mother says. She places my left breast on the comforter. “Hell, you made him an egg salad sandwich.”

“I made Dolly an egg salad sandwich,” he says. “She’s just generous.”

My mother rolls her eyes and gestures around the room, as if to say, Obviously.

Normally, Tag reassembles me after, but he was late for lacrosse practice. He’d promised to be back before my parents got home, but the light outside turned from white to orange to blue. No Tag.

When my mom found me, she’d propped my torso against the headboard so I could see myself in the closet mirror: armless, legless, breastless. Jaw flung across the room.

“You look like a bowling pin!” she’d sobbed into my hair.

She was right. The red ribbon I’d worn around my neck to school hadn’t helped.

Normally, disassembling isn’t so dramatic. Tag comes over. We make out, have sex. And sometimes, we remove each other’s limbs and reattach them. Never the heads, because who knows what could happen, but everything else is fair game. My favorites are my ears. Tag swirls his tongue around the lobes, then plucks them right off my head. They’re usually the first things he reattaches, too, and that feels just as good, better even, like walking through a blizzard and into a warm house with the fire going.

My mom’s reassembling is reckless. My arms are a centimeter below my shoulders. My nose skewed right, too close to my upper lip, my nostrils filling with the smell of Tag’s aftershave and grease from his Chik-Fil-a nuggets.

“It’ll go faster with two,” my mom says grimly. She doesn’t look up as my father approaches, shuffling in from the side like a crab. He won’t look into my face. He begins affixing my toes to my feet.

My jaw is last and, of course, my mother hinges it too low. I can’t close my mouth all the way.

Now, my mother and father loom at the end of my bed, backlit by the overhead light.

“Promise us,” my mother whispers. “Promise you won’t do this again. Ever.”

“Promise,” I say, but with my lopsided jaw, it sounds like “Pause.”

“No iPad for a month,” my father says.

I protest. I need my iPad to do homework. My reassembling took hours and my father has purple smiles under his eyes. We settle on two weeks.

They leave the room and a moment later, the sounds of Saturday Night Live drift upstairs.

I text Tag to climb up the flower trellis tonight. My parents mean well, but I’m all wrong. I try to distract myself with AP Lit homework, but I can’t concentrate. My muscles, my skin, my tendons — everything throbs against its new position. I close my eyes. Imagine the whisper of the window sliding open. Tag’s fingers, frigid from the metal stick and the open field, roaming my blanket-warmed body. Soon, I tell myself. I’ll be clicked back into place.

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Sara Kaplan-Cunningham received her MFA in poetry from the University of Houston. Her work appears in The Cincinnati Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Sundog Lit, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Visit her at sarakaplancunningham.com.