Ananya Kumar-Banerjee
Short American Female
Finalist for the 2023 American Literary Review Fiction Contest, Judged by Mike Robbins
Each morning I woke up and something new was missing. First, it was my pinky toe on my left foot. Oh, I thought, evidence human evolution is moving at a breakneck pace. I took care not to wear any particularly revealing sandals. I didn’t want to draw eyes when I left the house.
*
On the second day, I was missing a few more toes, but my big toes remained intact. Oh, I thought again. I wanted to grieve for my once-feet. But then I remembered, briefly, the sight of my parents, open-faced like sandwich halves in their caskets. I had lived, I had no excuse. I could still balance. I thought nothing of the smooth skin where each additional strange joint had once resided. I had never found toes particularly aesthetically pleasing anyway. I wore socks with a thick seam so that my sneakers would still fit. I wondered if I should avoid wearing open-toed shoes. But then, after work, the air outside was hot, and I attempted to wear flip flops. But of course, there was no ridge to support the shoe. So I walked home, barefoot, having grown accustomed to nubs I had once called human feet.
*
On the third day, my big toes were gone. I look like a cartoon, I thought. I look like a poorly-drawn character in a B-list television show. I look like a Barbie doll; maybe I will wake up and my feet will be twisted into exactly the right shape for pink plastic pin-up heels. But I had thrown out all my toe-centric sandals, so it was fine. My balance, of course, was different. In the evening, I fell in my yoga class, and the woman next to me looked down at my toes. Oh, she said. Yes, I said. She smiled, and I went back into boat pose, waiting for the climatic moment when my heels might touch the back of my head.
*
On the fourth day, I slept through the morning. It was Saturday. I hadn’t had a drop to drink and yet I felt extremely hungover. I called my doctor, who had an open spot in the afternoon. I have a migraine, I told her. She was short and had a poor bedside manner. But she took my insurance and generally honored my strange requests. I don’t know what’s wrong, maybe it’s the grief, she said. Besides your toes, I never noticed them, she said. There’s nothing to notice now, I said. Were you born without toes, she asked. I said no, I hadn’t, wouldn’t it be in my file? Short American female, born in 1992 with two feet and ten toes, and now none. So what happened, she asked. I don’t know, I said. I woke up one morning and they were gone. She requested a scan and reported I was missing a small bone in my ear. That’s why you have a headache, she said. Will it stop, I asked. It’s normal, she said, at your age, to start losing things. Like ear bones, I asked. Yes, she said, exactly like ear bones.
*
On the fifth day, I felt fine. The hangover headache was gone. Then, I realized, I had simply lost the pain. Another inconvenience, like my lost pinky toes.
*
On the sixth day, I was missing my elbows. No sharp ridge at the bend in my arm. In fact, no bend in my arm at all. My arms were soft, liquid flesh. I danced my flesh noodles around like the inflatable dancers outside the car wash. I tried to stand up from bed and used my arms like blunt force weapons. Bang, bang, bang and still I could not get up. I lay down for a while and then went back to sleep.
*
On the seventh day, I could not see. So I could not tell you what went missing that day.
*
On the eighth day, I became aware that each hand of mine had an extra finger. I could use my arm-levers to pull the covers over myself faster. I could carry more lip balms in each hand. I could type more keys on a keyboard. I could type and type and type. I could write a story, I thought. But I had no ideas, so I pulled my laptop closer to me and found my way to porn, using instinct instead of sight. Yes, and now I could masturbate with a newfound fervor. Oh, I thought, human evolution is moving at a breakneck pace.
*
On the ninth day, I did not get my sight back. But I got my smell back. I had not realized I had lost it. I wanted to call my doctor. Dr. Meller, I wanted to say, did you know that when we are born for five minutes we smell as well as cats and then we lose it? And now I have it back. I smelled my way off the bed and into the kitchen. I opened the fridge with my extra fingers and smelled my way to eggs and tomatoes and oil and salt. I ate and fell asleep, my stomach full of food, on an object that smelled, to me, of the couch.
*
On the tenth day, I woke up and felt the world vibrating. Something was calling to me by my window’s ledge. Hello, it said, in its trembling tenor. I’m thirsty, it said, with its vibrations. I smelled my way to water and gave it some, drank some for myself, too. Now, the plant said, I must go. And the plant died. I felt no sadness. I was familiar with the pattern. I had known it would die eventually.
*
On the eleventh day, my sister called me. The cell phone vibrated and vibrated and vibrated. I hated the sound. I wanted to make it stop. But, I thought, how to tell my sister what had happened. Last time we spoke, I was still human. I could still see. She would be so cruel about that.
*
I wanted to tell her how much I had learned: about smell, about the vibrations, about what the many-eyed flying insects in my kitchen knew about our world that people did not. I wanted to share that vulnerable beauty with her, though some part of me knew she would respond with violence. I picked up the phone. Hello, I said, and it was not my sister, but a telecom person speaking in a language I did not know from a place in the Southwest where I had never been. Hello, I said, in a different language, the same one from the buzzing plant. Hello, said the person, in the vibration. How did you find me, I asked the person. How could I not find you, they said, you called for me. So I have answered. And so it happened that on the eleventh day I had a new friend.
*
On the twelfth day, I decided to take a bath. But I could not tell when it would be full, and I did not want to slip in and die, so I sat in the big blue tub with black stains while it filled with what I expected would be brown water. I heard the voices of all the little, desperate creatures that unfurled in the tap. Hello, they said, we are hungry. Eat, I said, and they went to work on the pieces of me that I did not need anyway: my eyelashes and long brown hair. Drink, they said, and so I drank them, and we sat together inside my stomach until the water hit just above my chest. They fell asleep inside me and we woke up the next morning, on the thirteenth day.
*
On the thirteenth day, my limbs had smoothed out entirely. What had happened to my elbows now happened to my ankles and wrists, and now I was a glossy and quick thing. I should go to the ocean, I thought. I should find the creature from the telephone. I should find a new place to live, a place where life could be easy. I asked the tiny beings in my belly: do you know how to get to the ocean? They said: the ocean should be here. Right below you, right here. And I remembered how the land I was on had once been ocean, and I was sad, because human evolution was moving at a breakneck pace, but not fast enough to keep up with the world people had smoothed out entirely. And what do I do then, if I cannot find the ocean? I asked them. They gurgled, they screamed, they sighed. After many hours, I realized they were telling me: wait for the fourteenth day.
*
On the fourteenth day, the person called me once more. I cannot find you here, they said. I cannot get where I need to go, I told them. I was all soft, now melting on my kitchen floor, me and my many inhabitants. The sun was beating outside and I needed to get to it. But there were stairs, and locks, and doors, man-made intrusions into the order of my survival. What should I do, I asked them. We should do what we must to get out of here, they said. How do we get out? I asked. I don’t know, they said, and they moved to say more, but the line cut out, and they did not call back. So I went to my closet and put on a tube dress, which took hours, because I had no joints and no force and no strength. I was going to see my sister, and it was essential that I wear clothes. I didn’t want to draw eyes when I left the house.
*
I needed to see someone who had known me before I had lost and gained and grown. I needed someone who knew I was born human. When I managed, after days, to make it to her door, I did not knock. I couldn’t. I emitted some loud and sinewy sounds. She opened the door. Her skin was blackened with age. The air smelled gangrenous. I can’t believe you, she said. I can’t believe you’ve come to see me, after waiting all this time.
Ananya Kumar-Banerjee is a New Yorker living in London. Their writing has appeared in Bon Appetit, Autostraddle, and Hyphen Mag, among other places.