Joshua Malbin307 12

St. Apt. 8Brooklyn NY 11215

1Six FingersEdwin woke up one morning to discover that the number of fingers he had on each hand had,since the night before, diminished from six to five. His hands were whole and smooth andbalanced as if there had only been five fingers on them since they were made. He couldn't evenfigure out, looking at them, where the sixth had been fit.He had an awful time making breakfast. All his movements felt unnatural, even though hishands moved easily when he asked them grind the coffee, for instance, or pour milk on his cereal,moved as if he'd not spent his entire life learning to perform such actions with six-fingeredhands. He watched them, in part out of simple fascination with their deformity, but in part toobecause they were evidence that he wasn't quite himself any longer, at least not how he'dunderstood himself before. These new hands seemed to do everything one notch less elegantly.He couldn't say how. He just knew he'd been lessened.It was worse at work, when he learned it hadn't happened to him alone. Every one of his co-

Joshua Malbin307 12

St. Apt. 8Brooklyn NY 11215

2workers was down a finger as well, and when he dropped hints about their hands they all gavehim puzzled looks.He kept it to himself. He had no desire to be a Cassandra. Months passed.One night he was talking to a pretty girl at a friend's party. Pretty enough that he was able toovercome his revulsion at her misshapen hands. They were having one of those flirtatiousconversations about the joys of childhood, specifically about climbing trees and how little fearthey'd had, when the woman, whose name was Lily, said something interesting."Well, back in those days, too, with the extra joint," she said, and stopped.At first she insisted it was gibberish, the two martinis talking. Edwin suspected that in factthe drinks had made her let something slip, and he pressed her. And eventually she gave in."It's just a stupid fantasy," she said, "but sometimes I imagine that my legs—that everyone'slegs, actually, until just a few years ago—used to have an extra joint. Two knees between the hipand the ankle."Edwin told her about the extra finger, and for a long moment they stared at one another, stuck in an awful revelation: that the human species was secretly deteriorating. That even while itflattered itself with ideas of progress and evolution it was in fact shedding its gifts.They curled their bodies around each other that night carefully. Each was the first lover the