commendation award 3

Author Kim Soom

• Published Nov 1, 2015 5:56 PM KST
• Updated Nov 1, 2015 5:56 PM KST

Kim Soom’s “Left-handed Woman” translated by Christine Kwon and Park Chul-hwan

Left-handed Woman

When my wife first began insisting her left hand had disappeared, I didn’t think much of it. It was an uneventful Sunday night, and a dull lethargy had settled over me. And far from being gone, her left hand, like its twin, was very much attached to her body.

“Where is it…?”

I heard her murmuring from the kitchen where she was preparing dinner. I assumed she was looking for her phone. She looked in the refrigerator and around the dining table before busily scouring the rest of the apartment―bathroom, bedroom, balcony, and back again. Oblivious all the while to the croaker stew boiling over on the stove.

“What is it?” I snapped, hurrying to turn off the heat. “What are you looking for?”

“It’s…gone.”

“What is?”

“My hand…”

“Your hand?” Even as I said the words, I wondered if I’d misheard her.

“My left hand…just like that…”

She looked at me, her face contorting, like brittle rice paper buckling in water. This was a joke, I was sure. There was her left hand, dangling just so from her left wrist, wearing conspicuous smudges of fish scales no less. And it reeked―unmistakably―of croaker; she’d apparently cleaned it gloveless. I forced out a laugh. Not that any of this was funny, but she’d made an impressive effort. She was rather bland, my wife, indisposed by nature to humor and playfulness, and it’d always frustrated me somewhat. She knew it, too.

“Are you sure you didn’t put it in the stew?” I quipped.

I thought she would laugh at that, but her expression hardened. In a few quick strides she was at the stove, uncovering the pot, stirring up the contents with a ladle.

“It’s not here!”

Her murmur sounded close to a moan. I shrugged, not really in the mood for her sorry joke, and headed out for some cigarettes and fresh air.

When I returned, I found the dinner table roughly set. My wife’s hasty stirring in search of her left hand had broken up the fish, but the stew was savory and tasty enough.

“You’re not going to eat?” I asked, my rice bowl nearly empty. My wife hadn’t even touched her utensils.

“Because it’s gone. My left hand…”

“Then use your right one.” In a sudden surge of irritation, I forgot for a second that my wife was left-handed. I glared scornfully at where her left hand lay mute next to her rice bowl. Still looking bewildered, my wife slowly unclenched her right hand, and hesitantly, nervously, closed it around her spoon. At this point, things were more or less still tolerable.

My wife lay the entire night shivering with fever, sweat soaking the pillow and bed sheets, her whole body on fire. When I asked her where she hurt, she only murmured groggily that her wrist felt like it was being cut off. Phantom pain, I believe it’s called. The sensation of pain felt in places where some extremity or another has been cut off, a result of the mistaken perception that the removed limb is still there. I’d known someone who had suffered from persistent phantom pains, after losing his leg in a sudden accident; he’d felt them in a leg that was no longer there, a leg he no longer had. But my wife was the first person I knew suffering from a pain inflicted by her own delusions, by the imagined loss of a perfectly good left hand.

--

It was after that night’s bout. My wife stopped using her left hand entirely. Whether she was refusing to use it or really believed it gone I couldn’t tell, but she didn’t use it anymore. It was as if she needed to substantiate the fact of its absence to herself and everyone else. So she used her right hand instead―to hold her spoon and chopsticks, to wipe the floors, to comb her hair, to do the dishes. She buttoned her clothes with her right hand, did her writing and makeup with her right hand, and ate grapes, one at a time, with her right hand. She even peeled apples with the fruit knife in her right hand.

Through complete disuse, she rendered her left hand worthless, good for nothing. It was an unlabored, unrelenting, self-administered castration. Carried out on a hand still wholly attached to her arm, still coursing with blood, through to every finger.

A hand is no genital, but no other descriptor seemed as fitting. If not castration, then what? Denial? Or neglect. Negation. Apathy. Avoidance. All came to mind, but I found castration most apt.

I don’t think I’d ever thought consciously of castration before this, save for during winter vacation my first year of middle school, when I’d lay on the urologist’s operating table waiting to undergo a circumcision. Was it because I’d only recently had my first wet dream? Or because my mom had caught me in my older sister’s room the day before, fondling a lacy pink brassiere? All I know is that when the scalpel made its incision into my anesthetized penis, my ears registering the peculiar sound of a blade cutting into skin, I’d trembled with horror; my manhood, only just awakened to sexual desire, was being sliced away.

I wondered if my wife wasn’t simply hallucinating her left hand’s disappearance. Performing a castration in her own mind, a castration dispensed by the imagination. To be honest, the thought brought me some relief; her preferred method had not been so extreme. Though it was sickening even to imagine, at least she hadn’t lopped it off with a knife. If she had, I would have put her in a mental hospital, by force if necessary. The fervent assertion of a missing left hand would have been conclusive enough evidence of some kind of mental imbalance.

This persisted. My wife would not use her left hand, not even reflexively. And though this went on for two weeks, I still couldn’t take her seriously; as I said, her hand hadn’t actually disappeared. All I wanted, as soon as possible, was for her to see this, to see her hand extending unaltered from her wrist, as it had for 32 years.

Yet my wife was left-handed, of all things, in a way I’d only come to appreciate fully after she’d begun using her right hand. And not just left-handed―utterly and perfectly left-handed. Since she had only ever used her left hand, and deftly, using her right hand naturally posed certain problems. Wasn’t that why she was left-handed in the first place? Because her left hand had been more comfortable to use than her right. Still, it all seemed a bit extreme. She wrestled so clumsily and strenuously with her right hand you’d have thought she’d never used it once. Fumbling with her chopsticks and spilling banchan on the table, I could accept. But it made me uneasy when she handled other things, like knives―what if she cut herself? Once, watching anxiously as she peeled an apple, I’d finally had to take the knife away.

In all the time we’d lived together, I don’t think I’d thought much of my wife’s being left-handed. Or found it annoying, or discomfiting. I tried, strained, to recall any memory associated with the fact, but nothing came to mind. I mean, I knew plenty of left-handed people. It wasn’t an impairment. No one subscribed anymore to the bias favoring right-handedness as more polite or proper. Also, most of the left-handed people I knew were ambidextrous, which I sometimes envied. There was something cool, sophisticated almost, about being able to write with your left hand. I had only ever used my right one, just like my wife had only ever used her left. I’d even heard that using the left hand promoted right-brain function, enhancing emotional receptivity, imagination, and spatial perception. Left-handed people had seemed somehow superior to all the rest of us after that.

Sometime after she started using only her right hand―neglecting her perfectly good left one in the process―my wife developed a strange habit. In the middle of eating, or watching TV, or putting on makeup, she would suddenly let her neck droop forward, like an unfastened belt, and stare blankly around her. While walking to the bathroom or the kitchen, she would stop, as if startled, and peer cautiously at her own feet. In the middle of the night, she would wake up and stare into the darkness with an odd look in her eyes, then proceed to frantically search the wardrobe, the dresser drawers, and even the bathroom sink.

She did the same thing that day. She suddenly stopped in the middle of crossing the street. Only when car horns started blaring did I realize she was standing in the middle of six-lane traffic. Even when the light changed and cars began barreling down on her, ready to crash into her, she just stared down at her feet. After the crosswalk light turned on again, I accosted her and dragged her off the street.

“Are you out of your mind?!”

“I thought maybe I’d dropped it…”

I was dumbstruck at her mumbled excuse.

Did she really, truly believe her left hand was gone? An ominous sense of foreboding flared up in me like dry firewood set ablaze, but I did my best to put it out. As perfectly as she had wielded her left hand, and as inconvenient as her life had become since she’d switched to her right one, I expected it wouldn’t be long before she discreetly abandoned her fantastic claim. Not for a moment did I suspect it would drive her to quit a perfectly good job.

2

My wife was a dental technician with over seven years’ experience to her name. Though she’d deliberated from time to time about changing jobs, we’d never worried about her being out of work. Her specialty was fabricating laminate veneers for cosmetic dental procedures, a craft she considered herself well suited to and also enjoyed. (I’ll admit that her substantial if not terribly lucrative skill set had weighed a good deal into my decision to marry her; the lives of my already-wed friends had been enough evidence of the folly of building a family on a husband’s income alone.) With a bitterness that resisted all assuaging, I demanded to know how she could quit her job without even a word of discussion with me. Half of the loan we’d taken out for our apartment still needed paying off, not to mention monthly repayments on our bank loan, plus interest, and our living expenses. My salary would only go so far.

“Because, my left hand…”

This again? My eyes flicked to her left hand. Fingers curled, it hung inert, ponderous, like the pendulum of a broken grandfather clock. “I can’t very well work without a left hand…”

Hands were critical in my wife’s line of work. Building up a veneer, applying extremely thin ceramic in layers like strata, making sure to match the color to the original teeth―it was a meticulous process necessitating the keenest dexterity. She could find a way to apply her right hand for everyday tasks, but her job, the work she’d performed effortlessly all this time, would be a different story. If she fumbled with her chopsticks, it wasn’t hard to imagine the obstacles a pair of pliers and layers of ceramic might present. I guess I hadn’t thought about it very much. Because her left hand wasn’t really gone. And because for over a month after telling me of its disappearance, she had gone to work every day as usual. I had assumed she wouldn’t go around disowning her perfectly good left hand, not at work. I guess I had been wrong.

“Without a left hand? Your left hand is right there. Why do you keep saying it isn’t?”

“Where?” She looked at me suspiciously, eyes accusing. “Where is it?”

“Right there. On your left arm.”

“My left arm?”

Her face crumpled in disbelief. Slowly, with uncertainty, she looked down at her left arm. It took less than a second for the cautiously expectant, even hopeful, look on her face to drain with dismay.

“Where on my left arm?”

Could she really not see the hand I saw so clearly? But how was it possible? Since getting LASEK three years ago, she’d had better eyesight than me. She could see spots and read letters that looked blurry to my eyes. Hadn’t she bragged about getting a 1.3 for both eyes during her health checkup last spring? It wasn’t possible that her vision had deteriorated so rapidly in less than three months.

“Here, attached to your wrist.”

Reaching out my right hand, I grabbed her left hand, snatching it up. It was limp in my hand. I lifted it closer to her face, so her thumb, bent at the knuckle, pointed directly at her eyes.

“Where? Where is it?”

She was serious, more serious than I was. And she wasn’t someone sly enough to feign sincerity. Did that mean her hand, so plainly there, was somehow invisible to her? Speechless, I flung her hand away. It was too much. I needed to get out of the house. After a can of beer at a nearby convenience store, I came back to find my wife in the kitchen. Her right hand was outstretched, right arm raised high above her shoulder, and it held a cleaver. With a force that made the countertop rattle, she slammed it down. I heard the clear crunch of breaking bones.

“What are you… what are you doing?” My voice came out a quiver.

“I saw they were selling samgyetang chicken for cheap at the store, so I bought one. I think I’ll just make the spicy braised kind though. You said you wanted something spicy, right?”

Once more, the cleaver was thrust high in the air, above her shoulder. But to my eyes, it was not chicken my wife was chopping up. It was her left hand. She was trying to erase all doubt in my mind that it was gone. That’s why she was putting it on the cutting board, and with a force that shook the entire kitchen, ramming down the knife. I stopped, horrified, appalled, unable to imagine any further.

There are people who will believe only what they see with their own eyes, or what can be perceived in the physical, concrete world. I was one of those people, and my wife knew it well. Anything I couldn’t see or the existence of which I couldn’t confirm physically, I didn’t believe in. I didn’t trust those people who claimed to have seen ghosts or UFOs. They had seen strange things because their minds had been momentarily clouded, not because those things really existed. Therefore I could not accept the claim that her left hand had disappeared. I would never accept it, never believe it, unless the damn thing evaporated before my very eyes.

She wasn’t moving, but from her even breathing I could tell she wasn’t asleep. I quietly reached for her left hand with my right, to make sure again before I slept that nothing had happened to it. I wouldn’t be able to relax otherwise, let alone sleep. It was still there, intact. But something was off. This hand wasn’t the hand I knew so well―the hand I’d held so routinely while we were dating that I’d become all but insensible to its power, the feeling of it so familiar that it had felt more like my hand than even my own. This hand wasn’t that hand. This hand was cold, as if any heat had been leached away. It was scabrous, and bloated.

The hand I knew was warm―all softness, yet somehow nimble. Not that I was particularly observant; I was too obtuse to notice when she changed her hair. So if I could sense it, something was really off. Her hand felt utterly unfamiliar, as if I was secretly holding the hand of a woman I didn’t know. It was an indecent, even repulsive feeling.

If this wasn’t my wife’s hand I was holding, then whose was it?

I was just about to let it go, hand of a stranger, but I instead grasped it tighter, entwining my fingers with hers, seized by the sudden dread that if I let go, it might really disappear.

I clutched the hand to my chest; still my wife didn’t budge. I held it right above my heart, where it would feel the full force of the thudding that wracked my chest as if I’d sprinted a 100-meter race. But, my desperation was spurned; her hand felt nothing. Over my savagely pounding heart, it lay motionless, like a dead bird.

On a vague impulse, I drew it down below my waist. At once, underneath the limp hand―the sad, still lifeless bird―my penis grew engorged. Stretching tighter, stiffening, all where her hand would feel it. But her hand didn’t stir, not even the smallest finger, not even faintly.

Was it possible that at the very moment she’d become deluded, believing her left hand missing, her actual left hand had lost all physical sensation?

I reminded myself hastily that there was no way. All I wanted right then was to make her understand in some way, any way, that her hand hadn’t disappeared. Even if I had to prick her with a needle, or send a crackling electric current through her body, or whack her with a hammer. With a physical stimulus, I reasoned, administered like torture, she might realize that her hand hadn’t disappeared, that it was as much a part of her body now as it had always been, just like her right hand.

The castration had been staged in her mind, nothing more. And yet my wife’s left hand began to shrivel, like a plant torn by the roots from a garden plot and tossed aside. I had thought it would plump up nicely, so faithfully did my wife commit it to repose. On the contrary, it wasted away. The skin became so coarse that crusty patches began to form. The veins protruded like vines creeping over dry, cracked ground. Only the nails, which grew slowly but steadily, attested to the uninterrupted delivery of blood and nutrients. In their state of neglect, they had grown to a considerable length. I guess it didn’t bother my wife, because she made no move to trim them. My wife, the dental technician, who had never let her nails grow beyond the tips of her fingers.

3

I began to suspect that my wife hadn’t been born left-handed, that it wasn’t innate. I was possessed by a strong hunch that she had become that way on her own determination and effort. It was at a party to celebrate the first birthday of my wife’s nephew. All of my in-laws gathered there were right-handed.

I had been wondering if my father-in-law, whom I’d only seen in pictures, who had died, not yet fifty, of liver cancer, had maybe been left-handed. But when I asked my wife’s younger sister, as well as my mother-in law, I learned that hadn’t been the case. I tried to convince myself that it was just a genetic mutation then. Yet somehow that didn’t seem to fit my wife.

To be born left-handed and to become left-handed are two different things. You’re left-handed either way, but they’re not the same.

If my wife had become left-handed by her own will, I feared her belief that she’d lost her left hand might become extremely dangerous. Might she not one day make the disastrous decision to carry out whatever physical measures necessary to fully castrate it? For the sole purpose of making undeniably sure that it was really gone. Suddenly, I was reminded of a French film―what was the name―that we had seen at the theater the year before last. There had been scenes in which the sinister-looking female lead had sex in a forest, called Eden, and at the moment of climax, cut out her own clitoris. Almost the entire movie had been sickening and vile. My wife had persuaded me to watch it with her, and I’d followed her into the dark theater not even knowing the name of the movie. Had the two scenes―the severing of the woman’s clitoris, the severing of her own left hand―overlapped in her mind?

“I was wondering. When did you start using only your left hand?”

“….?”

“Your sisters are all right-handed, and you’re the only one who’s not. I always thought that was kind of strange. I hear your father was also right-handed. So when did you become left-handed?”

Her eyes clouded over in a haze, as if she couldn’t remember when it had been precisely. Or maybe it was that she didn’t want to remember. Maybe that was how much she had wanted to master the use of her left hand, so much that wanted to forget when she’d started, wanted to believe she had just been born that way.

“Starting my first year of high school…” Her voice was surprisingly composed.

“So that means you used your right hand before that?”

She nodded slowly.

“So you’re not naturally left-handed?”

Eyes that had been focused elsewhere were suddenly staring straight at me. Her lips were set in a hard, stubborn line, like a suture mark. In her gaze, which had recovered a sharp clarity, I could read anger, betrayal, and something forlorn, all at once. I was overtaken by an indefinable guilt, as if I’d asked something that no one should ever ask, or divulged something that should have been left a secret; flashed headlights on something that should have remained hidden. I asked no more questions.

A few days after this admission, I discovered a half page of paper on the dining table. It was covered with hastily scrawled writing that all but leapt off the page. She had obviously written it with her right hand; she wouldn’t have been able to write any neater, not with a hand that couldn’t even hold chopsticks properly. I was about to throw it away when I started reading the words on the page.

But today in my open house:

The telephone receiver is facing the wrong way

The pencil lies to the left of the writing pad

The teacup next to it has its handle on the left

The apple beside it has been peeled the wrong way (but not completely)

The curtains have been thrown open from the left

And the key to the street door is in the left coat pocket

Left-handed woman, you’ve given yourself away!

Or did you mean to give me a sign?

I couldn’t tell if it was a poem or a song, but here was yet more confirmation that my wife had acquired, not been born with, the use of her left hand. “Left-handed woman!” The phrase left with me a vivid impression of how ardently my wife had yearned to become left-handed, to become the left-handed woman. It had been traced and retraced numerous times so it stood out from the page, like a 3D image. So it was. Since her first year of high school, she had strived ceaselessly to become the left-handed woman, and she’d succeeded.

I felt a rush of pity, and sympathy, for her right hand. With her so fixated on her left hand, her right hand would have naturally been ignored, degraded. Like tools left to rust in a closet.

Whether born left-handed or right-handed, do we not all find ourselves in countless situations requiring the use of both hands? Washing our faces, washing our hair, lifting heavy boxes, tying our shoelaces. Can any human limb be deemed unnecessary and therefore superfluous? If it’s a part of the body, then surely it has some use, some unique role and function for which it remains securely attached, rather than atrophying away. I had never been much interested in the theory of evolution, but I did believe that it was the interminable process of evolution that had brought humans to their present physical and anatomical form, with needless parts like tails wasting away, and only the absolutely necessary ones remaining.

“Brutal woman.” The words came unprompted. Only a tremendous, brutal self-will could have driven someone to so thoroughly master the use of her left hand, enough to become a licensed dental technician. With some training, certainly, a left hand might be made to write legibly, or work a pair of chopsticks; but to perform the precise, minutely detailed work of a dental technician? Meanwhile I, long wearied of my hard-bitten mother, herself inured to the hard life of a marketplace haejangguk vendor, had been a man curiously drawn to every gentle, sweet-tempered woman that came my way. Hadn’t that been why I loved my wife as much as I had? She had been as gentle as a rabbit.

As I saw it, there were things that merited striving for, and things that didn’t. My wife’s labors to become a left-handed woman counted as the latter. As my mother had never tired of saying, the most painless way to live was to accept your lot, to make do with what you’d been given.

I pitied her right hand, felt sorry for it, but my eyes sought only the left one. At dinner tonight, I was too occupied trying to catch furtive glances of it to realize my ramyeon noodles had congealed. While my wife’s right hand, chopsticks in its grip, struggled to catch hold of a single noodle, her opposite hand had wrenched my gaze away. Then again, could my wife’s effort at dinnertime really be called a struggle? She sure hadn’t looked excited about it. I wondered if she shouldn’t have gotten used to using her right hand a lot sooner, even if a lot of time had passed since she’d stopped. It was her birthright, after all. Over two months had passed since she’d started using it, after announcing the left one missing. Still she was just as clumsy with it, and just as unenthused.

When I thought about my wife’s consuming obsession with her left hand, I wondered if it should have been her right hand, and not her left, that had disappeared. How was it the other way around? Since my discovery of the scrap of paper on the table, I had been plagued by a troubling question. Had her excessive, even pathological obsession with her left hand, not to mention her inordinate ambition to live as a left-handed woman, pushed her to the act of castration?

I suddenly remembered what my wife had said while eating a sirloin steak, after the movie with the woman who’d cut out her clitoris; in retrospect, her words seemed telling. Digging her knife into the rare, still bloody slab of meat, she’d murmured quietly, “Her eyes were open. During the castration. The woman’s eyes were open.”

Two years ago, then, she’d already said the word aloud―castration. She’d also mumbled other bizarre things. “Only in nonexistence is true existence attained.” As averse as I am to paradoxes, and ignorant to their charm, her words had meant nothing to me. As for whether that woman’s eyes had been open or closed, I had no memory of it at all.

4

I got the call to go down to the police station while on the train coming back from my business trip to Busan. It was late, past 11 o’clock. I had been deliberating whether to take the subway or a taxi home when my phone rang, like a warning signal. It was a number I didn’t know. I thought about ignoring it, but just answered anyways. An Officer Park from the local station spoke simply and to the point. After confirming who I was, he requested I come to the station as the guardian of one Kim Minjeong, presently being detained on charges of property damage and attempted theft.

Kim Minjeong. That was my wife’s name. I wondered to myself if this was one of those scam phone calls going around lately. I waited for the man to instruct me next to immediately wire a certain sum of money; I implored him in my mind. There was no way my supremely cautious and rule-abiding wife, who would walk away from money she found on the ground, would destroy property, or try to steal from someone. And Kim Minjeong was a common enough name. I knew two women besides my wife with the same name. A woman in Accounting. Also, the wife of one of my clients. As my train hurtled through the dark at 300 kilometers an hour, there was nothing I could do but hope it was a mistake. As soon as I got off the train, I flagged down a first-class taxi and sped to the police station. All of my hoping that it was the wrong woman for naught, she was there. Sitting alone on a bench in the corner, like an abandoned child. My wife.

It was Officer Park, whom I’d talked to earlier, who filled me in on what had happened. My wife had broken into a prosthetic limb shop and stolen a hand from the display. She’d been caught while trying to leave the store, shattering the glass display case in the process. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. In response, the officers showed me the evidence: the prosthetic hand she’d tried to steal. It was exactly like a human hand, but not. Even so, it did nothing to diminish my disbelief.

“Are you really telling me that that woman stole this and tried to run away?”

It had slipped out unconsciously. “That woman.” That woman, an inanimate object at rest―it was hard for me to believe even that she was my wife. When I’d arrived out of breath into the station, she’d simply looked at me, making no acknowledgment of my presence. But now, in one fluid motion, she stood up, her expression nervous, her stare directed not at me but at the prosthetic hand.

Though it took no small measure of entreating, the owner of the prosthetic hand shop agreed to drop any charges. Of course, we now owed him a hefty sum to cover the damage to his shop and the cost of the prosthetic hand, with compensation for his emotional distress thrown in. In his eighties, the shop owner was one of those adults who believed that all wrongdoings warranted an appropriate punishment, who would just as soon drop dead as give an inch when it came to his principles―in a word, stubborn as hell. While I knocked about in a frenzy trying to fix the situation she’d caused, my wife could only pine for her unharmed, unmisplaced, untouched left hand. The old man puzzled at how such an ordinary, innocent-looking woman could have attempted something so reckless. Over forty years running his shop, he said, it was the first time someone had tried to rob him in broad daylight, and in plain view.

“To tell you the truth, my wife lost her left hand not too long ago.” The lie, wherever it had sprung from, came out smoothly. Perhaps it was my way of getting some recompense for the months of misery and distress I’d suffered on account of her damn hand.

“Ah, so it was a prosthetic. I thought it’d looked funny.” The shop owner puckered his blotched face, clucking loudly.

“Funny how?”

“You can always tell a fake, no matter how real it looks!”

He shot a penetrating glance at me out of his left eye.

“A fa…so what you’re saying is that her left hand is…a fake hand?”

A current of rage thrilled through me, provoking a sudden urge to find a hammer and smash every hand and leg in the shop’s display case into pieces. I’d just said myself that my wife had lost her hand not too long ago, yes, but it had been a complete and total lie. Fake? Her ever-withering hand now looked more gaunt than thin, but it was no fake.

“Can’t fool me,” replied the old man.

His left pupil remained so perfectly frozen I wondered if it wasn’t prosthetic also. Black, its outline sharp, his pupil emanated a grotesque aura that seemed to shroud his face in a creeping shadow. I quickly turned around, a chill prickling my skin. The old man called after me to come back when we needed a new hand. Muttering to myself that I’d have no reason to ever come back to a prosthetic limb shop, I glanced up at the sign over the door. The shape of the dark green signboard and the name printed on it―Pyeonghwa Limbs―stuck in my mind like a photograph.

The hand my wife had stolen from Pyeonghwa Limbs lay, as if on display, on the dinner table. My wife sat by, her eyes fixed on the hand as if it was the last meal she’d have in this life. Though she didn’t say, it seemed she suspected this might be her missing left hand. Wasn’t that why she’d stolen it? As it happened, the prosthetic hand looked nearly identical to her own.

A sudden suspicion flashed in my mind. Was my wife acting this way on purpose, because I hadn’t believed her? But for all of this to be an act? Her behavior had become seriously worrisome, to a degree that made me wonder if they weren’t in fact symptoms of some condition necessitating psychological attention. And yet, it was something she was more than capable of, brutal woman, veteran dental technician, left-handed since her first year of high school.

“Alright, I’ll believe you. I’ll believe that your left hand has disappeared.” I was as serious as I’d ever been, but my wife didn’t even pretend like she’d heard me. She stretched out her right hand and, grabbing the prosthetic hand, clutched it to her tightly.

“I said I’ll believe you. Let’s just call this whole thing off.”

She stood up, still cradling the prosthetic hand to her chest, her movement dragging the chair backwards. Leaving me standing by the table, she padded lightly toward the balcony. There, she threw open the window, and leaning forward, let the prosthetic hand fall through the air, from fifteen stories above the ground. It happened so instantly I had no time to stop her, or do much at all. I’d mistook the falling prosthetic hand for her left hand and frozen, transfixed, unable to move. At once, a horrible scene unfolded in my mind: her left hand, tearing through the air as if through vinyl, down fifteen floors; splayed on the concrete, its flesh ripped, bones broken, splattering blood in all directions. One day last winter, a resident on the 13th floor who had been suffering from depression had fallen from the balcony; my wife and I, luck would have it, had witnessed the accident on our way to work.

As had been true these last months, I was just barely able to pull myself together after finding my wife’s left hand intact, and I strode to the balcony. Sticking my head out, I looked down at the ground, but I saw no hand, only children on the playground.

“Why did you drop it?” I asked, in a reeling grip of dizziness; I had a fear of heights. I felt like my body was falling, like the prosthetic hand my wife had just dropped, fifteen floors to the ground. I grabbed onto the railing, clung to it. The shouts of children on the playground drifted in like a hallucination.

“I thought it might be mine. But no.” She shook her head.

“…?”

“I forgot that my left hand had a scar.”

“A scar?”

Had there been a scar? I looked at her left hand. As far as I knew, though, there wasn’t any such thing.

“What kind of scar?”

“When I was seven, I cut myself on a nail that had been sticking out of a piece of wood, a really big nail. It was rusty, and it pierced clean through the center of my hand. I couldn’t move my fingers after that, and the inflammation was so bad the back of my hand swelled up like a blowfish. At night, in bed, I heard my father whispering something to my mother, very cautiously. I remember my mother sobbing.”

“Your father? Why, what did he say?”

“That my left hand might need to be cut off.”

This was news to me.

“My mother was sobbing so uncontrollably it woke up my younger sisters. Of course, they didn’t know what was going on, but they started crying too. I had to pretend I was asleep. Because if my father knew I was awake, he would have taken my left hand and―”

This was news to me. Her voice and her countenance were remarkably calm. If she had been seven, it must have been when her father had run the butcher shop. My mother-in-law had once told me, one anniversary of his death, that my late father-in-law had set up the butcher shop to support his family. “A man too gentle to harm an ant,” she’d said, to all of us, daughters and sons-in-law, tears welling in her eyes, “having to become a butcher!” Their entire family had lived in a tiny room attached to the butcher shop, so my wife would have seen her fill of pig flesh, and cow flesh, being hacked off and chopped up by her father with his cleaver. I could partly relate to this fear, the fear of castration that a girl only seven years old might feel. But at the same time, I wondered whether anyone could claim a childhood devoid of such fear. My older brothers and I had been bombarded by our share of threats, hadn’t we? My mother’s swearing she’d cut off our wrists and break our ankles, if she ever got the chance.

That night, I waited only for my wife to fall asleep, and then examined her left hand carefully under the orange glow of the reading lamp. What I found on her palm, the skin etched with lines radiating outward like the threads of a spider web, was not a scar but a mole, about the size of a sesame seed. Or at least it looked like a mole. Could it be the scar from the nail? In my muttering, the mole began to look almost like a nailhead, as if the giant nail that had punctured her palm when she was seven was still lodged in her hand. I scratched at it with my fingernail, but it was stuck fast. If only I could scrape if off with a razor blade, I thought. The mole―no, the scar―I just wanted it to go away.

5

Though my wife didn’t try to rob any more prosthetic limb shops, she was clearly still engrossed in her search for her left hand. She would suddenly stop and look around her, her wrist dangling from her arm all the while. She looked at times beset by despair at the impossibility of her search, and at other times buoyant with anticipation of imminent recovery. Sometimes she wore a mix of both, despair and anticipation, and sometimes she just seemed bored, as if in her protracted quest she had forgotten what she was looking for. At still other moments, she bristled with a cynicism and loathing that seemed to say, yes, I will look, but I no longer know why it matters.

There were times I felt sorry for her, looking for a left hand that wasn’t even missing. Because I saw plainly that no amount of searching would produce her hand. It was obvious. How could something that hadn’t even been lost be found? To look for something was to presuppose its loss.

“Do you want me to find it for you?” I finally blurted, nearing the brink of my own desperation.

“What…?”

“I mean, your left hand.”

“You? How would―”

“Don’t you remember? During our honeymoon, when you left your hat behind somewhere―I found it for you. And that time you dropped your phone in the taxi―I called the taxi company to get it back, remember?

“I remember…”

So she said, but her face said otherwise; she didn’t believe for a second that I would find it. She knew well I had neither believed from the outset nor made any subsequent effort to believe that her left hand had disappeared; more, she knew I still didn’t believe her.

“You didn’t drop it at the theater by any chance, did you?” I taunted her spitefully.

“At the theater…?

“You remember, the theater where we watched that movie, on our second wedding anniversary…” Mid-sentence, a notion formed in my mind that perhaps the problem was me, not my wife. Ever since I’d stood audience to the performance that had launched the prosthetic hand off the 15th floor, I’d become consumed with thoughts of my wife’s left hand. It was as if I’d been bewitched.

One day, her left hand became the only thing I could see. Nothing else entered my view. When I looked at my wife, only her left hand stood out clearly, like a freshly engraved woodblock, while the rest of her blurred like a silhouette. Even when speaking to her, I stared down at her left hand, not her face. I peeked at it in spite of myself. Helplessly, against my will, I was growing attracted to it. So much that I began to suspect whether I’d ever even been attracted to my wife. I couldn’t remember ever feeling an attraction this strong, not to the few women I’d dated before meeting my wife, not even to the girl I’d entertained a crush on throughout college. I thought of the hand on the subway in the mornings and in the middle of work at the office. Upon returning home, it was what I sought first, most urgently. One time I’d raced home in the middle of a round of drinks with my co-workers, just to see it. I’d even passed up a three-day business trip to Jeju Island, letting a younger co-worker go instead. Lying in bed with the lights off, waiting to fall asleep, I would find myself drifting deeper into the illusion that I was lying not beside my wife but beside her left hand―her other self, her everything.

But the real problem was that I had begun suffering from an inexplicable nervousness that only worsened as my fixation with this left hand grew. The cause, perhaps, was the paradox of its existing, yet not; belonging to my wife―her left hand―yet not. It was too difficult and abstruse a paradox for my faculties, much too metaphysical and philosophical for a public administration major who had yet to read a single philosophy book with any seriousness.

Maybe this wasn’t the only reason. Maybe it was also my fear that my wife’s left hand might actually disappear, might cease to exist. Which was why I looked for it first, as soon as I walked through the front door. Her hand, not her.

I didn’t want to admit it. Because my wife’s claim that her left hand was gone was something I still could not and would not acknowledge; moreover―and of this I was convinced―it was something I must never acknowledge, so help me God. So it was only natural, then, that the nervousness and fear aroused in me by her left hand continued to intensify.

At last, it reached a point where I was being hounded by the dread that my wife’s body would slowly be chipped away, like a potato gnawed by a rat, until only a desolate left hand remained. Her face, strikingly emaciated of late; her longish neck; her breasts, which, while not so ample, had always satisfied me; her slightly rounded back and slender waist; her arms; her plump thighs; the calves that swelled, from edema, when she stood for long periods of time, veins bulging till they looked ready to burst; even the right hand that had stuck to her like glue, in defiance of her neglect and mistreatment; all of it would vanish, leaving only the left hand behind. I wondered, would I then have to spend the rest of my life with her left hand? What would it be like, to fall asleep with that hand in my arms? Every night until my last, dying breath.

I was headed to the extreme, to a state in which my wife’s left hand, on its own, would suffice; even if her breasts and clitoris disappeared, as long as her left hand remained, that would do.

Late one night, I sat before a spread of soju bottles, a plate of small dried anchovies, a small bowl of red pepper paste, and a pair of cooking scissors. I poured myself a small glass of soju and downed it in one swallow. Chewing on some anchovies I’d dipped in red pepper paste, I went into the smaller room in our house. When I emerged moments later, a picture of my wife was in my hand. I’d taken it not long after we’d started dating, on our trip to Byeonsan-bando National Park. It was on that trip, which had played a decisive role in our becoming lovers, that I’d held her left hand for the first time. I’d snatched it up in mine, wordlessly, as we strolled along the Chaeseokgang River, never imagining I’d be visited by such confusion and misery so many years later. I’d not only held her left hand for the first time that day, I’d also slept with her for the first time. She hadn’t turned down my request, proffered at the raw fish restaurant under the emboldening influence of alcohol, that we spend the night together. In allowing me her left hand, had she been allowing me her everything? To put it another way, by grabbing her left hand, essentially her last bastion, on a whim, had I effectively neutralized the defenses of a heretofore demure woman? In the picture, she stood in front of a stretch of Precambrian-era sedimentary rock, grinning from ear to ear, waving her left hand like a bird fluttering its wings. Taking the scissors in my hand, I began cutting around her face with the kimchi-stained blades. A roundish hole formed where her face had been removed. Next, I cut out her right arm and hand, leaving a longish hole. Without hesitation, I cut out her torso and two legs as well. Only the left shoulder, arm, and hand remained. Taking extra care to ensure the scissor’s blades stayed clear of the left hand, I cut out the final shoulder and arm. The only thing left against the backdrop of sedimentary rock was my wife’s left hand. Maybe it was an illusion created by the rock layers, but her left hand looked less like a human hand and more like the fossil of some life form hundreds of millions of years extinct.

With only the picture―now a snapshot of a lone hand―to mull over, I quickly drained two bottles of soju and, in an instant, blacked out.

When I woke up with a headache the following day, I found myself on the sofa. I could make out my wife, squatted down in front of the old potted tree we’d moved to the balcony, picking out withered stalks and leaves. Several smaller potted plants were arranged in a line at her feet. Since she’d begun using only her right hand, she’d scarcely watered the plants, and little by little they had begun to wither. And it wasn’t just the plants, either. She’d enjoyed cooking as a hobby, but she seldom cooked anymore. The only thing she’d made the past few days was a watery curry of potatoes, carrots, and ham. This was the woman who, despite having to go to work herself, had made it a rule to prepare me breakfast and maintained the house in effortless order. The bright sunlight of an early autumn day flooded the balcony. Veiled in sunlight, a light breeze, and leaves, my wife’s form took on a hazy, dream-like quality. I recalled the indubitably left-handed woman, the flawless wife she had been but two months ago, and an ache of longing for that woman began to well up in me. Until I saw something that shattered me out of my reverie.

Her left hand was gone.

I took halting steps toward the balcony. “What have you done with it?”

Twisting her neck to the left, she peered up at me.

“No, this can’t…did you cut it off?”

In my trembling, I could hardly speak. My wife wiped her soiled right hand on her clothes and slowly raised herself up.

“Have you really… did you really―”

I could only barely bring myself to look below her left arm, below the wrist. I found myself looking at her left hand, fixed benignly on the end of the wrist, no suggestion of anything amiss. It had only appeared missing, obscured by the tree, by the trickery of sunlight and of leaves swaying gently in the wind. My wife walked past me, impassive. For a long while, I stood silently before the balcony window, breeze wafting in, sunlight shattering across the tops of my feet like shards of a broken mirror, the sounds of traffic rising around me.

6

I had no choice but to admit that a castration carried out in the imagination was also a kind of castration, in some cases capable of producing more certain outcomes than the kind performed with a local anesthetic and a cold surgeon’s knife.

I’ll just acknowledge that it’s gone, I reasoned; it’s not like it will cost me anything. We’ll just say that thing I’ve been gaping at for hours now, like a boy with fever, is not her left hand; that her right hand is all she has left, her awkward, terrible-with-chopsticks right hand―a right hand that squeaks in every finger at the effort to pick up even a single strand of hair, the result of being left to rust over 15 long, neglectful years.

Knowing my wife had perfected the use of her left hand by sheer will and effort, enough to earn her dental technician’s license, I was eager to believe she could once again become right-handed, and impeccably so, if she only put her mind to it. She was right-handed by nature, so surely she could regain a solid command of her right hand in no time, if she would only try. I harped at length on how normal and natural it was to start living right-handed again, to live the way you’re born―not to my wife but to myself. But was it already too late?

When I got home, having renewed my determination before leaving the office, my wife was sitting absent-mindedly at the table, betraying no intention to prepare dinner. The living room and kitchen were deserted, like a bus station after the departure of the last bus. A teacup was in front of her. I approached the table and sat across from her. The teacup, adorned with a red floral design, was half full of black coffee. I tried to ignore the left hand resting beside it, but the hand jerked my gaze its way. Fingers curled inward at a 60-degree angle, it seemed to exist on its own in isolation from the rest of my wife’s body. The neglected fingernails had grown frightfully long and taken on a form resembling arabesques.

“What’s on your mind?”

Sliding my right hand across the table, I reached for my wife’s left hand. I felt her hand repel mine with a force like that which pushes two like-poled magnets apart.

“Did you hear me? I said, what are you―”

She lifted her head grudgingly and looked at me.

“The handle on my teacup. It’s facing left.”

I glanced down quickly. Sure enough, the handle on the teacup was pointing to my wife’s left. Could this be evidence that she had been drinking her coffee with the cup in her left hand? Why else would the handle be facing left? And if this was true, did it mean she had realized that her left hand was still, unquestionably, attached to her body?

“It’s only natural, right?” I said evenly, feigning a relaxed smile; inside, I was more nervous than I’d been waiting for the results of the college entrance exam.

“What do you mean, ‘natural’?”

The unreadable expression she had just been wearing vanished, and her face grew as hard as a crab shell.

“I mean, you. You’re a left-handed woman.”

My right-hand fingers outstretched, I lunged at my wife’s left hand, like a predator pouncing on its prey. Her fingernails stabbed my palm all over like sharp spikes, but I held on, mustering every last bit of strength I had, to prevent the hand from wiggling out of my grasp. I wondered whether I’d ever held on to something so tightly in my whole life.

“It’s only natural that the handle of a left-handed woman’s teacup would face left. Isn’t it? I mean, since you’re holding the cup in your left hand and all.”

Enough was enough. It was time for my wife to accept that, now as ever, her left hand existed as a part of her body.

“You mean my left hand disappeared just now, just a minute ago?”

What was this bullshit she was driveling now?

“I thought it disappeared a long time ago. Are you saying it just now disappeared?”

Her response enraged me like the most agonizing of betrayals. I squeezed my right hand as hard as I could, straining until the tendons bulged out of my temples. There was a crack. It was the shriek of her left hand, a monosyllabic cry that carried from where the hand lay ensnared in mine. In contrast to the successive shrieking emitted by her left hand in the grip of crushing pain, my wife’s face looked more tranquil than ever. I wanted to put her left hand into my mouth and swallow it whole, if I could. Even if her fingernails, in ferocious resistance, tore my tongue and the roof of my mouth into shreds.

Crack! The hand shrieked once more. All I wanted in that moment was for my right hand and her left hand to disappear together. Blood dripped from where my hand still clamped around hers. Bright red blood. The gruesome trickle was blood from my right hand, not her left one. Her venomous fingernails lodged deeper into my palm with enough power to puncture my skin.

A bird, feathers plucked and flesh flayed by predators, only bones remaining―this was the image conjured in my mind by the X-ray of my wife’s hand. To the doctor’s explanation that the back of her left hand had developed a cross-shaped fracture, and that her pinky and ring fingers were broken, my wife didn’t say a word. Convinced of her left hand’s disappearance, she appeared entirely unaware that the X-ray was of her left hand. The doctor said it would be necessary to keep the broken fingers bandaged and in a split until the fracture had healed. As long as we were trying to see it healed, wouldn’t a cast be even better, was my suggestion to the doctor. Ignorant of all that had transpired, however, the doctor flatly dismissed my request; she didn’t need a cast.

“Please, it’s for my wife’s sake. Or else she won’t ever give her hands a break, she’s too diligent. She even tried to wear gloves and do the dishes―with that hand! I was barely able to stop her, and then I dragged her here. Besides, she’s left-handed…a left-handed woman… she can barely turn a door knob with her right hand.”

The doctor’s eyes appeared to be seeking my wife’s consent, but she didn’t even look at him.

“Okay, well, if that’s the case…”

Through the half-open door that read “Treatment Room,” I observed the entire cast fitting procedure carefully from beginning to end. Wordless, her left hand being tended to by a man clad in a white gown, my wife looked like an object in a painting. The man wrapped her hand with a cotton bandage before encasing it in plaster, his motions like those of a mortician cleansing and dressing a dead body. When he covered her hand with dampened plaster bandages, as if erasing it, I unconsciously let out a sigh. Until the plaster bandage had hardened, she didn’t emerge from the room.

The doctor summoned my wife to his office to see if the plaster bandage had been wrapped and hardened properly.

“It’s hardened well. It won’t dent even if you take a hammer to it.”

She didn’t laugh at the doctor’s joke. I wanted to laugh instead, but nothing came out. Back at home, I immediately marked the date when the cast was to be removed on the calendar. I would have to remember, since it was obvious she wouldn’t. The doctor had instructed us to come get the cast removed in exactly four weeks. Though it wasn’t a long enough time for the collagen needed to heal a fracture to be produced, he explained that my wife’s case wasn’t serious enough to require a cast for more than four weeks.

The doctor hadn’t been kidding about the hammer. The plaster bandage was as hard as a concrete wall. Yet from what I could see, my wife didn’t even suspect that her left hand might be confined in a bandage more impenetrable than any armed fortress. If anything, she became more prone to craning her neck to look around her. She was still searching for her left hand. The teacup with the left-facing handle was still on the table.

She never complained of any constriction. As I’d also had to wear a cast after spraining my ankle playing basketball one summer day in my third year of high school, I knew full well how annoying it could be. Even though only half of my ankle, not the whole, had been set in the cast, it had been stifling enough for me to ascribe to it my failure to enter a prestigious college. After all, my wife’s belief in her hand’s nonexistence had been so extreme she’d felt nothing, not a prickle of pain, at the dislocating and splintering of her bones.

Four weeks was not such a long time. The day the cast was supposed to come off seemed to be nearing, and then it passed, and the cast stayed on. I hadn’t forgotten the date. I couldn’t; I’d marked it on the work calendar in my office. It just happened that way. And, in the same way, a week flew by. The next Saturday, cooped up in the apartment, the thought of taking my wife to the hospital far from my mind, I detected an odd smell in the air. Somewhat sweet yet musty, it wasn’t anything familiar in our home. It wasn’t particularly foul-smelling, but I found it loathsome, and troubling, perhaps because I hadn’t been able to locate its source. I discovered it soon enough, though, and without much difficulty: the culprit was my wife’s left hand. The odor was coming from the plaster bandage still wrapped around her hand, now long past its removal date. On Sunday night, I decided it was impossible to postpone our visit to the hospital any longer, and I informed her as much.

“I’ll drop by the house at around two tomorrow, so get ready to go to the hospital by then. I’ll wait for you in the parking lot. Be ready to come outside when I call you.”

Yet the cast didn’t come off the next day either. We didn’t make it to the hospital. It was me, not my wife, who failed to follow through. After taking care of some urgent business at the office, without even a break for lunch, I’d driven home to pick her up. I’d had to go out of my way to get time out of the office in the middle of the workday, and on a Monday no less. I’d pulled out my phone, but I hadn’t made the call. I’d eaten a roll of gimbap instead, and returned to the office.

I kept pushing it off, one day after another, until finally it was a month past the date we’d originally scheduled. I was scared; that the plaster would be removed, only to reveal that her left hand was really gone; that only a pronounced empty space would be left where her hand had once been. At one point, I even found myself wishing she might just live the rest of her life with her left hand enclosed in plaster. But it wouldn’t be possible. In a clear indication of weakened blood circulation, a bluish, bruise-like band had begun to form at the base of her left wrist. And the pungent, damp-smelling odor was growing increasingly unpleasant.

While I did my best to pay as little attention as possible to my wife’s left hand, the blue tinge around her wrist began to spread, discoloring widening patches of her left arm. If the plaster bandage was not removed, she could possibly have to undergo a horrific and cruel amputation; she needed to be taken to the hospital right away to get it taken off. She also began cramping frequently, so often she could hardly sleep at night. The blue tinge steadily deepened into black. Judging from the seriousness of her arm, it wasn’t hard to imagine what shape her hand was in. Maybe it had started to rot, becoming pulpy and bruised, like a peach eaten into by worms during the rainy season. Despite feeling enough pain to start taking painkillers, my wife didn’t beg me to take off the plaster. Likely because of her adamant, unswerving belief that her left hand was gone.

I saw her left hand, covered with the plaster bandage, emerge from the darkness. It swelled up, growing rounder and rounder, and I stared like a man enchanted. An image of an ancient Arabian mosque came to mind―a white mosque, topped with a roundish roof like a steamed bun. If only I could enter inside the white mosque with the roundish roof. If I could, I would kiss the fingers, asleep like mummies. But the entrance to the mosque was completely barred by bandages of cotton and plaster.

7

Sitting in the passenger seat, my wife stared silently out the window. We stopped at a traffic light, in front of a crosswalk. Putting the gear in neutral, I watched the people crossing, taking particular note of their aimlessly dangling left hands. A left hand here, a left hand there, another one over there―the street swarmed with them. Frowning, I scrutinized one after another, as if my wife’s existent yet nonexistent hand might be found among them.

“How about going to Myeong-dong for some kalguksu after we get the cast off?” I asked, putting the car back into gear, my tone intentionally lighthearted.

It had been ages since we had last had kalguksu, one of our favorite meals when we were dating. A memory surfaced of my wife enjoying the slippery noodles, made more so by the leg bone broth they were served in; picking them up with ease in deft little motions, her chopsticks in her left hand. I was suddenly overcome by a puzzling emotion, neither anger nor sorrow. She’d made it look like an art―the way she’d slurped the strands up whole, balancing each knot of noodles perfectly on her chopsticks, not needing to bite through halfway, neither letting them drop again into the broth. Had she insisted on eating kalguksu with me so often not because of the taste, but because of the fun she had fishing out the noodles in a gleeful display of her mastery?

“It’s kind of hot today.” The mumbled, gurgled, words sounded to my ears like “because of my left hand.”

“Then what about naengmyeon? There’s a place in Mapo that’s supposed to be pretty good.”

She gave no reply.

The cramped waiting area in front of the treatment room thronged with people whose hands and wrists, feet and ankles, necks and shoulders were set in casts, or wrapped many times around in bandages. I was the only one there retaining full use of my limbs. An air of mystery lingered about the closed door to the treatment room. The door opened, and a man with a cast on his right leg stepped outside. He scanned the waiting area before limping to take a seat beside my wife. I could feel his glances at my wife’s cast-covered left hand. I muttered to myself that perhaps he, like my wife, had one day succumbed to the illusion that his right leg had suddenly vanished. And not just him, but everyone flocked in front of this treatment room; even the man with the cast around his neck, looking as if he belonged to one of those tribes that considered long necks the highest ideal of beauty. I heard someone in the treatment room call my wife’s name.

“It won’t take long. They’ll just be removing your cast.”

I patted her back, nearly shoving her. Reluctantly, she stood up from her chair. Her left arm hung limply at her side, an uneven shade of blue, as if it had taken a sound beating; she walked to the treatment room with faltering steps. When she reached the door, which lay agape like the mouth of a crocodile, she glanced backward all of a sudden. Her eyes were on me; but her expression was inscrutable.

It was maybe three minutes after she’d entered the room. A chainsaw roared to life. I knew that the removal of full casts required a chainsaw, to cut through bandages too hardened for regular knife blades to penetrate. This was probably what I was hearing, then, the sound of evenly sharpened teeth rotating frantically, slicing through plaster. And yet, to my ears, this was more than that. Ordinarily nothing more than noise, the sound of the chainsaw resounding in my ears had taken on a new significance. It was like the sound of a butcher’s electric blade cutting through the hooves of a cow, or maybe a tail.

“That’s the sound of a hand being cut off.” My voice rang out so everyone in the waiting room could hear. “My wife’s hand.”

After a brief pause, the roar of the chainsaw filled my ears once more.