spellingmistakescostlives.com / I love arms

I'm sat waiting for my lunch, quietly drinking my pint and looking around the pub. Then he turns and says to me. "What would you do if I just cut off my arms? What would you do?" He says, "Would you cry? Ha! Would you cry like a baby? You little baby! Shit your pants you baby. You premature baby!" He laughs and rolls in his chair and points at me calling me a baby. "You shit baby! Aborted baby! " I sit there. There's no need to rise to his taunts, I know he's not serious. I'm no more a baby than anyone else, I'm 29. But he's still going on, "Don't you think I'm serious? Don't you believe me?! I'll fucking do it. I will! You hear me? Baby!" I turn around and look at him, he's holding a pen knife and has this deranged look in his eyes, the kind of look an angry golf player might have just before he shatters your face with a steel club. I play a bit of reverse psychology, catching him mercilessly off his guard, "Well go on then," I say, "I don't mind. And I'm not a baby either. " And I sit with this perfectly straight face, even though I want to scream because that knife is so close to his arm, and then he just laughs at me and starts cutting at the shoulder. I lunge forward to stop him but he's laughing and moving away as he cuts into the bone and then he's through the bone and the other side of muscle and still going and then through the other side as blood fills the pub and the limb drops to the floor.

"No!" I scream into my shoulder, flinching with temporary spasticism. I fall to my knees, head in the hands on the end of my arms. How can he? How could... He kicks the removed arm in my face. "Present." he tells me, "Put it on your wall, you baby. You unplanned baby. You shit baby with shit on your face, baby!" Then he starts cutting at the arm holding the knife, but he can only get about an inch deep before his arm starts flinching and he stops, placing the knife instead in his mouth, and he continues. I sit crying. Desperately scooping the blood back into the arm, but to no use. And then as soon as he's started he's through the bone and muscle of his other arm and it dangles for a second before thudding to the ground as two fountains of blood erupt from Gareth's arms in time with his sick, black heart.

"You fucking baby."

Me and Gareth didn't speak much after that day. I found it difficult to even think of forgiving him and was prone to a few outbursts of pushing him over flat on his face at social gatherings and barbeques. People laughed at him squirming with his face buried in the grass and mud, legs kicking sideways, slowly rotating his body around his head. But I didn't. I felt sick. I love arms. And I hate it when someone can't use them. Don't make Gareth's mistake. Don't cut off your arms with a knife.