When the couple learned that they would no longer be living in the same city, they began making arrangements. She was moving up north for graduate school. He would stay in their city — hereafter only his city — because he had just started at a new company. She began saving boxes to pack away her books, brightly colored dishware, piles and piles of sweaters she had collected from thrift stores. She took everything off the walls: the pictures of their third date at a carnival, the sloppy sketch he’d penned a few days before of the neighborhood cat, the flowers she had dried from their sixth-month anniversary. He began planning extensive road trips. If he left right at five on Friday evening after work, he could be in her city at one in the morning. Well, if he didn’t stop for dinner or the bathroom and drove all through the night. And then he’d have all of Saturday with her (if he didn’t sleep in) and most of Sunday, leaving at midnight to arrive back in his city at eight, a full hour before work. Again, no time for food or bathrooms or sleep. They held each other at night and whispered an incantation back and forth: This will work. This will work. This will work.

On the day of her move, they stood in her empty apartment, the warm, bright place reduced to white walls, swept floors, and a faintly musty smell. There was one last business to attend to. She handed him a knife.

“Will you go first?” She worried her bottom lip between her teeth.

“Of course.”

He took the knife and in a sure, sweeping motion cut off his left hand. It fell to the floor where it flexed once, twice. Holding itself aloft by its fingers, it scampered to the young woman and tugged at the hem of her pants like a small child. She crouched down and carefully took it in both her hands, then set it gingerly in the tote bag at her shoulder where it happily waved its fingers atop the jacket, water bottle, and book she had already stowed away.

Now, it was her turn. He handed her the knife and she took it, considering it for a few seconds before lifting it towards her opposite wrist. But she kept raising the knife until it faced her straight on, right between the eyes. Before the man could recognize her intent, she squeezed her eyes shut, leaned forward, and swiftly cut down the center of her face. The right side of her face, the side with the mole beneath her eye, slowly slid from her head. She caught it and offered it to him.

The man’s eyes widened as he held out his hand to accept the gift. It moved like silk against his palm. The eye blinked and the half-mouth gave a shy smile. He thought he saw the barest bit of a blush. “I thought we agreed on hands,” he said, marvelling.

“We did,” she said. “But you like the mole underneath my eye so much.”

He nodded solemnly and embraced her. When he kissed her half-smile, the left side of his mouth felt cold and drafty. He broke away.

“Well.” His one hand rubbed her shoulder. “Travel safe, okay?”

“I will,” she promised. They shut the door together and, with an air of finality, she locked it for the last time.

+

In the weeks that followed, the two became accustomed to their new routines. She explored her new city and went to mixers for the incoming grad students. The hand dutifully followed, tucking itself into her bag or pocket as needed. The hand helped her settle into her apartment. It nudged books toward her as she arranged the spines by subject and color. It held a nail in place as she hammered it into the wall to hang a frame. It sat by her side and held her hand as she drank coffee in the mornings. Meanwhile, back in his city, the hand’s owner prepared for work at a bathroom mirror. The face hummed as it hung from a towel hook. The man joined in while brushing his teeth. As he ate his cereal in front of the TV, the face laughed at the sitcom on the screen. The laugh was that of the woman, but somehow halved, as if it didn’t end or begin where it normally would. But it still sounded like her, and the man found himself smiling from the face’s laughter as he drank the remainder of the milk from his bowl.

Of course, they called. They sent texts throughout the day. She wrote him a few letters, and though he didn’t care much for writing responses, he returned short letters with pressed flowers and sachets of tea. But at night, when the woman could not sleep from worries about the day’s coming assignments, it was the hand that made her feel close to the man as it stroked her forehead. In the cool evenings, as the man sat on his thin terrace and a pit opened in his stomach and threatened to swallow him, it was the even breathing of the face that calmed him and slowly pulled him back to the present.

+

The trouble began when the woman left for her morning classes and forgot the hand in her apartment. When she returned in the afternoon, she found the hand trembling in a corner of the kitchen, clawing at its fingers until the cuticles frayed. It took her over an hour to coax the hand from its shelter, and then even longer to clean and bandage its ragged wounds. That night, it curled next to her brow like always, but its movements were erratic. In a fit of twitching, almost as if it were having a bad dream, it nearly prodded her in the eye. She snatched up the hand and closed it in the bathroom where it scratched against the door a few times before falling silent and, she assumed, asleep. She turned on instrumental music to calm her nerves as she chanted: This will work this will work this will work.

+

Or maybe the trouble began when the man took the face to work in his messenger bag, and it kept laughing during an important meeting. At first, everyone thought the noise was a phone, but after several successive warbles, it became clear there was another source. The man peeked into his bag and saw the face smiling and laughing to itself. He apologized profusely to the other employees and the big boss, gathered up his things, and asked to momentarily excuse himself. The big boss, today wearing a sickeningly red tie, scowled as his face turned a similar shade. The man kept his gaze trained on the ground to avoid the twelve pairs of eyes that followed him as he left for the bathroom outside the conference room. The laughter was now coming in short, staccato bursts, as if the face had heard something so humorous it was struggling to breathe. As he leaned against a stall, he realized that he was not so much bothered by the face interrupting the meeting as the knowledge that the face must be laughing because the woman, in her city eight long hours away, must also be laughing. There was nothing else to make the face laugh at this moment. Who was making the woman laugh so hard that her abdomen and chest seized up, that sort of ridiculous laugh that hurt in such a joyous way, it pushed at the seams of the body?

+

Or maybe the trouble came when the man made the long drive to visit the woman, and the hand seemed wary of him and refused to come out from under the couch the whole weekend. Or maybe it was that, on another visit, the face wouldn’t fix to the blank half of the woman’s head, instead sliding off like water. Or maybe it was that the man found it difficult to text and write with only one hand, or that the woman’s peers struggled to interpret her facial expressions with only half her features. Maybe it was that the woman had given half her face when the man had only given his hand. Maybe it was that the man drove the eight hours over and over again but the woman never offered to do the same. Maybe it was because everyone was always asking why she only had half a face, why he only had one hand. Or maybe the trouble was that any word or set of words, when said enough, loses meaning until it becomes a droning noise.

+

It came apart in a slow and pathetic way, the way a sweater slowly unravels into a limp pile of yarn. They decided it would be best if they sent their gifts back by mail rather than in person. She was busy with end of term papers, and he had a big presentation coming up at work. She cornered the hand and herded it into one of the left over boxes from her move. It rattled and shook the box the whole way to the post office. He folded up the face and placed it in a large manila envelope. As he licked the flap shut, he thought he heard the face whimper. He hurried out to the street mailbox and slammed the envelope inside. A whine echoed from inside the metal chamber.

A week later, the woman was sorting through her mail when she came across the envelope. She tore into it and felt the cool skin of her face slide between her fingers. Once in her bathroom, she spent an afternoon glueing it back in place. She experimented with a full smile. The right side of her face, the one with the mole the man had once kissed when she was half-asleep, still sagged a bit. When she pressed the pad of her finger beneath her right eye, she was met with a fizzing, numb feeling. It would be several months before the sensation returned to that side of her face, before her laugh sounded full again, before her mouth quirked up at both ends with hardly any effort.

At around the same time, the man was reunited with his hand. He sat back on the couch and set about sewing it to his left wrist. With each stitch, he winced. Small rivulets of blood trickled down his forearm. Had it been this bloody and painful when he first cut it off? He couldn’t remember. Once reattached and cleaned, the hand was clumsy and delayed in its movements. It had trouble gripping glasses, though it was strong enough to grip the steering wheel when he commuted to work. The stitches got infected a few days later and the man had to invite a friend over, one who had done the same sort of fix before, to help him drain and repair the stitching.

For a while, the seams where the face and hand had been reattached throbbed and ached. Then, they stung like a bad spider bite and tapered off to an itch. Sometimes, especially at night when the man and woman were alone in their respective cities and apartments and left to wander dark tunnels of thought, the seams would go white hot and burn for a few minutes. If it was a bad episode, for upwards of an hour. But the seams always stopped hurting by the morning. For the most part, they didn’t hurt at all.

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