The first limb springs from the ground at the beach. It is a foot. One of the locals’ daughters pulls it from the sand as she collects mussels, which she drops into a bucket of seawater to watch their ghostly appendages wriggle out from their shells.

She turns the limb over in her hands, thinking it a toy. It’s perfectly severed mid-calf, a stark ring of red wrapping the white circle of bone. There is no blood or oozing viscera, nothing to suggest it was ever attached to a body.

When she brings it to the group of parents gossiping on the bank, one of their sons gawks amid the clamor. He confesses he found something similar while playing in the forest behind the school: a pristinely clean but unmistakably human ear that was growing off the trunk of an ancient oak tree, the same shade of deep brown as the bark from which it sprung. He inquisitively tugged at the lobe and found he could pull it cleanly from the tree with a snap, like picking an apple.

He had pocketed the ear and put it in a box of small trinkets he kept under his bed. At night, he would take it out and inspect it: for weeks, it did not decay the way that a human body or even fruit would, but retained its plasticity and even carried a small amount of warmth, as if blood flowed through it still.

In the coming weeks, the town became electrified with a small boom of new crops: pinky toes were unearthed in the soy fields, thighs were found shooting from the earth in the forested mountains, hands dropped from trees like ripe figs, each a different size and skin tone. Law enforcement and physicians didn’t know what to make of the limbs, which remained supple and lively months after harvest.

Rene hears of this the way he hears most of the town’s secrets: months after the news circulates in the hushed, inner rings of the generational citizens who had the town’s life and land imbued into their bones from birth.

But word soon breaks the inner circles when the body parts appear in such abundance that the locals begin to collect them. At first, they hide pinky toes in cigar boxes, spread the fingers of hands out flat so the entire appendage can be hidden beneath a wardrobe. Then, slowly, it becomes common to see people display rare appendages in their windows to inspire the intrigue and jealousy of others, or to watch children playing with noses and tongues in the streets, poking them with sticks or tossing them like baseballs.

Rene’s sister Mara immediately brings the first limb she finds to him. It’s a small harvest: two segments of a ring finger that she uprooted while clearing invasive vines from her vegetable garden. She brings it over one evening while Rene is recipe testing, trying dates in his brioche instead of cherries for extra sweetness. In truth, he knows he would never actually change the recipe, nor any in his shop, so devotely his customers clung to familiar tastes.

She carries the finger delicately in a small jewelry box, opening it for him like a proposal. “Look at it, Rene,” she says. “Touch it.”

It’s not the first of the strange appendages Rene has seen firsthand. The man who lives in the apartment above his beckoned him with a similar request just last week, prideful of his discovery of an arm with the hand attached. It is a rare find that gains him the esteem of many, judging by the scuffling sounds of foot traffic that Rene regularly hears above him into the night.

“Touch it,” his neighbor insisted, holding the limb out with both hands as if presenting a drapier. “Look, look,” he said, pressing his index finger into the flesh of the leg to demonstrate how the pale skin pinkened against the indentation then slowly returned to its usual hue. Then he performed the same action against his own arm to identical results.

“What do you think?” Mara asks after Rene silently declines the invitation just as he had with his neighbor, wary of contact with this particular flesh.

“Looks like a finger,” Rene says.

Mara sighs, deflated by her inability to infect Rene with her zeal. Mara has only grown more inquisitive and lively since they moved to the city together, has folded into the townspeople’s gossip and bustle with ease. But Rene found that, unlike Mara, he had never minded the layer of unrecognition the locals painted between themselves and outsiders.

“Of course it’s a finger,” Mara says, pulling a chair up to the countertop. “But what do you think?”

It’s a question that has been asked of everyone at this point: What do you think? What do you think? But Rene simply can’t see any value in adding another opinion to the swirling cacophony of theories and hypotheses about the limbs’ appearances — those of serial murderers, of scientific experimentation from the mainland, of the evolution of sentient organisms that developed highly specified and misguided camouflage — all of which evaporated under the faintest of scrutiny.

“People think they’ve been sent to trick us,” Mara says, citing a theory most common among the church women she sees regularly at the school where she teaches. “To tempt us away from God — or something like that.”

“Like the fossils?” Rene asks.

“What do you think?” Mara presses.

Rene looks up from his recipe notes and tares his scale. “I honestly don’t think of them at all.”

+

This is largely true. Rene sidesteps most conversations of the limbs with ease, and as the harvest increases, the topic is woven back into the tapestry of the town’s gossip. It soon becomes no more gripping than the latest good novel being lent around or the rolling summer thunderstorms.

Mara spends an evening tearing through his bakery’s kitchen, fumbling with his laminated dough and flour to produce the prototype for a new item to add to his menu. Rene obediently recreates it and bakes a dozen for the next morning: a small pastry in the shape of a foot, complete with slivered almonds for toenails. Though Mara had filled her pastry with dark red cherry jam, Rene opts for creme anglaise. They sell out twenty minutes after opening.

“You have to give these people what they want,” Mara tells him, nodding at the empty display case before she leaves for work. “If they want feet, you have to give them feet.”

That evening as he goes to donate his surplus loaves and pastries to the church, he finds the building’s doors unexpectedly locked, their heavy oak wood unrelenting against his hand. He turns down the alley to bring the food to the monastery.

It is a still night, the air cold and unmoving. It had taken Rene months to adjust to it, the thick of silence so unlike the backdrop of constant city ambiance he was raised against.

A scuffling sound cuts through the stillness; a beast of some kind lumbers behind the dumpster. He turns slowly, expecting to see the bright, reflective eyes of a raccoon or a feral cat.

Instead, he discovers the crouched shape of a man, barely visible in the darkness.

The alley becomes flooded with low, wet, squelching sounds, and cold dread spreads down Rene’s neck and into his ribs. He is chastened with the familiar feeling of bearing witness to something he knows he should not see.

The figure freezes like a startled deer, stiffening on its haunches. Then, half of its shuddering face slowly peers around the dumpster, only revealing one unblinking eye.

The two creatures stay frozen like that for several heartbeats: Rene petrified into stasis, the crumpled man heaving labored breaths. He grips a half-devoured leg, chewed to the bone. His glinting eyes are fixed on Rene, his beard dark and dripping with blood.

Then, in a feverish flurry of movement, the figure bolts down the alley and is swallowed by the night.

+

Rene discovers his first limb in the fall. It is a small pinky toe, dark and slightly curved, nestled in the flowerpot on his windowsill. Many of the townspeople now spend their weekends gathering at the beaches or foraging in the forest to find their prize-worthy limbs, but this feels like a token intended for him alone. He wonders momentarily whether the appendage was dropped by a bird or had sprung unbidden from the soil nourishing his parsley and basil, then he pushes the question from his mind.

Word of the limbs has brought people from the mainland in droves, and the tourists take trips to the beach and hikes through the mountains to pad out their pilgrimages. Rene has to take on an apprentice baker as demand increases, and he allows her to take the lead on new recipe designs, adding ears spiraled out of puff pastry and pink tongue-shaped macarons to his display case.

Mara placidly agrees with Rene’s grumbled assessments of the irreverence of The Festival of Flesh when she insists he attend with her. The main street is lined with vendor booths and games, and the bright red and gold banners are dotted with small illustrations of hands and feet. Mara buys a lollipop of a foot, which is butterscotch flavored and oozes raspberry jam. Though many limbs are displayed in the booths — one featuring a fully intact leg reaching up to the thigh, which is crowded around for the duration of the festival — Rene knows that the first sales of the appendages only happen in the hushed secrecy of the taboo.

He continues to add to his growing collection of discoveries. Unlike those who spend all of their free time seeking out their rations, the limbs are thrust upon Rene: he happens upon fingertips as he forages for chanterelles in the dewy mountain mornings, or stumbles over elbows sprouting from the ground in the courtyard of his apartment building. He even discovers an ear clogging one of the pipes in the bakery’s kitchen.

He lays the limbs out in the spare room of his apartment, spread in the vague shape of a human with mismatched skin. A forearm, a pinky, the middle of a thigh. An unattached foot, a nose, and three ears which he places at the top like a halo.

He walks with Mara along the shore one evening, and as the waves recede on the quiet beach, they make a highly envied discovery: an arm with its hand attached, fully formed up to the shoulder. Mara pauses and looks to Rene almost expectantly, and then she reaches down and holds the thing in her hands like a lead pipe. She kicks off her shoes and treads into the sea to return it to its origins. They watch as it floats and floats and then sinks.

Rene keeps his face impassive as they continue their walk, but he knows that the limb was intended as an offering for him alone.

+

People begin to eat the limbs secretly at first, Rene theorizes, in desolate moments of voracious hunger or equally intense throes of unquenchably curiosity. It feels like an inevitability: after all, what are the limbs if not flesh, gristle, sinew, and meat? There was only so long the town could celebrate the discovery of flesh without driving themselves mad with lust for its flavor. But just like the initial taboo of the limbs’ discoveries and subsequent sales, the feast continues in hushed secrecy until eventually it’s as common as the setting sun.

Rene tries not to look too closely at the cuts of meat in the butcher’s shop, the way they’re labeled so obliquely: bone-in calf and shoulder cut and strip steak. Though ambiguously named, the source of the meat is clear in its luxurious pricing, often costing upwards of ten times the once-treasured cuts of beef and pork. Most locals can easily afford them after the economic boom brought by the increased tourism, but Rene can’t even look at the flesh without the sounds of ravenous desperation he witnessed in the alley echoing through his mind. Eventually, he stops eating meat altogether.

He stations his apprentice at the front of the shop, unable to greet the townspeople without imagining blood spattered about their lips, the churning of flesh digesting in their guts. He refuses to broach the topic with Mara, clinging fervidly to his ignorance of her dietary habits. He knows he won’t be able to recover from seeing her the way he sees the others.

As the town flourishes, Rene’s patchwork body continues to grow. It takes the shape of a seraphim of old, with four arms and a dozen fingers and three calves, each a different size and color.

Rene discovers a torso on one of his hikes, thick with weeds and grass which bloom from the thin layer of earth covering its fertile flesh. He disentangles it from the growth and washes it in the river.

Liberated from nature’s attempts to reclaim it, he wraps the torso in his jacket and carries it home in the privacy of the early morning light. When he returns to his apartment and places it in the centre of his being, his fingers rest momentarily on the flat chest, quaking against the anticipation of the expansion of a lung or the beating of a heart. But he quickly pulls his hand away, finding himself unable to bear the knowledge of what stirs beneath. When he leaves the room, he locks the door behind him.

+

Rene’s neighbor catches him in the staircase one afternoon and invites him and Mara by for supper.

“They’ll want you to use the meat,” Mara theorizes when he informs her, her voice airy in a lackluster attempt to appear nonplussed. “In the pies for the bakery, and the sandwiches.”

“I don’t see why they’d care,” Rene says. “It’s none of their business.” But they both know perfectly well that his resistance to assimilate is a thorn that had been thickening in the side of the community since the first foot sprung from the ocean.

But Mara is proven wrong. At supper, they don’t speak of the limbs the entire evening, though his neighbor’s passion for them has not faded: arms jut out from his walls as coat hangers and pristinely framed ears and noses decorate the living room. Rene notices that the legs of his coffee table are legs.

Instead, his neighbor and his neighbor’s wife simply prattle about them warmly, asking about the bakery and the school and how they like the town, treating them still as newcomers though Rene has lived below them for over half of a decade.

The main dish is a stuffed loin spiraled around fresh herbs and breadcrumbs and parmesan. For Rene, they serve lovingly stewed lentils, crisp arugula salad, and impressively crusted levain bread. They do not discuss the meat except to pay it passing compliments, nor do they eat ravenously like beasts.

Afterwards, Mara walks Rene to his door. “Here,” she says, pressing something into his hand: a cut of the loin, wrapped in parchment paper — whether by Mara or his neighbors, he isn’t sure. “They’ll never know,” she says, leaving Rene to wonder which they she’s referring to.

The meat sits in his refrigerator for one day, and then two, and then three. When it presses close to the danger of spoiling, Rene wakes in the night, beside himself with hunger. He sautés pearled onions and mushrooms with fresh butter in a cast iron pan, then he adds the meat, searing it expertly on each side. He works desperately, weak and salivating.

In his dark apartment, he brings a cut to his lips to discover — as if remembering a knowledge he was born with and forgotten over time — that it’s the most delicious thing he’s ever tasted.

+

Rene’s next forage through the lush mountainside is bountiful; he harvests oyster mushrooms, small spritely porcinis, and a cluster of golden chanterelles so thick it could fill its own tart. But as he fills his bag, his mind fixates instead on dishes from his former life as a chef: succulent steak and kidney pie, bacon-wrapped tenderloin rolled with pesto, osso buco served over creamy polenta.

But today, the river swims only with fish, there is nothing hidden in the grass except the occasional wood mouse, and the only fruits the trees bear are bark and sap and the spiked spheres of sweetgum pods which they drop onto the forest floor.

He considers that perhaps he missed the early morning harvest — wanting fingers plucking loin and brisket greedily from the land. Perhaps the earth had swallowed the limbs back into itself, reconsidered its offering after witnessing the abuse and desecration of its alms.

Rene ventures deeper into the forest than he does on his usual forages. Eventually, he spills into a small clearing where he spies a thicket of newly bloomed flowers, weeds, and fertile life similar to that which had covered the torso. He drops his bag and falls upon it immediately.

The limb has grown dense with tiny yellow flowers and grass so long it appears weeks old. Rene marvels at his luck for discovering such a prize before the town descended upon it — a thick bicep or a thigh, no doubt, with robust, tender muscle and rich, flavorful fat.

But as he dusts away growth and dirt, an unfamiliar shape forms beneath his slowing hands: a curve, an arch, the stiff push of bone right beneath flesh. His fingers work against the curve of ears, the incline of nose, the jut of chin.

Rene presses his thumbs gently into the sockets of two eyes, sweeping them free of earth. They slowly open at his touch, and the face blinks up at him.

+++