Francie Faucer gives it away

May 25, 2009 at 11:36 pm (z) unrated)

Francie Faucer began with her arm.

 

It had been bothering her for a while, the fact that her arm was there, and constantly nagged at her, like it didn’t feel quite like part of the body. She found it impossible to explain to her peers, who laughed, or stared.

 

 The doctors were the worst.

 

It was an undefinable urge to remove it, a constant sense that the arm did not belong.

 

Elina D Smithe lost her right arm, from the shoulder down, in a spatter of blood. She was eighteen. The motorbike hit her at eighty. She was a promising young starlet, the daughter of Smithe L Smithe, brightest star in the Hollywood Hills.

 

When Francie Faucer heard about it, she handed her arm over to the Smithe girl. The operation was flawless, and Frankie thought, when she woke, that she was free.

But Francie woke sweating in the middle of the night, and although the arm no longer hung alien at her side, the nagging feeling had shifted. Under the dim moonlight, Francie looked at her foot.

It went to a girl in Connecticut who’d stepped on a cherry bomb, and Francie felt good, for a while.

 

When Francie tried to give away her other foot, the doctors started to get antsy.

You need help, they said.

Francie said the only help she needed came at the end of a rotary saw.

They ran the full gamut of tests on her, but couldn’t disprove her sanity.

So Francie gave her other foot away, took it off at the knee. It went to a lady who’d slipped on the edge of a crowded train platform, who sent Francie pictures of her smiling children.

Still, Francie found herself lying awake at night, staring at the last limb. It burned, without burning. Not a single doctor would agree to help her with the one thing she needed. She couldn’t afford it anyway, because nobody would sponsor her.

 

He appeared on her doorstep one morning, all Hollywood with his sharp cheekbones and sharper suit, and deep hollows under his sallow eyes.

‘I just want to thank you for my daughter. Elina. You know what you are, Miss Faucer? A national hero. You are.’

Francie had never thought of herself as a hero, much less a national one. She felt awkward and unclean, sitting under the glow of his perfect white teeth.

‘You’re a hard woman to find,’ he said. He smiled the smile they plastered across all the magazines.

Francie said she had never expected anything, and she wasn’t doing it for anybody but herself.

He didn’t believe her. People never did.

She asked timidly what he would like from her.

‘I just want to thank you,’ he said. ‘I want to help you.’

‘I’m quite happy,’ Francie said. Then she looked at her arm.

He looked too.

‘There’s just one thing,’ Francie Faucer said.

 

It went on a long time, and each time the lines in Smithe’s face deepened. He always asked her the same thing.

‘Are you sure?’

And Francie said, ‘Just one thing.’

 

But Francie Faucer did not belong to herself, not even when she’d given away her eyes, that itched and burned and wept.

‘Are you happy now?’ Smithe asked, somewhere in front of her..

Francie’s eyes would have seen the deep line that furrowed Smithe’s neat brows.

‘There’s just one thing,’ Francie Faucer said.

There was a long pause. Then Smithe’s feet broke into a rhythm of taps, and Francie realised he was walking slowly away.

‘Mr Smithe?’ she called.

But there was nothing but silence in her house.

Francie Faucer opened the mouth, and then she had the worst thought; that all along, it had been the body that belonged.

Somewhere, Francie Faucer screamed.