The stranger's hand remained in Iva's when he walked away.
At first she thought he had given her something. She looked down, expecting a business card or a folded note. His right hand lay across her palm, warm and complete, its wrist ending in a smooth pale surface without blood. The fingers curled around her wrist.
Across the cafe, he put his empty sleeve into his pocket and turned back.
"We should meet again," he said.
Iva stood so quickly that her chair struck the table behind her. She tried to shake the hand loose. Its thumb pressed against the pulse in her wrist. The pressure was intimate and exact, like someone testing whether a piece of fruit was ripe.
The stranger returned and set a card beside her cup. There was a telephone number and nothing else.
"Introduce me to someone who trusts you. Then I'll take it back."
"Take it now."
He glanced at the hand. A narrow line had opened across its palm. Iva saw a wet darkness inside it and felt something move against the bones of her wrist.
"It doesn't know anybody else," he said.
He left while she was trying not to scream.
At home she wrapped the hand in a towel. The fingers found their way through the folds and tightened whenever she pulled. She could no longer feel her own little finger. She read the number three times before entering it, reluctant to give him a way of reaching her.
He answered on the first ring.
Iva offered money. She had little, but there were things she could sell. He said he had no use for it. She offered to bring him an acquaintance from the employment office. He asked whether the acquaintance would come somewhere private because Iva said it was safe.
She did not answer.
"Someone who trusts you," he repeated.
The mouth in the palm widened that night. Iva could feel it working between the two long bones of her arm, making space without breaking the skin. She sat on the bathroom floor with the towel in her lap, trying to keep her breathing quiet enough not to wake the neighbor. She did not want to explain. Explanation would bring people close to the hand, and she had begun understanding what closeness was worth.
By morning she had chosen Tamsin.
Tamsin worked from a room behind her flat, altering clothes and making costumes when there was money in local theater. She had repaired Iva's coat without charging and left soup at her door during the week after the translation agency closed. Iva still had the bowl. She washed it before making the call.
"I met someone who might have work," she said.
Tamsin asked what kind. Iva invented an exhibition, a small production budget, people who needed someone reliable. The lies arrived easily because she knew what her friend had been hoping to hear.
"Can he come this afternoon?"
Iva looked at the hand beneath the towel.
"He asked for somewhere quiet."
Tamsin said the workroom would do. She would clear the cutting table.
The stranger met Iva outside the flat. He wore the same coat, one sleeve still empty. The hand on her wrist became very still when he approached. Its fingers loosened enough that she could feel blood moving into her own hand again.
Tamsin opened the door smiling. Behind her, Iva's repaired coat hung on the back of a chair, the torn cuff neatly turned inward.
"This is my friend," Iva said.
The stranger laid his bare wrist against the attached hand. Its fingers loosened from Iva's arm, and the flesh joined with a soft closing sound.
Iva took a step backward.
Tamsin had already offered her hand. The stranger accepted it, then opened his arm from wrist to elbow. The flesh unfolded around her forearm, too wide and deep for the amount of body holding it. Tamsin stared, waiting for the impossible sight to become a trick she could understand.
Then it reached her shoulder.
Iva caught the doorframe. There was still time to take hold of Tamsin's other hand. She could see it reaching toward her. She could see the little crescent of thread caught beneath a fingernail.
"Iva."
The stranger watched her with mild interest. The pale interior of his arm worked upward around Tamsin's neck. Iva held her own wrist where the pressure had been and stayed outside its reach.
Tamsin understood before she disappeared. The understanding changed her face more than the pain had. She stopped calling Iva's name.
When the stranger left, he thanked Iva for the introduction. Both his hands were ordinary again.
Iva stood in the workroom until the afternoon light no longer reached the cutting table. She had brought back the soup bowl and left it beside the sewing machine. Before going, she took her repaired coat from the chair and put it on, careful not to disturb the cuff her friend had finished for her.
