When Clem first realizes she’s a monster, she’s in the gender-neutral bathroom on the fourth floor of the Seattle Convention Center, trying to convince the touchless faucet she exists. She waves her hands under the gleaming tap, then, remembering something Sabrina told her about sensors, spirit-fingers her way down to the base. Tries a little to the left of that, too. A little to the right. Still—and now she’s for sure late—nothing.

Clem thinks about how vampires can’t see themselves in the mirror. Something about mirrors reflecting the soul and vampires not having one of those, so the mirror rejects the idea of the vampire altogether. She wonders if the faucet is some modern version of that: a new generation of bathroom fixtures capable of detecting the hollowness, the sheer unworthiness, of her corporeal form.

She presses her thumb directly on the sensor, holds it there for three Mississippis as if she’s doing a hard restart. What she’s late for is a panel on recent advancements in the factory decaffeination of non-Arabica beans. It’s afternoon on the last day of the annual West Coast Coffee Expo, and most of the conference’s six thousand attendees have already spilled onto Pine Street in search of something more exciting than the light roast, dark roast, medium roast circuit they’ve been running the past three corporate-sponsored days.

Decaffeination isn’t Clem’s wheelhouse, either. The company she works for makes the PodGods™ instant coffee pods that everyone these days says are killing the planet, and she’s here to figure out how to rebrand them so people will say, well, pretty much anything else.

Her boss told her forget having a lightbulb moment. What they need is more like a stadium floodlight.

That’s what Clem should be doing. Shuffling from one geometric-patterned carpet to another. Going to something called a Single-Serve Caucus. Waiting for genius to waltz right up to her, recognizing her by the name on her conference lanyard:

Clementine Tsoi

Chernobog Brew

Except, there’s Sabrina. And, last week, the recommendation from Sabrina’s doctor that she switch to decaf, at least during radiation. The rest of that appointment, instead of listening carefully or taking her typical teacher’s-pet notes or demanding a second opinion or even crying, Clem was thinking about something she’d seen projected onto a massive screen at work once, about the chemical they use to pull the caffeine out of the beans. How it’s the number-one active ingredient in paint strippers.

So Friday morning, Clem drew an asterisk next to “Charting New Grounds: The Future of Decaf” on her conference events program. And Saturday night, she brushed off her coworkers’ texts about going for dim sum with these guys they’d met from Montana, co-founders of a startup that makes ultralight percolators for mountaineers and glacier guides. Now it’s Sunday, and she’s wiping her soap-tacky hands on the inside of her blazer, the water that would have been oh-so useful be damned.

There’s a motion-activated paper towel dispenser, sure. But she’s not going to risk being snubbed by that, too.

When the idle faucet finally wakes up, Clem’s walking out the bathroom door, too far gone to hear the fast jet of water.

Because she’s not a bloodsucker after all—there’s a soul in there somewhere. Even if she drove Sabrina to the oncologist then left her alone for three whole days to stew in Sacramento’s spring heat and the news they’d just gotten, there’s got to be a soul in there somewhere. Vampire law says so.

Clem’s not that kind of monster.

As for her doing marketing for a product that may take, according to one study, as long as five hundred years to decompose, here on the tail end of Earth’s sixth major mass extinction? It’s not like she invented the thing. She joined Chernobog four years ago, just out of business school, shortly before meeting Sabrina in an East Sac dive bar where someone had drawn an “E” on either side of the ATM sign in permanent marker, so instead of “ATM,” it read “EATME.”

Anyway, Clem’d never let work find out, but she hardly even drinks coffee, having always been more of a gas-station-energy-drink girl herself. Likes the color to be borderline radioactive. Likes feeling like her brain stem’s being pressed to a vibrating tuning fork at all times.

No, Clem’s job doesn’t make her a monster, either.

What does is the sharp twinge she feels as she steps into room 430B, the surprisingly chirpy decaffeination panelists already halfway through intros.

And what she finds when she looks down in the pain’s direction: the new finger sprouting from her clean left palm.

• • • •

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

So as not to fall off the edge of the world, the one-armed goddess Ulena hooked her sixth and final finger over the rocky ledge, and she held on.

The men who had chased her there and forced her off the terrific brink now stood over her, stomping on her hand until it was all swollen, bloody ribbons, until it bloomed white and orange—which was how gods like Ulena bruised, given their skin was naturally black and blue.

Soon, however, the men began to worry that by kicking the rocks so hard, they’d take the entire cliffside down, and themselves with it. So they decided to step back a bit, a skosh, a morsel, and shout and curse at Ulena from a comfortable distance. Shouting and cursing, they reasoned, was a kind of stomping, too. A stomping of the morale.

The men walked back the length of a young sapling, planning to wait Ulena out. After all, how long could a one-armed goddess, not even the favorite of her father Miro, delay the fall? But then the great blaze at the edge of the world shot up past where Ulena doggedly hung, and it burned the tips of the men’s hairy toes. And they thought, what’s a few steps more?

They walked back the length of a mid-sized maple, elbowing each other expectantly and fixing their gaze ahead. But then the great family of coyotes at the edge of the world howled, in tones so mad and insistent that the men’s ears began to bleed. And so, just to be safe, they took a few steps more.

The men had walked back the length of a giant sequoia when the great void at the edge of the world blinked, and their eyes gave out. Panic-stricken, they ran as far and as fast as they could from that place—which wasn’t very far, since they could neither see where they were going nor hear one another calling; and it wasn’t very fast, since their feet smarted horribly with every step.

And before anyone could do anything about it, the goddess Ulena pulled herself up.

Legend has it Ulena once had two arms—she was formed in the image of a mortal so that she could live among them—but she sacrificed the other arm to help the needful babies of the world. Right this very minute, Ulena’s second arm is cradling all the lonely ones, the stunned-quiet ones, the wailing ones whose cries were ignored. She is rocking them to sleep, shielding their eyes from the too-bright sun. She is bouncing them up and down and up and down. She is holding them just as they are.

Of course, there are a lot of needful babies in this world, which is why Ulena’s cradling arm is the stronger of the two.

The remaining arm—the one she uses to rescue herself from the men every few generations? Different generations, but still the same men? Oh, that one’s nothing to sneeze at.

• • • •

Clem’s first instinct is to get it removed. After everything with Sabrina these past few months, she’s gotten to be a level-five sweet-talker at Sutter Medical Center’s scheduling desk, and she figures she’ll be able to get in by the end of the week.

Hey, Pat. They put you on early shift this week, huh? Let me drop off a pack of our Almighty Mocha pods. They’re seasonal. Won’t be on shelves till next month. You know, gotta take care of our people.

It’ll be a simple thing. Half-hour on the table, localized anesthetic, then Clem can drive her own self home. Swing through the drive-thru on the way back for a pair of ten-piece McNuggets: their post-hospital sometimes-treat. Sabrina’s doctors ordered an unequivocal ix-nay on the ast-food-fay, but keeping morale up has to count for something, doesn’t it? Clem compromises with the austere dietitian in her head: fine, she’ll even get the creamy ranch sauce for Sabrina, since if you’re putting ranch on it, it’s basically a salad.

Clem’s always trying to come up with little jokes like that lately. Mood-lifters for when her girlfriend’s at her worst.

The night before Clem’s procedure, they’re watching one of the four home-makeover shows in their current rotation. It’s the one genre Sabrina can still lose herself in, reality without the reality: no danger of the screen flashing without warning to blood splatter or skeletal dogs wrecked with mange. Clem’s in her sleep shorts, the silky ones that Sabrina used to like so much, that she would bite at the waistband of and say with a purr would certainly, eventually, be the death of her.

Clem’s mulling over that phrasing—the death of her—and feeling nauseous when, suddenly, her right leg spasms and a finger pokes up from under the shorts’ scalloped hem.

Minutes later, another one. A few inches below the last, from the meat of her thigh.

Then, like aftershocks, a fourth spare finger emerges above the bone of her left wrist, a fifth in the crook of her right elbow, a sixth from the center of her right shoulder blade, pinned against the sofa’s sticky maroon faux leather. A seventh appears right next to the original spare on Clem’s left palm, flexing at its neighbor like inviting it in for the world’s freakiest pinky promise.

They’re all shorter and thinner than her real fingers. Most bend at a single knuckle. About half have nails.

When the makeover show is over—an old sorority house beautified the predictable way: warm black walls, custom light fixtures, several truckloads of monstera—Clem’s still going. When they count them up, Sabrina estimates she’s got as many fingers as the Sacramento Kings’ starting lineup.

“Maybe you should try out,” Sabrina says flatly, but a touch of wistfulness breaks through. She’s been in a state of near-zombification, like her body’s here but her brain’s still back in that doctor’s office, waiting for better news. “Sure can’t hurt.”

Clem has to take her word for it. While she’s part of the latest wave of transplants from the more expensive cities down south, Sabrina’s been getting her heart broken by the Kings since she was just a kid, wearing royal purple on school picture day ‘cause this’ll be the year.

Later, while Sabrina’s sleeping, Clem practices wiggling her new fingers, arranges the ones at her knee around the shape of a regulation-size ball. She’s surprised by their responsiveness, their pliability. How eager they seem to be a part of her. She’d be a workhorse, she lets herself dream, second string but scrappy. Instead of an inadequate girlfriend wielding cartons of factory-processed chicken. Instead of a professional landfill filler—those millions of pounds of single-use plastic pods.

Fantasies aside, Clem knows she’s outside the scope of tomorrow’s appointment. When she dials Sutter Medical to cancel, she has to remind herself to use her pointer finger and thumb.

• • • •

EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT ANGELS

When they hear the word “angel,” people think different things. Pretty much, they’re all wrong.

Maybe they picture a figure, perfect in the limited way that humans can conceive of—which is to say, perfect in the way of the Hollywood celebrity. Lean and soft in all the right places. Expertly styled with a white robe and halo. Two vast, strong wings glowing as if from the inside, dry-cleaned and air-fluffed, stage-lit, seams masked with sweat-proof Kylie Jenner-brand makeup.

Or: a roly-poly baby, bare bum, impossibly symmetrical ringlets, grinning gap-toothed from between hearts on your store-bought Valentine’s Day card. Its quiver full of those mini suction-cup arrows from the kids’ section of Dick’s Sporting Goods—a cartoon “pop!” when you pull them off.

Or how about the porcelain Christmas tree topper from every Lifetime movie? Fur-lined dress, chiffon ribbon over thirty feet of warm white LEDs? Precocious niece perched on someone’s shoulders to place it, almost falling—almost, almost—but not?

If there’s any truth to these depictions, it hardly matters; they’d be at the very bottom of the hierarchy of angels, anyway. I’m talking the first-year PAs of the heavenly realm, the ones running around taking box-lunch orders and getting the real gods hot refills of Chernobog PremiYumm™. Probably not the ones to call when what you need is a miracle.

Legend has it the real angels—the biblically accurate ones—look like dozens of gigantic interlocking golden wheels with hundreds of eyes around the outside. All sorts of eyes, with the zigzagging patterns of horseflies and the swiveling movements of chameleons and the nervous, rectangular pupils of goats. Attached to the wheels are wings, six at minimum but likely many more: at least two for flying and the rest for covering the angel’s face and feet, which themselves have never been documented.

There’s a lot we don’t know about angels.

Of course, everything we do know suggests they’re terrifying.

Some people call them seraphim, which translates to “the burning ones,” and they’re all about multiplicity: an abundance of parts. Wheels, eyes, wings in spades. More appendages than you could ever imagine. Yeah . . . Yeah. Those are the ones we want.

• • • •

For all of Chernobog’s Kool-Aid-drunk quarterly pep talks and routine corporate dysfunctions and the fact that some seventy percent of their products are presently under environmental review, they did let Clem start working from home to look after Sabrina, and you have to give them credit for that. Good thing then because it meant Clem’s boss couldn’t walk by to find Clem on hour two of googling the contraindications of vape pens to corticosteroids. And good thing now because it means nobody has to know about Clem’s sixty-third spare finger, jutting proudly from the side of her right hand.

Though they’d be thrilled about her increased productivity potential. If she could type a hundred words per minute with the standard ten fingers, just think what she should be able to do with her expanded set. How many brand-repositioning slogans might she have come up with, instead of the precisely two she actually had?

Chernobog Brew: The EPA Can’t Get Enough of Us—Neither Will You!

Or, better yet:

Coffee Pods for You, Space Pods to Transport Your Children to Safety on Another Planet

Draft zeroes, Clem reassures herself. It all starts with getting something down on paper.

She backspaces and tries again:

Please accept this notice as a formal letter of my resignation.

Again, she imagines a swift but frankly justified career change. A free solo climber with an unfailing grip. The only hairstylist capable of doing a dozen cuts at once. A pianist with twice the average finger span, never needing to hand-over-hand to hit that low, low C. As it stands, her repertoire ends at the mindless melody of “Heart and Soul”—but why not a completely different job? A massage therapist, a poker dealer, a pro gamer with a six-figure income. She’s a completely different person, after all, from the woman who stood in front of that bathroom mirror in Seattle only three weeks ago, second-guessing her decision to cut the shoulder pads out of her blazer in the hotel room the night before. She barely fits into that blazer anymore, all the fingers pushing up against the cheap rayon blend, the ones with nails scratching holes in the lining.

“We haven’t managed to grow anything like this before,” Sabrina quips from the armchair, drawing from her own shallow well of one-liners. She’s talking about their series of failed gardening projects: the tomatoes, the carrots, the radishes last fall. The cannabis leaves that burned under the grow lights a month after Sabrina’s diagnosis—and that was Clem’s first major breaking point, being unable to offer her girlfriend even that small relief.

Sabrina, more hopeful and less tired then, had taken Clem by the shoulders and said, “Babe, we’re downwind from Humboldt. The dispensary’s got a thousand times the selection for about one-thousandth the trouble. Plus, the guy who works there. What do you call that—the weed version of a sommelier?”

“A life saveur,” Clem had said, with her pathetic attempt at a French accent. And that’s when the mercy-joking to replace any conversations of substance began.

Still, Sabrina’s not wrong. Nothing they’ve tried to grow on purpose has flourished quite like what they’re growing now against their will: Sabrina, the tumors between her L2 and L4 vertebrae; and Clem, the fingers, well, basically everywhere.

And what’s it done for Clem? She can type faster, sure, albeit with more typos. Roll a coin across her knuckles a little while longer. Carry more of Sabrina’s pills out to her at once. Nothing that, ultimately, makes any difference.

For a long time, Sabrina wasn’t sleeping, was getting up every hour to rub Tiger Balm into the small of her back or stand under the shower, where the water was cold and she thought Clem couldn’t hear. But now the combination of pain meds and ergonomic pillows seems to have kicked in, and it’s Clem who’s up all night, trying to organize her body so she’s not bending her hip fingers backwards against the mattress. Trying to ignore the sensation of so many simultaneous protrusions, the way amoebas must’ve felt when they finally evolved into crabs.

Clem wonders: if she were to cut one of her fingers off right now, using the pliers from Sabrina’s sewing kit, would it grow back by this time next week?

Regeneration, she thinks it’s called, in crustaceans and insects.

An ad spot projects onto the inside of Clem’s skull—a nasty business-school habit. Mutant kids sprinting through a playground: a boy with grass-stained knees and five heads, a girl with a cacophonous laugh and fourteen arms. Flashback to the parents at their respective ultrasounds, exhausted but happy, chugging cup after cup of Chernobog’s PodGods™ brew.

Chernobog Brew: Evolved Coffee for an Evolved Species

Chernobog Brew: Drink More of It, Be Much (Much!) More of You

• • • •

IT’S ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL YOU ALTER EARTH’S LANDSCAPE IRREPARABLY

In Upstate New York, there is a group of eleven long, narrow, north-to-south-running lakes bookended by the towns of Syracuse to the east and Geneseo to the west. These are known as the Finger Lakes.

None is wider than three and a half miles across. That’s less than two hundred full-length basketball courts, probably less than the distance in sprints the Kings have to run after every gut-wrenching loss. From largest to smallest, the lakes are: Seneca, Cayuga, Keuka, Canandaigua—

“Can we skip this part?” Sabrina coughs, reaching for the cup of water the nurse left on her wheelie bedside tray. “They’re not paying you enough at work? You have to moonlight as marketing director for the Finger Lakes Tourism Bureau?”

Clem doesn’t say anything about her salary as it relates to Sabrina’s outrageous hospital bills. That was a joke for four months ago. Instead, she flashes what Sabrina’s dubbed her signature Oscar-the-Grouch scowl—“I guess you don’t want to hear about the historic village charm or the tours by wine train, either . . .”—and continues.

Legend has it the Finger Lakes were formed when Earth was still very young: too hot to host any living things, but not hot enough to be left out of the gods Miro and Mira’s game of Evadesphere.

“‘Evadesphere?”

“Quit interrupting.”

“Evadesphere, though.”

“Well, okay. Nobody knows what it was actually called. But the closest modern equivalent is dodgeball, so . . .”

“Evadesphere, got it. Very creative.”

“Anyway.”

Earth was the newest planet to pop up on Miro and Mira’s horizon, and the twins were excited to see how it threw. Jupiter was too big for them to palm comfortably, and Saturn’s trajectory tended to go wonky, as if anticipating it would one day tilt off its orbital plane and form all those rings. Asteroids and dwarf planets were fair game, too, but they were pretty puny, and the truth was that Miro was hoping for something with a bit more impact. Nothing that would hurt his sister, obviously. Just something that might knock some sense into her, shake her out of her latest mood. She had grown so distant lately. They’d been inseparable for as long as he could remember, maybe even for all of time—the only ones alike in the whole cosmos. Now she seemed perpetually distracted, as if dreaming of ways to leave him behind.

He was worried she’d abandon him for the boring things the grown-ups of their kind were always doing, like creating tiny mortal beings just to watch them live their blip-length lives then die. Watch them ruin their stupid little planets and die. Watch them try to save themselves and their worlds and one another, despite having already worked out, using their woefully reduced mental processes, that it was far too late.

If he didn’t do something, pretty soon Mira would be like the rest of them, watching four or five of these miserable species at once, flipping numbly between their tedious stories. She’d become a permanent spectator. She might never want to play with her brother again.

Evadesphere was the exact opposite—it was all-in, all-out participation. Action. Decision. The thrilling maneuvers Miro had to make to avoid an oncoming onslaught of moons. The sudden change in velocity when the orb he’d hurled got clipped by a shooting star.

Normally, when he chucked a planet across the black expanse, it was a solid body, or dense enough gas, properly cured over tens of millions of years. But Earth was still hot to the touch, molten goo churning beneath a seemingly sturdy surface, and when he gripped hard onto it, it was like dipping your hands into wet concrete. His fingers left long, narrow gashes in Earth’s crust. Gashes that would—many epochs later, when the landmasses had rearranged themselves several times and the planet’s atmosphere at last allowed for precipitation—eventually fill with water.

But Miro wasn’t thinking about any of that. He was in his ready stance, homing in on Mira where she floated on the other side of what would someday be called a galaxy, and noticing that she was looking the other way. He was breathing deep, he was winding up, wondering how he’d ever let go.

Legend has it Miro and Mira, like the rest of that early pantheon, had ten fingers on each hand. This accounts for the presence of ten of today’s Finger Lakes. Nobody knows where the eleventh came from.

• • • •

When Clem finally tells her parents, they say, Oh, yeah.

Just like that, they say, Oh, yeah.

She’s been putting it off, telling them, contacting them at all. Clem’s mom is of the homeopathic remedy camp, one of those people walking around wearing an infrared-light-therapy sun hat saying hospitals only make you sicker than you are. They live in the Finger Lakes region’s most crunchy-granola town, where, last Clem checked, her dad manages a team of mulish kid-genius engineers and her mom makes biodegradable earrings by pouring resin over actual fruit.

Clem’s mom’s enthusiasm for alternative medicine was fine when they were talking about Clem’s pollen allergies, ten times worse in California, or Clem’s dad’s periodic intolerance to grapes. It’s less productive now that Sabrina’s doctors are throwing around words like “stage two” and “stage three.” Clem doesn’t need her mom asking her to put Sabrina on the phone, just so her sick girlfriend can get another earful about the underreported benefits of reiki and burdock root. And Clem definitely doesn’t need the scolding reminder that, before she and her parents moved here, they lived in a country with near-medieval healthcare and rations so tight that Clem’s mom had to find all their medications on the black market—or figure out how to approximate them herself at home. AKA her mother’s superfood supervillain origin story.

One reason of many they’re better off with nine or ten U.S. states between them.

So when Clem mentions, as casually as she can, her recent, um, developments, she expects her mom to recommend a crystal sound bath. Instead, her parents sigh.

“What do you mean, ‘Oh, yeah’?” Clem’s pacing the living room in her loosest nightgown, chewing the dozen-plus fingernails on her left hand. Sabrina’s in the bedroom with the TV on, as of late having lost any tolerance she ever had for silence.

“They warned us it might grow back,” Clem’s mom admits, in a voice much farther away than the twenty-six hundred miles it actually is. “But we thought, after almost thirty years . . .”

“They?” Clem pinballs between the words pulling at her attention. “It?”

“Polydactyly,” her mom explains, “happens when a person—”

“I know what polydactyly is,” Clem snaps. Her mind flashes to videos of kittens with paws too big for their bodies, Sabrina’s squeals as she scrolled for what felt like a full hour—a good hour—through the hashtag #ExtraHelpingToeBeans.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Clem can practically hear her dad’s shrug. “It’s the first thing you do with babies,” he says. “Count the fingers and toes, make sure they add up. It wasn’t a decision. It was automatic.”

“You wouldn’t even call it an operation.” This from Clem’s mom, who once read a book on anti-inflammatory tinctures and probably thinks this makes her a board-certified surgeon. “When the finger is that small, they can cut off the circulation using a piece of . . . What’s it called?”

“Dental floss,” Clem’s dad finishes.

“Yes. Dental floss.”

Clem fights the image of waxed thread sawing pink skin. She doesn’t hate herself enough to try to explain to her parents the concept of a trigger warning. Not today, anyway. “So, the doctors—they said it was necessary?”

“Necessary? What’s necessary?” Clem remembers this about her dad, now: his gift for posing a question without leaving space for even a wisp of an answer. “Look at it from our perspective. As a parent, you want your child to have a normal life. Being different only makes things harder. Any sane person knows that. If you ever have children of your own, you’ll understand.”

Clem inhales sharply, and it takes that harsh rush of air for her to realize she hasn’t been breathing this whole time.

Sabrina isn’t Clem’s first girlfriend, isn’t even the first her parents have known about, and it’s been a long time since they’ve been explicitly critical of what they call her “dating preferences.” But little comments like this—a normal life, if you ever have children—and Clem’s instantly transported back to undergrad, home for a week of her dad’s famous spicy carrot salad and steamed dumplings, stumbling through the preamble to the preface to the prologue of her clumsy coming out.

As for the no-questions-asked finger amputation, which she was too young to have a say in: Clem wonders, if her newborn brain had been capable of stringing a sentence together, much less comprehending the concept of bodily autonomy, would she have asked to keep it? Or would she, too, like any sane person, have wanted it gone?

She counts all the parts of herself that she’s since excised to fit in. The severances she’s had total control over.

The two separate wardrobes she had in college: one for queer theory class and drag nights at Oasis and daily life at Berkeley, and the other one for home. So whenever she packed for winter break, her then-girlfriend would grab the nearest hairbrush and announcer-voice into it, “And here’s Clem Tsoi, wearing last season’s Disapproving Parents Capsule Collection!”

More recently, the way Clem’s had to surgically remove most of her moral code to do her job at Chernobog.

The way she’s had to surgically remove her feelings to do her job at home, be some kind of comfort for Sabrina.

“Where was it?” Clem mumbles low into the phone, flexing her left hand open and closed so her palm looks like an oyster, the fingers at its center two bizarre, overgrown pearls.

Her mom answers, “Your right hand, next to the little finger.”

“The technical term is pinky duplication,” her dad chimes in. “A tiny stump came back, actually. It’s fascinating. Apparently the body has an overwhelming impulse to regrow the nerve.” There are whispers Clem can’t quite make out, a rustle of fabric over the mouthpiece, then quiet.

“But—” He’s back on, sounding sheepish. “They removed that, too.”

Clem thinks about all the things that come back with a vengeance when you try to eradicate them. Weeds. Invasive insect species. Leg hair, her parents once told her, to discourage her from shaving like other preteen girls—though now that she’s more or less quit shaving, they’re quick to call that unhygienic and “I don’t know, Clementine, just not very nice.”

“Do you have a picture? Of the finger?” she asks them.

Her mom snorts. “Of course not.”

• • • •

THE BURNING ONES

At different times over the course of Earth’s history, polydactyls have been revered, feared, crowned, caged, immortalized on cave walls, burned at the stake. Ancient Peruvian and Mesoamerican civilizations believed that having extra digits meant a person was of divine descent, could trace their lineage back to the earliest gods. Archaeologists have discovered six-fingered effigies with feline faces, primitive water vessels in the shape of bird people and snake people from whose sandals poked fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, even eighteen toes.

A thousand years ago, the Pueblo people of what is now the southwestern United States decorated their homes with six-digit footprints.

Five hundred years ago, the Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sander proclaimed that Anne Boleyn had six fingers on her right hand—considered, like all so-called deformities, to be a mark of the devil. Because Boleyn liked to wear dresses with long, hanging sleeves, these accusations could never be confirmed, and they remain highly disputed today. Sander also wrote that Boleyn ordered her seamstresses to make her a dress covered in tongues, and that if you ever spoke ill of her, she’d have yours ripped out and stitched into the fine linen.

During the Salem Witch Trials, having extra digits was enough to get you sentenced to execution by fire, irrefutable proof of your guilt as a witch. So was having epilepsy. So was having two different colored eyes. If a baby was born with spare fingers or toes, wet nurses were instructed to discreetly bite them off before anyone—even the family—could see.

“Bet they couldn’t have guessed,” Clem looks up from her library book to joke, “that all my extras would make me the best hand-holder in town.”

Beside Sabrina’s bed, the patient monitor beats and clicks in a rhythm Clem imagines someone somewhere must’ve once found reassuring.

By now, Clem’s made almost entirely of fingers.

By now, Sabrina’s too bone-tired to respond.

• • • •

So as not to fall off the edge of the world, Clem slides down the bedroom wall and hooks all the fingers that can reach it into the high carpet pile. She’s trying, desperately, to anchor her body to the earth.

What Sabrina’s asking for is unthinkable. What Sabrina’s asking for, only a monster could do.

It’s been seven months since Clem’s first spare finger appeared, five since Sabrina’s last day at her job at the State Capitol, when she was sent home in a swirl of thank-you and get-well and sympathy cards, her coworkers unable to decide on a single, unified statement. It’s been two months since the night Clem smuggled an Oreo McFlurry into the oncology ward in her thermos and Sabrina gulped illicit spoonfuls between vitals checks while Clem told her the one about the eternal perseverance of the one-armed goddess Ulena.

There have been detox meal deliveries from Clem’s parents that both women agreed they wouldn’t feed a stray cat. Catalogs of headscarves for patients with hair loss. Calendars marked with color-coded appointments, a different specialist every day of the week.

There have been drinking games, Sabrina relegated to fruit-punch Pedialyte and Clem knocking back the same in stiff-lipped solidarity. “Take a shot,” Sabrina said, “every time one of them uses the phrase ‘extraordinary lengths.’”

There was the first round of radiation, the second. The radioactive seed they implanted—a half-court Hail Mary—directly next to one of the tumors on L3. Yes, there was even the burdock root. There was Sabrina, achy and covered in bruises, hating to be touched; and Clem, good for only one thing. One great big sensory organ designed for touching.

When they hear the word “angel,” people think different things.

At one point, Sabrina said angels looked like rosy-cheeked babies with little feathery wings. Now she says they look like mercy.

Mercy, she swears, is what it means to be an angel.

She says it softly, when Clem thinks she’s opioid-drip dozing, then abruptly, in the middle of a sentence, when visiting hours are almost over and they’re making a final concerted effort to talk about something, anything, else. She says it over and over, as if it’s the one solid truth holding up her molten core. It sounds to Clem like an invocation, or like the worst slogan she’s ever heard.

Mercy.

And: “I just want to be completely free of them, when I go.”

Well, there’s no tool like Clem for that job.

In Upstate New York, there is a group of eleven long, narrow, north-to-south-running lakes, and Clem could fill every last one of them if she only had the luxury of letting herself cry.

Instead, she peels herself up off the floor and walks to the bathroom, the fingers that stick out from her sides tapping a little rhythm on the doorframe as she goes. She grabs the plastic container of nail polishes off the counter. Won’t meet her own eyes in the mirror, because this Department of Waterworks has got to stay closed.

Nine Inch Nail Salon is the main event on Sabrina’s last-day wish list, along with a twenty-piece Chicken McNugget and a triple-shot vanilla latte with actual caffeine. It’s been a tradition since their fourth date, though it took another year or so for Sabrina to give it that name. “Manicures that bring you closer to God,” she declared, drawing her hand through the air between them as if writing the salon’s tagline in lights. Even now, Clem has to admit it’s way better than anything she ended up pitching for the Chernobog rebrand. Not that she’s invested. Once Sabrina doesn’t need the health insurance, Clem’s for real going to quit.

Sabrina’s in her armchair. Clem passes her the polishes, then settles cross-legged at her girlfriend’s bare feet.

Sabrina picks a sparkly mint green for her fingers and an obnoxious construction-zone orange for her toes. Clem’s slow and methodical, though they both know she could get this thing over with in a matter of minutes if she wanted. She holds the bottle between two fingers, painting each of Sabrina’s nails one at a time—more layers than strictly necessary, more than any real nail tech would recommend. She wipes runaway green off Sabrina’s cuticles after each application. Exhales lightly to blow them perfect and dry.

“Okay,” Clem says when she’s done and can’t put it off any longer. They turn together toward the container of polishes, as if it has the answer.

Then Sabrina surprises Clem with: “Your turn.”

Clem shakes her head no. Because Sabrina’s supposed to be taking it so easy, not overexerting herself by performing physical labor and inhaling even more solvent fumes. That’s the stage they’re at now, the conditions under which she was allowed to bring her girlfriend home.

Besides, Clem’s the kind of client even a professional in full health would turn away.

Sabrina reads her mind. “Oh, come on. This is the last affordable manicure you’ll ever get. Can you imagine what they’d charge you at a real salon?”

“Affordable, huh?” Clem laughs. “Not free?”

Sabrina taps her cheek and Clem stands to pay up, mildly aware of the finger fighting to wriggle out from the corner of her mouth.

Clem estimates this’ll take forever.

How long it actually takes is six days.

They stop for frequent, leisurely breaks—to eat, to sleep, to watch already-watched episodes of home-makeover shows about empty nesters turning their grown kids’ bedrooms into extravagant home theaters and art studios. At times, Sabrina can barely hold the bottle. Keeps shaking and dropping it to the floor, so that over time the dark hardwood around the armchair becomes dotted with pools of silver polish, like stars glimmering in an unfeeling sky.

“Let me help,” Clem insists.

And Sabrina says, “You are.”

While Clem’s nails dry, she tells Sabrina the one about Anne Boleyn, mother of the last monarch of the House of Tudor, and her dress made of traitorous tongues, as if it’s the first time.

She tells Sabrina the one about the ATM sign in a seedy bar in East Sacramento. Because Clem needs to know if her girlfriend will recognize it as more than myth or fable or collective history—as something belonging special to them. It’s a test to find out if Sabrina’s really as clear-headed as she says she is. Clear-headed enough to be making this call.

“Eat me,” Sabrina interrupts, and all of a sudden she’s that same girl again, slinging her vegan leather jacket onto the back of the barstool and chastising Clem—“That Chernobog Brew? The one that’s basically killing the planet?”—in a way that sounded so much like a pickup line.

Clem’s nails are purple and silver, a tribute to Sabrina’s Kings. She remembers her standoff with the touchless faucet in the Seattle Convention Center. “It sounds like an invitation to a vampire,” she mutters.

Sabrina smiles sadly. “Maybe it is.”

On the seventh day, Sabrina takes the morphine the doctors prescribed her.

Clem’s breathing deep, Clem’s winding up, wondering how she’ll ever let go.

When Clem digs her many digits in, she can’t believe how natural it comes. She’s clung to Sabrina like this before, she reminds herself—those government-work pencil skirts always so tricky, in the inland heat, to shimmy off. But, no. It’s more than that. It’s like she was built for this precisely, each fingertip a homing pigeon programmed to find the rot. And where her will falters, her fingers never do, clawing through skin and tissue, circumnavigating ligament and bone, until she’s found every last one of the malignant places and scooped the tumors loose. It’s not an exact one-to-one ratio—Clem stopped counting her new growths long ago—but each one does its part as she whirls around, angling her ruined body to reach into Sabrina’s own.

They lift out easily, back through the tunnels from whence she came, like that cooking competition show Clem saw once, when they were still watching those: the chef extracting an enormous fish’s spinal column in one neat pull. And they feel nothing like she expected. They’re hard and angular like she imagines an asteroid might be, or some tiny, still-forming planet sailing through the cosmos eons ago. Struck by a sensation adjacent to euphoria, Clem wonders briefly if she’s catching some of Sabrina’s morphine secondhand. She feels the closest she’s ever felt to something she has no name for—something she’s always assumed trotted up to other people wearing a helpful, jingling tag.

Then her girlfriend’s head drops forward, onto her shoulder, and Clem’s far away again.

Already, she’s trying to think of this as just another story. She could do that once, couldn’t she? Reposition. Make poison palatable, and herself presentable, and earthbound things fly. In some past life when she was only human, and powerless to do anything else.

Clem holds what’s left of Sabrina, now. Tells it as best she can.