In the morning, Moira finds rot down to her fingertips. This is no surprise: it has been three months of tingling former-nerves, lotions to stave off the march of decay. Now, like an opera glove in black and blue and yellow, like fingers and palm pressed into ink, she confronts the evidence of inevitability in the bathroom mirror.

Fuck this, Moira says to herself. "Fuck this!" she says to the mirror, and goes to call her boss and pour some liquor in her morning coffee. She'll be late to work today.

The skill saw is buried in the second drawer under other sundries: the battery is dead. She props it against the narrow sink pedestal with one hip, wrestles with the plug for her hair drier, gives up, drops it onto the floor. Slams the drawer shut with her leg, dumps the unplugged saw into the basin of the sink, and takes another good look at her arm.

It hasn't made the elbow yet: fresh clean flesh there. Well, fine. She digs a turquoise bag out from the shelving above the toilet, sits it there, on the lid.

Five minutes of annoyed, avoidant ritual of bustling about fetching things, adjusting her setup, changing into some stained sweatpants and t-shirt instead of her night robe, she sits on the edge of the tub, arm tied off with a prayer strip, smoking a joint with the other.

She stubs out the joint, sets to work.

The bathroom is absolutely trashed when she's done with the saw and the remnants are in the tub, where she is resolutely not looking after rinsing everything off. The prayer strip glows like the heart of a forge on her arm, keeping everything - fine, more or less.

Moira rummages through the turquoise bag. Another curse - she's low. Should have gone shopping.

From there, she pulls a collection of battered old radio antennas by the fistful from the mess, slots them into place at the elbow, where they bucket together noisily before slipping more into form. One-handed, she knocks the top off a bottle of lotion, and things begin to take more of a productive bent.

Fifteen minutes later, bag tilted over onto the floor, moss and flowers packed into the new arm, Moira leans over the sink, wraps an ace bandage around the whole lot. Closes fat, fabric-wrapped fingers of the new hand around the faucet, turns the dripping stream off, smears a washcloth ineffectually at the droplets of decay and herbs, and this and that.

Outside of the bathroom, in that dim apartment beyond, the radio is talking about the sky being due to fall over the weekend, a plague of maybe-locusts, bad for the skin. An advertiser tells that frequency of a new cream that solves embarrassing limbrot: check with your doctor today!

Moira drops the skillsaw into the tub with the dead prayer strip. Cleaning up the rest is a problem for Moira-after-work, after another couple centimeters from the whiskey bottle.

She slams the bathroom door on the way out with her bandaged hand, and heads to work.