She could pop the joint, explore the angles of the knuckle, idly pare the nail. It was the nail-paring that alerted her to the "presence" of another. Thumb.
Another thumb.
On her left hand, where to the casual witness there would appear to be four parallel digits, Berkley Hedgerow felt a near fin, a fan of phalanges, and damn she could play that twelve-finger rag; had Waller on a platter and Joplin in the bag. So she wasn't having a bad time about it. It was probably the opposable toes that first brought back that same frustration which caused her to chew off her thumb in the first place. She was powerless to realize the Chimp-Toe Boogie she has effortlessly audiated after discovering her phantom toes. She felt clumsy, unsure without the support of a radial digit.
Without a revolving axis, a revolutionary axis, what influence could she have? Only the most shallow of significance: direct approach, phallic, astrologically masculine. A severed thumb. As if she had become her missing piece, a mere ghost.
But this orbital axis, made the more important by Galileo's etymological contribution, was that about which her attention revolved. The axis would reorient itself, with some regard to her Cartesian planes, without regard to Berkley's desires or cognitive limits. It paralleled her spine, and spun, and new limbs sprang from her body, new, truly new, unjointed or many-jointed, strong or weak or anostic, moving or frozen like some Hindu ikon. The thumb was only just beyond a novelty, the toes a cause for rejoice, the invention of the axis a cause for rebirth... The axis spins and shifts, appendages bloom, and this linear obsession is reduced to an origin: a single point from which the anemone frame of her body was able to bloom. And Berkley only one of--
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