I’ve got twenty-eight bones in each of my hands. I felt absolutely sure there was something wrong with my hands; they never worked the way I thought they should. All my life I had dreamed of hands I could use. I wanted to hold people. I wanted to build fires. I wanted to go swimming. But with my big, clunky hands, I couldn’t do any of those things. I sat at home. I sat on my hands. I waited for the extra bone to fuse with its neighbor. It was, of course, wasted time.

So I fixed the problem myself. I opened up my hands. I split skin from muscle from fascia. I peeled each hand, like slaughtered bananas, and once the bone was out in the open- and let me tell you, bone is not quite as pearly, smooth and glimmering as you would imagine, in fact it is grey and spongy. And there, right below the metacarpals, was a large flat oval, gleaming in its superfluousness. So I pulled it out. Like cracking my knuckles, I pulled each finger’s support from its socket, and lifted the extra, nameless chunk of calcium out of its pocket. Then I pulled the muscle and skin back up over my fist, trimmed the extra skin and sewed it all back up.