Member-only story
Of Severed Arms and Sesame Street
How a residency in Maine healed a lonely heart
1.
Hours before most arrive, I find a severed plaster arm lying on a stump by a gravel parking lot.
It’s a handsome arm: realistic fingers naturally at rest, though the index finger has also chosen freedom. I pocket the finger as I pick up the arm, attempting to descry the body to which said arm belongs.
I hoist the arm to my shoulder like a hunter with a gun — this thing is heavier than it looks. Must be the rebar inside, a piece of which pokes out where a shoulder should be.
My circumspection proves naught for armless statuary, so I sigh and pat the sun-baked bicep, then toss it into my Outback’s trunk. It will prove a nice curio for my mantle at home.
2.
Campus is beyond beautiful. There aren’t dormitories so much as there is a conglomeration of large, friendly cabins. There aren’t quads and sidewalks and halls so much as there are verdant gardens and meandering pathways to stately buildings or the Atlantic Ocean. I would have thoroughly enjoyed spending my six undergrad years (yes, six — remove thy plank from thine own eye first, please) on a campus like this.
