Parts and Halves

My grandmother is a part-swapper, my mother is a part-swapper, and I’m a part-swapper too. Most folks come to us knowing exactly what they’re willing to give up for what they want. For example, we might see a soccer player looking to trade any small appendage, ideally not on her foot, for a big toe. And then in comes a guitarist looking for a pinky finger who could care less about what’s under his shoes. Things tend to work themselves out like that around here.

We live in a stall between two vending machines, my grandmother and my mother and me. The machine on the left sells cheap, artificial parts, like wax skin tissue and marzipan ears, for clients who can’t afford our commission. The machine on the right sells chai.

The body-fixers live in the room down the hall. Every hour on the hour, a client goes into their room with some broken part. Some come back out fully repaired and beaming. Others, who have a part broken beyond fixing, come right up to our stall and seek a trade. Most times, we’ll harvest their part on the spot, my grandmother, my mother, and me.

Sometimes things don’t go as planned and a client becomes unfixable. That’s when the Hustler arrives with his empty yellow bag and walks right into the body-fixers’ room. He leaves with his yellow bag thumping across the floor. I like seeing him because he gives me a wink when he passes the stall, like we’re only two people in the world who know what really goes on here. 

Every once in a while, the Hustler stops by to pick up some chai. He makes pleasant small talk while he sips, like what’s the going rate for a nose this week or you ladies care to put a handsome face on the market? All the other workers walk right by us, my grandmother and my mother and me, like we’re just another part of the building. 

One day, a client is wheeled on a cart out of the elevator surrounded by a gaggle of men in black suits. My mother covers my eyes when she sees me staring. She often treats me like I’m still a child, even though my parts are ripe for trade. 

I peek between her fingers to stare at the client’s face as he rolls past the stall. His eyes are dark and smooth-lidded like mine. The right one dangles out of its socket and oozes pink down his cheek. The other stares back at me, surprised, like it’s not used to anyone looking straight into it. I hold his half-gaze until he’s disappeared into the body-fixers’ room. 

A few minutes later, the Hustler emerges. He walks up to the stall.

“I need to speak with you,” he says. “A very important customer has requested to trade for your right eye.” 

“I can’t,” I tell him. “We’re banned from swapping parts by the parts-manager, who makes all the decisions for us workers from the top floor. They do all the hard thinking so we don’t have to.”

“Luckily for us,” the Hustler says, “the one-eyed client is so monied that the parts-manager has decided to make an exception just this once.” The Hustler points up at the ceiling. He says there’s a hallway on the next floor up, bigger and better in every way imaginable. Hundreds of clients are up there waiting for someone to facilitate their trades. The stranger will sponsor a permit that allows us to work upstairs, where we can make deals at a more profitable scale. 

“I don’t have any problems with this floor, personally,” I tell him, but my mother tugs at my sleeve and whispers something into my ear. 

“You can swap every part besides the heart,” she says. It’s her favorite thing to say, even if it’s not strictly true. You can swap every part besides the uterus. But I know it means she thinks it’s a good deal.

I nod at my mother, she nods at the man, and he nods down at all of us. He takes a sleeping potion pack out of his pocket, punches a straw through its hole, and hands it to me. I swallow while I take one last two-eyed look around me. My grandmother’s hands, the Hustler’s yellow bag, the backs of my eyelids folding the world shut.

* * *

When I wake up, the Hustler is sitting by me on the ground, staring hard. “How are you feeling?” he asks. I cup the hollow socket in my face, then un-cup. I stare hard back.

“I feel like, for the first time, I’m really seeing you,” I say. I describe what I see. The left side of their body is the Hustler I know, but the right side—well, the right side has half a pair of thick red lips, braids falling to one expensive-looking breast, and a big black mole on their right cheek. A tiny nub of hard flesh peeks out from the slit between their legs. 

I know what I’m looking at as soon as I see it. On one side, there are the parts the Hustler wear on their body. On the other, the parts hidden underneath. And I don’t mean the liver. I mean, the parts they wish they had. The ones that, if it weren’t for all the rules and costs, they’d come up to the stall and trade for in two heartbeats.

“That sounds like a beautiful body,” the Hustler says. “A perfect body.” They look down at their lap and laugh painfully.

Around us, my grandmother and my mother pack up the stall for our move to the next floor. They wrap fingernails in cellophane, stuff organs into ice. My mother says she’s proud of me. She can’t wait to start our new, better life. My grandmother just snorts.

I watch them closely as they move. Half of my grandmother has become my mother, and half of my mother has become me. I don’t find either of their new halves particularly surprising. I was once part of my mother’s body, after all, and I know there’s no such thing as a completely clean break of a part from its whole. It makes sense, then, that some chunk of me is still hidden somewhere deep inside of her. 

* * *

The next floor turns out to be pretty much the same as our old one, only slightly bigger. The linoleum tiles on our old floor were the same length as my foot. The new ones are a foot plus a pinky. We earn trade commissions at a one hundred and twenty-five percent higher rate than the old one, and we work an hour extra in the morning and an hour extra in the evening. But the biggest change is my doubled vision.

“You wouldn’t believe the wants these people wear,” I tell the Hustler one night over chai. I point at a young adult waiting in the hallway. “There’s an extra hand jutting out from her right wrist. Is she a pianist wanting a wider reach? A finger-painter seeking five more brushes?” 

“No,” says the Hustler. “She’s a missed business opportunity.” 

“On the highest floors,” they say, “clients are allowed to buy parts they want but don’t need.” They lower their voice. “We could do it here, too.”

They open their yellow bag. A whole arm, shoulder to fingernail, spills onto the ground. Its thumb presses lightly onto the back of my leg. I whistle loud and slow. “You could get half a heart for an arm that nice.”

The Hustler tells me their job is to bring unfixable clients down to the basement where they feed the Belly. It’s a waste of perfectly good product. If only they knew of some part-swappers who could make quick work of them. Also, an especially discerning salesperson who can see what a client really, truly desires.

I look over to my mother. She’s sharpening a pair of culling shears in the corner. Dark bags droop from her eyes. The price of chai up here is nearly double our old floor. 

“How would this work, exactly?” I ask the Hustler.

* * *

There are many ways to cull a part from its body. That night, when the Hustler brings their yellow bag of unfixables for harvest, my mother uses a pair of culling shears. At a press of a button the sheers freeze the area around the part, snip it off, and package it in a neat gel cube.

My grandmother prefers the old-fashioned way. She uses an ice-blaster to freeze the skin. Then, a pair of scissors if it is a part that curves out like a nose, or a spoon, if it curves in like a belly button. 

After the harvest is over, my mother mops guts off the floor. I stack the harvested parts in the backroom, and my grandmother wipes down the tools. 

“New floor, same shit,” she grumbles while she works. My mother shushes her. “We should be grateful for this opportunity,” she says. She says it too loud, like she’s trying to make herself believe it too.

The next morning, when a monied client comes to the stall seeking a set of gums for her auntie, I know what the client really wants. She wears a stubby smooth arm on her left, a wooly long one on her right. 

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I whisper to her while my grandmother handles the auntie. “We have a special offer on limbs today.”

She leaves the stall holding her auntie’s rotting gingiva between new, hairy fingers.  

* * *

As business expands, we set aside parts for the Hustler’s transformation. Each part we add, I watch the dead half of my friend shrink and the true one takes its place.

We also invest in better equipment for culling, more backroom shelving, and business cards. We buy a permit that licenses the next three generations of our family to swap parts on the new floor. “This is what it means to leave a legacy,” my mother tells me. I’ve secured the future of the stall for my daughter and her daughter and her daughter’s daughter too.

One night, the Hustler arrives, bag empty. They pick up a culling spoon and look at their face’s reflection in its bowl. They ask, “How do I look?”

  For the first time since I lost my eye, both halves of the Hustler are identical. One pair of thick red lips, two symmetrical expensive-looking breasts. The only exception is a mole on their right cheek.

“You look like you,” I say, smiling. “What’s next?”

“I’ve gotten all this place can offer me,” they say. “It’s time to move on.” They pause, look down at their heels. “If you want, you could come with me,” they add. 

“I want to,” I say. “But my grandmother and mother couldn’t live apart from me.” 

“I thought you might say that,” they sigh. “How about you take my job and keep the business going? I can show you the ropes during my next round.” 

I nod, and they walk out of the stall, leaving the culling spoon behind. I pick it up and stare at my face, stretched long onto its bowl. Two eyes blink back at me under creaseless lids. I pass my finger cleanly through the eye I imagine, my socket pulsing with want. 

* * *

This is how the Hustler and I feed the Belly. We gather the unfixable bodies from the body-fixers’ room, then drag them to the stall for my grandmother and mother to harvest. Then, we drag the yellow bag to the elevator and ride it all the way down past an uncountable number of floors.

When we reach the basement, the Hustler slides the grille doors open. I step into the Belly. It’s so big I can’t see where the cavity ends on the other side, if it ends at all. By our feet lies a pink pool of digestive juice churning with decayed parts. Islands of bones and organs, drifting in a sea of forgotten flesh.

One by one, we dump each unfixable out of the bag and roll them into the waves. When we’re done, we wipe our hands on the yellow bag. 

“That’s it?” I ask. 

“That’s it,” the Hustler says. 

We turn to the red waves rolling around us. My halved vision kicks into overdrive as I watch the unfixables sink, part by part. Everywhere I look, I see the parts their bodies long for. A brown torso bobs, still and heartless on one half, pulsing and whole-ribbed on the other. An infant glares at me with a single unblinking eye. 

My belly gurgles and I’m suddenly aware of how tired my bones are. It’s exhausting, to look at things both the way they are and the way they could be. I hurl my insides into the pink soup. The Hustler holds the small in my back and hums in healing tones.

“It gets better with time,” they say. 

“That’s easy for you to say,” I say. “Time’s letting you leave.”

Back in the elevator, I want to ask the Hustler if they think what I do is unforgivable. I mean, to see what someone wants most in this world and use that desire to help myself. But too quickly we reach the floor and it’s time to say goodbye. 

I don’t quite know what to say. I want them to stay forever. I also want them to leave and never come back. I end up just getting out without saying anything at all, holding the yellow sack over my shoulder.

The Hustler blows a kiss as the door shuts between our faces. The elevator starts to shudder upward. We wave until we can’t see each other anymore. Then I turn and hustle back to the stall, pushing past my mother and grandmother into the backroom. The door locks itself behind me.

I throw the yellow bag beside the bucket of pickled eyes sitting on the ground. I try to squeeze an eye in my empty socket, take it out, try another. None of them match the size of the hollow quite right. They’re too small, or too big, or the wrong shape entirely. 

I stick an eye on my forehead instead. I add another to my dimple, my Adam’s apple, the bottom of my left heel. I can see from so many perspectives at once that I can’t make sense of what I’m looking at. I spin in circles, giggling. I fall to my belly and lay there unmoving. My body is a garden, ripe for harvest, an endless supply of parts. 

I’m still lying down when my grandmother busts the door down. My mother follows close behind. She covers both of her eyes when she sees me, like I’m seeing too much for the both of us. 

“The Hustler’s gone,” I tell them.

My grandmother plucks an eye off my butt and sits me on our bedroll. My mother stalks back and forth across the small room, raving her worries at the wall. “Where will we get unfixables to cull from now? How will we ever become monied enough to get your eye back from the stranger who took it from you?” 

“No,” I say. “You and Grandmother took my eye.” She goes quiet when I say that. I pick the yellow bag off the floor and rip it into two clean halves. My mother sits by me and rests her head on my shoulder. She helps me rip the bag halves into halves again.

Pressed between my mother and my grandmother, it feels to me like there are other women sitting beside us who I cannot see, women from other floors, women who came before us, women who will come after. I imagine we are all growing more unruly by the minute, more unwilling to do the work we’ve been ordered to do. Soon we will take the elevator down to the lowest floor. We will dive into the Belly and surface with all the unfixables on our backs. We will fix them up, piece by piece, give them what they wish for with stolen parts from monied bodies.  

My grandmother reaches out and touches my covered socket. A wetness dribbles out of it. My grandmother and mother’s faces are streaked in wet, too.

“You know, I’d trade my own uterus to make you whole again,” my mother says. I look over at her. “Who in their right mind would trade an eye for a uterus,” I ask her.

Hand in hand we walk out to the front of the stall and sit down. If the Hustler were to walk down the hall today, they might see us sitting there still, spoons in hand, ready to scoop back up what’s ours.