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yet? Did you forget that’s what this story was about?)
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    (Me: I was just getting there. You can’t just start off a story about missing arms without the proper context. Apparently.)
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    I finally went to sleep at three a.m., woke up a few hours later to take Hailey to school, and then crawled back in bed for a quick nap. It was lovely, but at nine thirty the alarm I’d set on my phone went off. I tried to reach over to turn it off, and that’s when I realized that my left arm was missing.
    And I thought, “Well, that’s odd.”
    But then I looked over at my arm and was like, “Wait, no, there it is.”
    It was flung awkwardly over my head and was completely numb because Hunter S. Thomcat was lying on it and had cut off the circulation. I threw my shoulder toward the phone and Hunter grudgingly rolled over, but my arm just fell forward, zombielike. My hand almost grazed the phone but I couldn’t get my fingers to work enough to hit the snooze button. I glared furiously at my fingers like I was trying to telekinetically move an inanimate object, except that the inanimate object was my own hand. The alarm got louder and so I tried to prop myself up with my other arm but I ended up just flopping around like a fish out of water because my other arm was pinned behind me AND WAS ALSO ASLEEP. This has never happened to me before and it seemed such an astronomically weird coincidence that I started to worry that I was accidentally in some sort of partial coma that only affects arms. Or maybe I’d been selectively paralyzed, but that seemed unlikely since most people who’ve been paralyzed say “I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS” rather than “My arms stopped working.”
    Hunter walked around to stare at me like “Why aren’t you turning off that noise? What is wrong with you? ” which was very unhelpful. I managed to Frankenstein myself up into a sitting position and kept tossing my helpless arms near the snooze button, but it wouldn’t work and it got louder and louder and I could hear Victor angrily stomping toward the bedroom, yelling, “Oh my God, ARE YOU STILL IN BED ?” I didn’t want to tell him that not only was I still in bed but also my arms weren’t even awake yet, and so I panicked and quickly rolled off the edge of the bed to hide behind it. Obviously I wasn’t thinking straight because I forgot that I didn’t have arms to help catch me and so I landed facedown with a dull thud and that’s when I realized how helpful it is to have working arms. You never think to appreciate your arms until you need them to stop the floor from punching you in the face.
    Hunter S. Thomcat looked over the edge of the bed at me quizzically, as if to say, “What in the hell are you doing? Is there food down there?” and he dropped to the floor beside me to check it out. Victor burst in, yelling, “WHY IS YOUR ALARM BLARING? SOME OF US ARE ON CONFERENCE CALLS, YOU KNOW,” and I heard him huff and switch off the alarm.
    I looked at Hunter like, “Shhh. Say nothing and we’ll be fine,” and he stared back at me like, “What do you mean ‘ we ’?”
    Victor paused and I saw his feet moving toward the bathroom, where he looked for me, and then he came back in and was like, “ WHERE ARE YOU? ” but I stayed quiet and waited for him to leave so I could sneak out to my desk and pretend I’d been up for hours. My plan would have worked perfectly if Hunter hadn’t decided to jump onto my hip so he could peer over the side of the bed and look at Victor like, “Why are you people doing this? Is this a game?”
    Then Victor walked around the bed and sighed, and I said, “NO ONE’S IN HERE,” but it sounded muffled because of the floor. He accused me of hiding from him rather than working and I said, “ No, actually , I’m