Page 75 of This Darkness Mine

“Wait, do you get half off on pedicures?” Layla asks, and I whack her on the arm. “Ow! What? She said she’s over it.”

“Want to hear something cool?” Brandy asks.

“Yes,” Layla and I say at the same time.

“So I sleepwalk, like, a lot,” Brandy says. “And after the amputation it was this big problem. Dad lined the floor around my bed with pillows every night, because I’d forget I had only one foot, and I’d try to get out of bed in my sleep.”

“Sucks,” Layla says, but Brandy shakes her head.

“I only fell a few times before my brain figured it out. So now I put my foot on in my sleep. Except once I put it on backward and it got stuck, and we had to go to the ER. That was not awesome.”

“How did you even explain that?” Layla asks.

“Wait, so even in a semiconscious state you knew to put your foot on?” I ask, redirecting the conversation before they start trading ER stories, which I’ve learned can quickly become a thing in the cardiac center.

“Yeah, I guess it’s kind of like people putting on clothes before they walk outside even when they’re sleepwalking. They just know.”

“Does it hurt?” Layla asks. “Like your . . . I don’t know, do you call it a stump?”

“Yeah, stump,” Brandy says. “It doesn’t hurt so much, no. But my foot still does sometimes, which isn’t so bad. But the itching makes me crazy.”

“Itching?” Layla sits up. “The foot that isn’t there can itch still? And you can’t scratch it, like ever? That is the literal worst.”

“Yep,” Brandy says. “The doctors tried to explain it to me. Basically what happens is my brain still gets signals from that foot, even though it’s not there. So sometimes it’ll hurt, or itch, or burn. It took a while for insurance to come through with my fake foot, so they tried mirror therapy for me first.”

“Explain mirror therapy,” I say.

“So, it’s like a box,” Brandy says, rolling the tray table over to put it in between her and us. “And there’s an opening on each side, and one on the top. If you’ve got your right hand, you stick it in that hole, okay?”

She pretends to stick her right hand into the imaginary box and we both nod.

“And the inside of the box has mirrors facing each other, so if you’re missing your left hand and it itches, you stick your right hand in there and look down through the top and your brain sees two hands and you scratch the one that looks like your left hand.”

“How does that work?” Layla asks.

“It’s a mirror image,” I tell her. “It tricks your brain into seeing the reflected image of your right hand, which it believes is the missing left. Then you scratch the hand you’re missing and your brain gets the visual signal that the itch has been scratched.”

“Thanks, nerd, I got that part,” Layla says. “I’m saying how do you scratch any hand at all if you’re missing the other one?”

“Oh, um . . .” I look to Brandy, who shrugs.

“I don’t know. I always just stuck my foot in it.”

“Wait, so if my left tit is bigger than my right and I stick it in there will my brain think I have two big tits?” Layla asks.

“Neither one of your tits is bigger than anything,” Brandy says.

“Plus you wouldn’t be able to look into the top window anyway,” I tell her.

Layla puts both her hands in the air and sighs. “You two are killing my dreams.”

“Once I got the prosthetic it kinda worked the same way,” Brandy goes on. “My eyes see me scratching my right foot and thinks it’s taken care of.”

“So your brain was still getting signals from your missing limb? That’s why it would itch?” I ask Brandy, trying to get back on topic.

“Yeah.” She nods, her hand subconsciously dropping to her foot to give it a scratch. “It’s called phantom limb syndrome.”

Medicine can’t explain why a phantom limb itches in the night, fingers scratching for skin that isn’t there. They don’t know how to silence the burn in a foot that doesn’t exist, the tingle in a hand rotting elsewhere. There is no answer for how a muscle not attached to the body can cramp, causing familiar pain in a limb long estranged from its owner.