At Thirty-Five, I Grew Eight Arms

When Lin Man was thirty-five years old, he had six extra hands. Not a medical miracle, not a supernatural awakening. I woke up one morning and found three extra pairs of nails under my shoulders. It was time to cut my nails, but the gaps were clean. Her first reaction was not to scream, but to stuff her hands back into the quilt - because her husband was snoring next to her, her six-year-old daughter was shouting at the door that her pants were wet, and she had to call her work at 8:20 to ask for leave. Are eight hands useful? It works. It took forty minutes to mop the floor, and the two-day work at the workplace was completed in half a day. My daughter was able to tie two braids of the same height at the same time. A bag of oranges rolled on the floor in the supermarket. She picked it up in three seconds. The old lady praised her: "Girl, you have such skillful hands." Her mother scolded her for being in a hurry since she was little. In thirty-five years, this was the first time someone praised her for her skill. There are too many hands. She couldn't put on her clothes and couldn't sleep. Her colleagues in the office stared at her sleeves. The neighbors downstairs started knocking on the door to ask for help. The work unit piled piles of work on her desk. No one asked her if she was tired, because "you are fast". What's even worse is that they move on their own. Knocking on the quilt in the middle of the night, knocking over the bowls on the dinner table, and wiping away her tears before she even noticed. They seemed to know things she didn't dare to do. Later she learned that she was not the only one with many hands. Some people are listening to sounds from five directions, some people have not slept for twenty years, and the people on the list are disappearing one by one. Alienation is never a disease——