GEPPETTO'S BRIDE

Just twenty-seven bones make up the human hand. From our fingertips down to each crescent spur of wrist, we hold just twenty-seven bones in all. Combine both hands, and you get the number fifty-four. A significant figure, fifty-four’s a deck of cards and all the tools you need to deal it.

Magnus was a good engineer, but he had the sort of poker-face that made relationships difficult. You just couldn’t read him, and in twenty-seven years nobody had stuck around long enough to really try to. People just assumed he was married to his work.

In Magnus’s trade, good was great, but still fell shy of God: you see, even with the blueprints poking from his shirt-cuffs, Magnus couldn’t create a pair of hands with less than sixty moving parts. His imitations were heavy, clumsy, felt strange to interlink one’s fingers with.

Almost perfect.

And hands were important. Hands reciprocated your touch. Held you when you needed holding. Brought you coffee, made you eggs. Dragged you up when you were low.

There was a reason prayer occupied two hands.

“For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.”

Magnus downed his tools for the evening and contemplated bed. His bride was sat upon the table beside him, not lifeless, but not yet present. A meagre thing without her arms, and with every hour that Magnus wasted—on sleeping, eating, daydreaming—she remained incomplete. He caught her vacant eye. Brought her awake with a gesture.

“Gus?” The petite shrug of empty shoulders. “Twenty-seven yet?”

“I’m sorry darling. No such luck. But we’re down to sixty now.”

The bride examined her disembodied arm.

“Sixty’s good enough.” Her doll’s eyes fluttered wide. “I don’t mind sixty.”

Jesus she was so demure. Almost perfect. And she really wouldn’t mind sixty, on that she was being true.

But Magnus could offer only a tight, conciliatory smile in reply.

Almost perfect.

If she could read his face, she’d understand his frustrations.

Because almost perfect was still shy of God.