EXCERPT  |  By Perparim Kapllani  »  I dare not look at that left hand. I dare not. But my eyes are drawn to it, as it lies on my right shoulder. He sees my glance and his face softens.

“That is why you went away, isn’t it,” he says gruffly. “You confounded fool, King of Fools, I knew that was why you went away. Tell me I’m right. Tell me, Agron, King of Nincompoops, did you run away like a yellow-bellied missish girl because of this?”

With that he holds up his mangled left hand in my face. My eyes fixed on his hand and saw clearly what I had imagined so many times in my mind, the strong hand, with the two fingers, the ring finger and the middle finger missing, the flesh mottled and badly set over the gap.

I cannot speak. I did not have to. He saw the pain, the torture, the living dread in my eyes that I did not bother to conceal.

He had always been the emotional one, crying when he was hurt and never giving a damn if anyone thought him ‘soft’ because of it. Now I saw his eyes, less than two feet from mine, fill with tears of understanding.

“You stupid fool,” he finally says in a voice that shook, “You didn’t even give me a chance to tell you it didn’t matter. It was an accident. You are like my brother. That’s what matters. That’s what always mattered. Not this.”

With the last two words he presses his left hand into my face. Then that hand and arm went around my neck and I was pulled into another bear hug that again knocks the air out of me. This time, my own arms go around him in a grip of desperation that he cannot help but feel.

“Genti,” I can hardly hear myself speak, “how I prayed you would react this way.” 

“And how the fuck did you think I was going to react anyway?” growls Genti. We are now seated across from each other at a table in Dea’s coffee shop.

I can still hardly believe we are actually sitting together. How many times I’d dreamt this. And it was finally happening. My eyes devour him. I want to reach out and touch him, grab his mangled hand and wipe away the scars, pull at the flesh to create new fingers to replace the ones I had lopped off all those years ago. If I could take anything back in life, it would be that stupid, careless, thoughtless moment when wanting to ‘win’ a battle I was ‘losing’ I had lashed out at him with my makeshift sword. Only that time, that god-awful damnable time, the makeshift sword was not made of the usual cardboard or sticks or sawn-off planks. It was a butcher’s long knife, rusted and discarded carelessly in the pile of garbage near the gateway. I had found it and gleefully wielded it like a medieval madman. Carelessness on the part of so many that would change forever the lives of the two of us sitting across from one another.

“I didn’t know what to think,” I hardly recognize my voice. It sounds so different from the youthful, vulnerable voice I have had in my head when I carried out these imaginary conversations with Genti. “All I remember was your father yelling at me at the hospital, my mother yelling at me at home. Everyone yelling at me that I had killed you. Maimed you for life. Ruined your life forever.

“God, Genti, if there was any way I could have taken that moment back,” the raw pain rasps at the back of my throat.

“Damn you, Goni,” his arm shoots out and playfully cuffs me on the shoulder. “You’re freaking me out with this weird talk. You’ve been moping about that all these years? I cursed you for the first few months as I had to learn how to do things without those blasted fingers, but then life just went on. Why did you have to run away? I missed you more than those damned fingers, you moron.” He cuffs me again, this time harder.

Then the dam broke and I cry like I have never allowed myself to cry in all those seventeen years.

 • Excerpted from Beyond the Edge: Stories, by Perparim Kapllani,  published by In Our Words Inc, ISBN:  978-1-926926-04-9, price: $19.95. To order, visit inourwords.ca.