Tegan Webb
Pip sits on the wave-shaped jungle-gym and waits for the concrete to kick in. But something else has kicked in first, and Pip is annoyed, because she can’t figure out what it is. It’s heavy, in the way that concrete is, but heavy is not how concrete makes her feel. Concrete makes her feel light as a fucking feather. She should be floating out over the houses scattered below the hill on which this deserted playground sits, over the Skyrail station and the shopping centre and the thin river choked with leaves and supermarket debris. She checks the incision she’s made just under her left armpit, slides a finger under the skin to make sure the piece of concrete is still there. She finds the lump, moves it around a bit, takes it out – maybe she needs to try another body part. If she were made of liquid metal, she thinks, not solid, her body would drip through the bars of this jungle-gym. Being pulled back towards the earth by whatever it was that is making her feel so heavy.
Pip picks a playlist to try and shift some of the weight. She chooses ‘april mix’ from the list that appears in her field of view, leans back against the curve of the jungle gym, and thanks past Pip for being really into ambient black metal three months ago. But then a song cuts in that’s so un-ambient it makes her sit up. It’s an old song, by a Born artist, from an era when white women were coming into some power. Pip tries to place where she first heard it – in the supermarket maybe, or on graveyard shift radio? She starts singing along – “I’ve got one hand in my pocket, and the other one is holding the hand of my dead friend.” This makes her laugh, so hard her back hits the bottom rung of the jungle gym, but she doesn’t feel it, and she can’t stop, and that’s when she figures it out. “Oh,” she says to the empty playground, “It’s grief.”
Pip has been carrying around Mica’s hand in her pocket since it had arrived for her in the mail. It had come in an express post Tough Bag and had sat on the floor by the mail chute for almost two days. In the end her girlfriend Kym had opened it, mostly because she was sick of passing it in the entryway, and she thought whatever it was might’ve been for her anyway. She’d been sitting at the kitchen table when Pip arrived home that night, and the hand sat on the table facing up, fingers curled in like a dead spider’s legs.
“And you say I bring home weird things from the tip shop,” Pip had said, leaning down to give Kym a kiss on the head hello.
“It came for you,” Kym had said, pointing at the hand with the chopstick she was holding, “Someone sent it by mail.”
“By mail? From who?”
“Dunno. No return address.”
“Is there a ransom note?” Pip had expected Kym to laugh, but instead she gave her a look that said don’t joke about that, it might be. Pip had bent down to take a closer look – it was definitely a Bot hand, but the skin and wires that should’ve been hanging from where it had been severed had been cut neatly away. Pip took the chopstick from Kym’s hand and pressed it gently into one of the palm lines, half expecting something to activate. The hand remained still, but the Tough Bag activated a memory – a conversation Pip had had with Ainslie, one of Mica’s partners.
“I’ve got something to send you,” they’d said over voice chat, “of Mica’s. Can I have your address?”
“Oh,” Pip had said, and then, “Sure, what is it?” “Fucked if I know.” Pip had thought it might’ve been some clothes, or a favourite stone from their geode collection, and then she stopped thinking about it altogether. She stepped back, dropping the chopstick, as if the hand had sprung to life.
Pip hops down from the jungle gym and decides to take the long long way home. She puts on a different playlist for the walk, a collaborative one that she, Kym, Mica and a few of their other friends would periodically add songs to – no one’s added anything for a couple of weeks though. She adds the song that made her laugh to the playlist, and then starts to regret it. As she starts to cross the asphalt of the car park, she reaches into her skin, through the incision under her armpit to dig the piece of concrete out. It was supposed to take at least a couple of months for her body to absorb and recalibrate itself to the sensations of a new material – the lightness, the fizzing in her joints, waves breaking across her field of view. She and Kym had talked about it a lot, both of them trying to map familiar feelings onto each other’s bodies. Kym would describe the effects of drugs she had taken when she was younger – the euphoria she used to get when slipping ceramic sounded a bit like GEM or MDMA. Or the way she felt when Pip’s fingers lingered on the nape of her neck while they made out – a shard of bottle green plastic had made her shiver like that. She’d talked about it with Mica once too – the two of them sat on a kitchen floor of someone’s best friend’s share-apartment, and she told them that it was a feeling of wholeness that she liked the most – that when she slipped the right object, it felt like something missing had slotted into place, and it had always meant to have lived there, just below the surface her skin.
“Sorry I’m not very good at explaining it,” she’d said, but Mica had just smiled and said, “You don’t need to babe. Sounds like magic.”
Pip isn’t feeling any kind of magic right now though. She lets her finger find the concrete and flicks it out, tearing the cut a little wider. She crushes it under her boot, turning it to gravel and then kicking it across the car park. Her other hand is still in her pocket, holding Mica’s.
Mica’s hand hadn’t come with a ransom note, but it had come with a photograph. Pip had almost thrown it out with the Tough Bag, but it had slipped out on her walk to the waste chute. It fluttered to the ground, landing face down, so Pip saw what was written on the back before she saw the picture. Atacama Desert, Chile. Lithium mine, 2021. She flipped the photo over to see the image – an aerial view of the salt beds, pale and vibrant greens grouped together like a painting, or a collection of bathroom tiles. They reminded her of the tiles she used to collect from tip shops, back when she slipped ceramic. Her first thought was to take a photo of the photo and send it to Mica. She had sat down right there in the hallway, next to the waste chute, looking at the photo and looking up the mine, which had been drained dry decades before. When that didn’t lead her anywhere, she looked up all the songs she could think of that were about lithium and started making a playlist. She found a lot of Born songs about anti-depressants, and a song by a new Bot punk band called Cold Hands Cold Hearts. Their live recording of “Salt Flat Blues” began with the lead singer shouting into the mic; “This is a song about all the shit that used to be pulled out of the earth, that’s still getting pulled out, even though there’s barely anything left, and how it’s fucked up because it’s like, doing so much damage but also we need it to live. One two three four.” Pip listened to the song, and it led her to Mica, to something they said to her, on a different kitchen floor; “It’s weird how people talk about us like we’re so separate from the natural world. Like, where do they think that metal comes from? Literally everything we’re made of has been pulled out of the earth, in some way or another.” Pip had sat in the hallway until well after Kym got home from work, arranging the pieces of information she’d collected around like a mosaic in her field of view.
Pip is rearranging the information now, shifting and spinning her thoughts as she follows the creek towards the city, but she can’t make any of them fit together. At first she thought Mica had wanted her to take her hand to the Atacama Desert, to site of the photograph. But it didn’t make sense – they knew better than anyone that neither she nor Kym could leave the country. She had thought maybe the old lithium mine site on Kaneang country, but that’s protected land now, and almost as hard to get to as Chile. She had tried to talk to Kym about it, but Kym’s grief wasn’t heavy like hers. It was angry.
“If they chose to power down,” she’d said, “instead of getting their battery replaced, that’s fine. Whatever. That’s their choice. But sending this cryptic shit to us in the post, like some cheap fucking escape room puzzle? That’s fucked.” Pip had rubbed her back while she talked, but felt only a splinter of Kym’s anger, felt it like a piece of concrete she’d had slipped too far in and was now rattling around inside of her. Now Pip feels like she could sink to the bottom of the creek. She sits down in the water and pulls Mica’s hand out of her pocket.
Pip has never noticed how much smaller Mica’s hand is compared to hers. She lays it out so they are palm to palm and holds it there. She notices a tear in the skin, near where the wrist is supposed to end – had it always been torn, or had she torn it by carrying the hand around in her pocket for two weeks? Pip tugs at the flap, and then she can’t stop, tearing the skin up the wrist and along the palm line. She peels it back, stretching the skin further than she’d ever dare to do to herself, until the skeleton is exposed, all metal and filament. There’s a piece loose, part of the thumb joint, shaped kind of like a Born fingernail and Pip can’t help herself. She feels like she’s tried everything, so why not this? The incision she made for the concrete is still open. She takes a beat, then slips the piece of Mica’s hand into the inside of her arm.
And feels nothing. No fizzing, no shivers, no weight lifted from her shoulders. The splinter of anger widens to a crack and Pip grits her teeth and sinks her fingers into what’s left of Mica’s flesh. She’s about to tear the biggest piece in half, when a message pops up into her field of view; Nina has added Legs by ZZ Top to your collaborative playlist.
Pip sits for a moment, stunned. And then she laughs. She laughs so hard that Mica’s hand tumbles off her lap and into water. Cackling, she watches the pieces of torn skin float downstream and she thinks about letting the only piece she has left of her friend follow it.
Ainslie has added Legs by PJ Harvey to your collaborative playlist.
Min has added Silver Knees by Cold Hands Cold Hearts to your collaborative playlist.
CC has added Cross Your Fingers by Laura Marling to your collaborative playlist.
Pip snatches the skeleton hand back, selects the song Nina added to play, and lays down in the filthy creek. The water barely covers her chest, but Pip is floating.
Tegan Webb (she/they) is a writer, zine and digital art maker from Naarm. Her work explores themes of connection and creativity in various forms such as zines, games and interactive fiction. They are currently working on a collection of short stories about robots, a bunch of other digital experiments, and at a public library to pay their bills.
Long Trek Press 
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