Sinister extremity, p.1
Sinister Extremity, page 1
Sinister Extremity
A Love Story
Hugh Neill
Sinister Extremity
Copyright © 2025 by Hugh Neill
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-968319-00-7 (Trade Paperback)
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
For permission requests, contact castellatedpress@gmail.com.
This is a work of fiction. The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.
No artificial intelligence was used in the composition or editing of this novel, nor the design of this book.
Book design by Castellated Press
First edition 2025
To G, for putting me back together.
Content warning
This story contains repeated amputations, explicit sex, a level of gore beyond all plausibility, general disgusting filth, and modern American labor standards.
SINISTER adjective
sin·is·ter
Suggestive of evil or malevolence.
Designating the left side of the body.
EXTREMITY noun
ex·trem·i·ty
The utmost degree (as of emotion or pain.)
A limb of the body, especially a human hand or foot.
Part One
The Invisible Hand
1
Every day, Griffin Batt went to work at his job where he cut off his left hand in a single swift strike. Griffin Batt hated his job where he cut off his left hand in a single swift strike.
Here is what Griffin Batt would do every day when he went to work at his job where he cut off his left hand in a single swift strike.
He would wake up in the morning to his fat orange cat, Mr. President, sitting on his chest and screaming in his face to demand food. Griffin would eventually rise and stumble over to Mr. President’s bowl, which he would fill with a couple of scoops from a twenty-two pound bag of kibble, comprised of fish flavors on alternative proteins. Mr. President would then dive in with the frantic desperation of a creature that had been starving in the desert, though the bag of kibble was visible at all times, with an open top that Griffin had not bothered to clip shut, which Mr. President, despite it all, would not eat directly from unless circumstances were truly dire, as Mr. President appreciated the ritual of the process. Griffin had left the bag out and open due to not wanting to pay for a refillable container and not having anything that could truly be called a closet or kitchen storage space. What might have served as a closet to store clothing or personal objects had been retrofitted to serve as the utility closet that contained his electric water heater and no drain.
Mr. President would eat in the soft morning light, which was diffused by a sheet of frosted plastic that Griffin had adhered to the windows of his ground-level apartment so that passerby would not be able to see into his home as if it were a dollhouse occupied by a lanky 28-year-old man. There was one stripe of uncovered window he’d cut out at eye level for looking outside when necessary, and a similar small low viewport for Mr. President to see all the exciting action of the concrete courtyard.
Once Mr. President was crunching away at his breakfast rather than screaming, Griffin would turn on his electric kettle and examine his left wrist to see how yesterday’s work was looking, and therefore how today’s work was going to go. Depending on how well he’d done the day before, as well as the quality of his sleep and levels of protein intake, he would be looking at anything ranging from a thick band of scar tissue solidly holding the hand to his arm with all the grace of an apprentice welder’s first work, to a surprisingly seamless connection with only the remaining sutures as evidence of his grim task.
Once the kettle clicked, Griffin would use the boiling water both for a mug of instant coffee with soymilk and a bowl of instant oats. The coffee was more for its laxative effect than its stimulant effect, as it was important to have a bowel movement before leaving his apartment. As you can imagine, it would be much harder to go to the bathroom in the middle of his workday and wipe properly with one hand that was still a bloody stump.
Griffin Batt’s workplace did not have bidets.
After breakfast, he would brush his teeth while staring at himself in the mirror, regarding the look of idle despair in his blue-grey eyes. Now, depending on how much money Griffin had blown on getting drunk enough to briefly forget how awful his life was on any given week, he might pack a lunch to save money. He would usually go for a basic peanut butter and jelly sandwich, due to how easy it was to eat one-handed, which he would put inside a plastic bag inside a paper bag inside his messenger bag. If he was being thrifty, either out of the successful deployment of self-control or absolute necessity, he would load his rice cooker and set its timer for right around when he usually got back from work, so that there would be the beginnings of a meal waiting for him in the form of some nice steaming hot rice upon his return.
Every day he was in horrible pain and deeply miserable. Nothing he did made any difference and he felt abandoned by God. His life was hell, and nothing was good.
Once the rice cooker was set, he would strip off the boxer briefs and t-shirt he slept in, step over the huge protruding lump in the floor that kept his bathroom door from fully opening, and scrub himself thoroughly in the shower. He usually showered twice per day— once in the morning and once in the evening, since his work could get a bit messy and when at work he was more eager to be done and get home than to be fully cleaned and stay later. But in the mornings, after he made sure he didn’t smell bad and wouldn’t shit himself at work, he put on business casual clothing that he had never ironed, but that he always hung to dry on a rolling rack near the radiator because he was unwilling to pay for the extortionate scam that was laundromat dryers. He had six white oxford shirts on rotation that he would wash and bleach once a week because old blood stains had never been in fashion, as far as he knew.
Griffin would then turn on his TV and put on a playlist of bird videos for cats to watch so that Mr. President could be entertained while he was away, despite being unable to look out the window or go anywhere. Mr. President was the cat version of the chained man in Plato’s allegory of the cave, seeing shadows on the wall that were a pale imitation of reality. Fortunately, without any frame of reference to what he was missing, Mr. President appeared to be perfectly content with his lot in life. Once he was situated on his little pillow in front of the TV, Griffin would give him a skritch on the chin and a kiss for the road, then head out the door.
Stepping out of his front door, he would see directly in front of him the stairwell, going up to the second floor apartment landing and down to the basement. The basement was unfinished, full of spiders, and prone to flooding. To the left was the front door to the whole building, which he would exit through on his way to catch the bus.
Every time Griffin got on the bus, the driver gave him a look as if he’d just said a racial slur the moment the door opened, though this had never been the case, whether when the door opened or at any other time. Griffin would tap his phone on the paypad, say thank you, get a slightly different look like he’d just spat in the driver’s face, and go sit down. He was usually seated next to various weary-looking men who smelled strongly of pepperoni or other fragrant lunch meat products and appeared to have been up all night.
As the bus made its way towards his workplace, he would skim through his video feed to look for people doing jobs that were actually clearly good for the world. He enjoyed seeing woodworking, power washing, and animal husbandry— his favorites were the farriers who dealt with cow hooves. There were few things more satisfying to Griffin than watching a man carve into an infected hoof that was so internally pressurized with pus that it would shoot out in a bloody stream, instantly relieving the animal of a great deal of pain. He appreciated the effort these men went to to ensure the health and comfort of these cows before they were sent off to a swift and violent death, and fantasized about anybody making an effort to reduce his suffering in a similar way before he died. He also fantasized about similarly being able to do work that seemed to help anyone or anything in clear and concrete ways.
Griffin Batt held a master’s degree in economics.
Here is what would happen when Griffin Batt arrived at his job where he cut off his left hand in a single swift strike.
The bus let Griffin off at a stop near the edge of the parking lot in front of the large, drab building. The complex technically housed several companies under one roof, though they were all similarly under the same corporate umbrella, and each subsidiary company had its own entrance. He would cross the parking lot, enter the building through the front, swipe his ID keycard for entry, and make his way through windowless, labyrinthine corridors towards a small room with a metal chair and table. He would pass the supply station, where he would tell the attendant Hey Dave and the attendant would reply Hey Griffin and as Dave went to fetch the day’s hardware and regenerative cooling gel, he would think for a moment that Dave could be pretty cute if he actually bothered to take care of himself a little better. Dave would then wheel out a cart bearing a container that looked similar to a deep fryer, but full of a pale pink liquid, so innatel y cold that coils of condensing vapor poured off of it like dry ice. He would take this cart and roll it to his station.
Common, lanky Griffin Batt came from the hallway, bearing a tub of regenerative cooling gel upon which sutures and a cleaver lay crossed. On a lower level of the cart there sat an insulated cooler of ice and gallon-sized sealing plastic bags. He entered a small wedge-shaped room with a metal chair and table, atop which sat a large end-grain cutting board. At the narrower end of the room was an interrogation-room-style two-way mirror that gave him the impression that somebody or something was behind it and watching and enjoying the sight of him in pain, but he was yet to confirm this one way or the other.
Griffin would spend the first hour of every day sharpening his large carbon steel Serbian cleaver, hoping to get it to a point where it would slam through the skin and flesh and fat and bone and sinew of his left wrist like it wasn’t even there. The name of the game was a single swift strike, not several slow slices, and he was a professional. As he sharpened his instrument, he mentally steeled himself for the performance of his contractual obligation.
The first time he ever did this, emotionally preparing to emancipate lefty from the homeland had been a long and harrowing process, but over time it became almost automatic. He had set up a pavlovian connection in his mind at this point, wherein the sharpening was a meditative, or perhaps dissociative, process. Through classical conditioning he had trained himself to associate the inimitable shine of the perfect razor edge of a carbon steel cleaver with absolute mental, emotional and physical preparedness for the task at hand.
You might think it takes intentional grit, courage and resolve to cut off your left hand in a single swift strike, but this is not the case. It might’ve been like that the first time, but Griffin had been at it so long that it was hard to remember. In truth, the mental state required to do this every day on a professional level was a resigned, dissociative numbness. When he felt like his body was not his own, when he felt like he was watching someone else wield the cleaver, then he knew he had achieved the optimal state of readiness to disconnect his left hand from the rest of his body.
From that point forward, the process was fairly simple. He would apply a tourniquet to his left arm to restrict blood flow, place his hand upon the chopping block, hit a button that indicated he was about to amputate so that personnel could be on standby if anything went wrong, and pick up the cleaver. He felt the sturdy weight of the blade in his right hand and knew that if not for the bone, it would go through him like meringue just by resting its weight on the wrist. Unfortunately, Griffin Batt was a bone-in man, so it did require a bit more precision and force. He would hold the cleaver precisely at its intended point of contact, draw it back to a good high starting position, then slowly return it in reverse, repeating this process a few times to get a feel for the ideal groove of the swing like a golfer resetting his stance before every shot.
No matter how practiced you are at something, it’s not an excuse to get cocky and sloppy with your work.
Then he would swing down hard and cut off his left hand. An indescribable pain incapacitated his mind and body for a few seconds as his brain scrambled to figure out how to process the complete cessation of all nerve input from what was formerly the location of his hand. This passed in a few minutes.
If he had done it right, and usually he had, there wasn’t much mess to speak of and he could deposit his severed extremity in the gallon bag and place it in the provided ice bucket. During this part of the process, the feeling of being watched from behind the mirror was always extremely strong.
Something inhuman and horrible was watching him suffer and enjoying it. Some invisible, malevolent watcher that did not want to be truly known but craved to be sensed just enough that he knew his pain was bringing someone else pleasure.
Griffin only had the will to keep living so that he could provide for Mr. President.
Then came lunchtime. Griffin was always starving after the morning’s work, and you don’t want to try to stitch your own hand back on with an empty stomach. Depending on how much Griffin had succeeded or failed at adhering to his budget, this is when he would either eat his peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the employee break room, or head across the street to the strip mall with a few different dining options.
Griffin was no Rockefeller, so his choice of lunch was dependent on whatever deals were available at the various chain restaurants through their convenient phone apps. Griffin kept the notifications on from every one of those apps to see if they were running any promotions or discounts at a glance. Just before lunchtime, he tended to be incapable of thinking straight enough to search for coupons due to the fact that he had just severed his left hand with a carbon steel cleaver and was experiencing a level of pain that distorted his perception of reality on an almost psychedelic level. But if he had the notifications on and checked them on the way to work, with attentive couponing he could often find a hot meal at a reasonable price.
A Waffle House stood alone, and in the strip mall there was a fried cricken joint, a sandwich spot, and a pseudo-Mexican place. When he went to the Mexican place he would try to be a bit health conscious by getting the tacos with black beans instead of their institutional-grade meat product. He would pre-order this meal for lunchtime pickup while he was on the bus so that he could pick up his food immediately upon arrival and minimize the amount of time spent among other customers while cradling the bloody stump of his left wrist, which sometimes drew questions from people unfamiliar with local industry.
The restaurants also had loyalty programs where enough repeat orders meant he would get something for free, like fries or a drink, and looking forward to getting enough points to get those treats was another one of the few things that kept him from self-immolating in protest against something or other, which wouldn’t even make the news these days if he did do it.
But without the bonus sodas from loyalty programs, he often got just water to drink while out for lunch, then coffee from the break room back at the office before getting back to work. Around the coffee machine he always got a little bit of conversation with his colleagues, though for obvious reasons many of them weren’t eager to chat much. He would sometimes see a new hire, pale and bleary-eyed from blood loss, and then he would exchange a knowing, pitying smirk with another veteran professional, also pale and dead-eyed from the grim acceptance of their certain fates.
Once fully fed and caffeinated, he was ready to get back to work.
Griffin had learned that there was a delicate balance to the nutrition required to reattach your own left hand, especially considering that you had to do it one-handed. The problem is that if you’re hungry, or at least if Griffin was hungry, his hands would shake, which is not ideal when one hand is the surgeon and the other is the patient. But if he ate a big lunch he tended to get the early afternoon slump, which would require him to have more coffee to perk up, which would make him loop right back around to having shaky hands.
This is why Griffin limited himself to two cups of coffee per day: one in the morning, and one right after lunch. This was enough to mitigate the initial fatigue of sleep inertia and the post-lunch fog, but not so much that he went around feeling like his heart was going to explode from excessive caffeine consumption.
He often felt like his heart was going to explode, but that was more of a metaphorical feeling and for different reasons.
These were reasons why he tried to avoid simple sugars and go for complex carbohydrates and proteins whenever it was economically viable for him to do so. He felt the best on days when he had the black bean tacos for lunch, which kept him from spiking his blood sugar too much and provided enough smooth, constant energy to get him through the horrifically painful process of sewing his left hand back on.
