I'd always known it would be the arm. Or more rightly, I always knew it would be some part of the arm: fingers, hand, maybe just some debilitating laceration. It would tingle with the foreknowledge of the thing. Like maybe it yearned to have it done with. Maybe it had done with me as well and was looking for exit strategies.
I wondered too if it might have had some magnetic pull, looking for occasions to rid itself of me. But then I'd start to thinking, what is this magnetism? Can the thing have a section of my mind for its own? Or am I just lending it credence in my own crazy way? More likely tho, the thing I'd settled on, now I can't remember if it was before or after, was that as a thing it must have had its own mute consciousness, its own thinking way. We seen the way trees can think and even stones. So why not my arm? Its muscles twitching out electrical code that my brain can't listen in on. Central command cut off, those fibers all conspiring.
But now, it's like it can't be done with it. Still ticking and calculating along all those silent what have yous. Or the reverse, the more likely I guess, that I can't get the command part of the brain to quit sending orders down the line that isn't a line no more. Old pathways what never come.
And then I suppose, who is the me that can't stop command signals? Who is the me standing outside to observe. And maybe then the arm would have let me in on the conspiracy to secede if only I could have wised up. Now central is still in charge and the anarchists up and gone. And me left here without a compatriot one.