REX’S ARMY
Rex is not a tall guy. He uses a support to reach things from the cabinet. Noodles; rice in a canister. All the foodstuffs that are way up on the top shelf next to the highest. He, Rex he, gets mad sometimes at his stubby arms. At their inability to stretch to usable lengths. He wants to cut them off sometime. Grow new ones. Long ones. Elbowey ones. The kind without the hardened skin on the fold, the alligator knobs. Not those. New arms with new skin. So new they're pink and veined and hurt when you extend them. Arms that'll reach up and keep going, to the top shelf...and even beyond that!
Rex tried it once. Cut them, that is. It was hot out. Sweaty sunny weather that he usually enjoyed, even despite his deficit plagued length of arms. Basketball was out, for obvious reasons; extensions were required, illegal ones like lashes at a jr. miss pageant, only before the whole Jon not-French-girl incident. You know what I mean? Rex could hardly play a consistent game of pinball. Always having to violently shift to the opposite button. Rex likes to talk on the phone too; though a special harness had to be fabricated especially for him in order to do so.
Rex' Dad is an inventor, of the movie sort. He invents counterfeit currency plates for countries with inadequate Secret Service services. He makes Rex some of his devices. Not always the ones that work though. Amy, pronounced Ahh-me, is Rex' two year old twin sister. She stayed inside their mom for seven years because she liked the acoustics, she would later explain.
She makes the good stuff for her brother. She's a whiz at Lego® electronics; programmable motors and geared plastic armatures. She has made Rex the one "army", as she calls it, that he wears all the time. All the time. Everyday, even to bed. It's a head scratch machine that hides under his hair piece. Oh, right, Rex is also bald. Amy commandeered all the epidermal follicle chromosomes when they both were in the womb. Bill, Rex and Amy's Dad bought him a toupee for his fourth birthday. Mainly because of all the "freak midget arm, cancer boy" taunts he was receiving everyday at the Montesori he attended on the east side.
The day he tried to free himself from his monstrously ill-deformed dainty side appendages, he was inside the house, cause it was hot out you remember? And the heat gets to metal parts of his army and, well, fooey is what happens. Rust and all that junk start in like the devil. So right, he was inside his house, drinking Kool-Aid™. Grape to be quite exact; though it tasted more like acidic grapey granules, he downed cup after cup just the same. When he had finished his eighth jawa tumbler full, he noticed something. A simple something. A routine he always ran through as he placed his dirty dishes into the sink. He would walk to the pantry, grab the Cosco step stool with the grippy parallel rubber footing and return to the sink.
It was the first time ever of his being conscious of the steps involved. He was too damn short, his arms were too damn small and his hair would usually fall into the disposal. This was how it went. This is how it always went. He immediately hated his arms. He hated his legs, and he hated his damned bald head. He wanted rid of at least one of them. He decided on the arms after no thought at all. The stubby arms. The midget freak arms. Perhaps he knew which he wanted rid of all along. A few things first though, figuring out wise. Cause he just saw The Apartment with Jack Lemmon, ya know buddy boy? Just how, exactly, would he cut the second arm once free of the first? He needed Amy. He needed Amy and one of her tools.