Maude Moskowitz hadn’t sucked a dick in ten years. That was what the man’s amputated arm, cut off at the elbow, made her think of. She felt guilty that the stump of his upper arm reminded her of a penis. The guilt made her look away. This in turn made her worry that others would think she was repulsed by his disability, which compelled her to look back at him.

The one-armed man took no notice. His back was to Maude as he descended the steps and exited the bus. He didn’t glance back as he walked off across the parking lot, pulling his coat on, hiding what was left of the arm from view. He was the third man she’d seen that day with an amputated arm and this gave her an unsettled feeling as she shouldered her duffel bag and walked in the opposite direction.

It was a thirty-minute walk from where the bus dropped her to her grandfather’s house across town. There was a chill in the air, but Maude didn’t mind. She liked the way the cold Virginia air felt in her lungs as she hiked up Main Street, guided by dim streetlights and a nearly full moon.

As she walked her mind fell back on the past ten years of her life, lived without a penis entering her mouth once. Those ten years seemed to Maude like a lifetime lived in the blink of an eye. Maude hadn’t intentionally stopped sucking dicks, it was more like a habit she’d outgrown along with miniskirts and racoon eyes. It was part of a person she’d been, not the person she was.

She supposed that on some level she had always known she was gay. Occasionally, when drunk to the point of brutal and sometimes revelatory self-reflection, it crossed her mind that it was this very gayness that had compelled her to suck so many dicks in the first place. A sense of otherness that pushed her too far in the direction of conformity.

It was odd to think back on the feeling of shame that used to accompany each new sexual encounter. Numbers that got you labeled a slut in high school were rounding errors in the adult world of dating apps.

Maude took her usual detour through the cemetery. She could just make out the large statue at its center, honoring the Confederate general buried there. The whole place was dotted with small Confederate flags, marking the graves of those who had fought for the right to own others. Whether the flags were there as marks of honor or marks of shame, Maude didn’t know. But she always avoided stepping on their graves—not out of respect, but out of a deep-rooted belief in vengeful spirits.

She remembered the last dick she’d ever sucked.

It was the night she graduated high school. The details were blurry, but she remembered bathroom tiles, cold against her knees. He had woven his fingers into her hair and every time she she’d started to pull her head back, he’d pulled it forward, pushing himself further into her mouth. She remembered gagging and crying but he wouldn’t let go and it felt like it went on for hours and then finally it was over but she was crying too hard to swallow and it was dripping down her chin and onto her dress.

What she remembered most clearly was the next day and the days that followed. Trying to explain what had happened, that sucking that dick had not been like sucking the others. The messages calling her a slut and a liar. Those were tattooed in the self-flagellating muscle memory of her mind.

She passed through an opening in the low stone wall that encircled the cemetery. Safely on the other side, she turned and spat. It landed weakly on the pavement a few inches from the wall. She didn’t know if she was spitting at the boy in the bathroom or at the dead soldiers. Maybe both.

She turned a corner and spotted her grandfather’s house with the tall pine tree that loomed like an angry shadow on the front lawn. It was a large colonial style house that dated back to the Civil War. Everything here dated back to the Civil War. Even the attitudes, thought Maude, as she glanced at the Confederate flags hanging from several of the neighboring houses.

There was a lot to love in this quaint Virginia town, and a lot to loathe. Already she felt the relief of knowing that in less than two days she’d be back home, where the parks and squares and statues that dotted her city were named for the men who’d fought for freedom and not for those who’d fought for subjugation.

But for now, she was here. She took a deep breath and tried to put all thoughts of dick-sucking and high school and bathroom floors and dead soldiers and the Confederacy out of her mind, as she marched up to the door of her grandfather’s house.

“Grandpa?” Maude called out as she stepped into the foyer, shaking off the cold. “Grandpa?” she called again, pushing further into the house, poking her head into the sitting room.

He wasn’t in there, which meant he must be upstairs. Maude shrugged to herself and went straight for the liquor cabinet in search of some liquid courage. As a child she’d found her grandfather deeply intimidating. He was patriarchal in a way her own father wasn’t, embodying an antiquated idea of masculinity that made the women in the family shrink into the background. As she aged, however, it seemed that he in turn aged tenfold, and now it was the thought of his liver-spotted hands that sent a shiver down her spine.

And, of course, there was the thing her father had compelled her to come down here to say—to confess—to this primordial patriarch.

Maude poured herself a generous glass of whisky, which she quickly downed and refilled, before settling herself in one of the ancient armchairs.

“Maude?” Dr. Jacob Moskowitz called out to his granddaughter.

“Down here, grandpa.” Her words floated up from the sitting room.

With a groan, Dr. Jacob Moskowitz eased himself into the stair lift, disgusted, as he had been for the last five years since the machine was installed, that time, which had already taken so much from him, had claimed his dignity too.

Maude squeezed her eyes tightly shut and listened to the groan of the stair lift as it carried her decrepit grandfather closer and closer to her. When the motor stopped, she finally willed herself to stand up and greet the man her father had convinced her to come and see.

Dr. Jacob Moskowitz let his youngest granddaughter lead him to one of the armchairs, still upholstered in the fabric his then-young wife had chosen when they’d bought this house.

A few minutes later, grandfather and granddaughter were both settled, she with her whisky and he with his pipe and a glass of scotch, the gas fireplace adding an uncomfortable heat to the room.

“How have you been?” he asked, his gravelly voice leaden with age.

“I’ve been good,” she answered. “How about you?” she asked, eyes trained on the deep reds and purples of the rug. Her grandfather’s lower lip sagged when he spoke so that you could see the saliva pooling in his mouth.

“Not bad,” he said. Why was this girl here? His youngest son’s youngest daughter. As a child she had always tried to keep up with the older ones and had always fallen behind.

“Grandpa,” Maude began, “how many amputations did you see in the war?” It was not what she had planned to say and she wasn’t exactly sure why the words had come out of her mouth. She examined the arm of the chair and was glad to find a loose thread to fiddle with.

“Not a few,” he said.

This was typical for him. Not bad. Not a few. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten a real answer out of him. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d asked him a real question.

She suddenly wished he would speak to her, tell her something deep and real. Her grandmother had told beautiful stories. She used to tell them to all the grandkids, lined up in their sleeping bags on the floor. Maude loved to fall asleep with pictures of her grandmother as a young girl on a farm in Virginia in her head. But she’d been gone for many years now and she’d taken her stories with her.

“The strangest thing happened today.” Maude wasn’t sure why she felt compelled to tell him this, but she was sure she needed to say it and she knew she wasn’t ready yet to tell him why she’d come. She watched his shadow take a sip of scotch and puff on his pipe, which she took as a signal to continue.

“It’s just… I saw three different men, each missing an arm. I guess I don’t know how common they are, amputations I mean. But it just seemed odd to see one, two, three like that. The first one was when I got coffee this morning and I guess I didn’t think much of it. He was missing the whole arm, cut off right at the shoulder. I couldn’t see the stump or anything. He had on a long sleeve shirt and he had the loose arm, the empty one I mean, pinned so it didn’t flop around I suppose.”

Maude paused to catch her breath and take a sip of her drink. She was talking very quickly. She knew her grandfather didn’t like it when she did that. Her hand searched for the loose thread again. She began to twist it around her finger, trying to steady herself as she started up again.

“The second one was on my way to the bus. He was sitting in a restaurant, having lunch with someone and he was sitting so that his—the missing arm, the stump—was facing me, practically pressed against the window. He was wearing a short sleeve shirt and I could see the way the fabric hung loose at his shoulder. I almost didn’t notice, I was walking quickly, but then for some reason it caught my eye.”

At this point, Dr. Jacob Moskowitz had finished his scotch and set down his pipe. His eyes had grown weary and he gently removed his glasses and rubbed them so as not to fall asleep. He didn’t care much for the story his granddaughter was telling, but he did care for her, even though he was acutely aware that she was doing everything she could to avoid looking at him. He understood that she, like him, was disgusted by the body he was forced to call home. He shifted slightly in his chair, cleared his throat, and replaced the glasses on his nose. She didn’t seem to notice. “The last one was as I was getting off the bus. He was there the whole time, I just didn’t see him until the end. Only he was different because it wasn’t the whole arm, just half.” Maude paused again to take another breath and another sip. “But I think the weirdest part, was that it was the left arm. All three of them were missing their left arms. And, I don’t know, I guess it just felt like it must mean something.”

Maude unraveled her finger from the loose thread. That was it. She’d come to the end of the story. There was no revelatory ending it seemed. She had seen three one-armed men in one day. Her grandfather said nothing, so Maude forced herself to trudge bravely on.

“Anyway,” she said, “I guess what I’m really getting at—or I mean, why I really came is, well, Dad said I should come say it in person before…” she trailed off. “I’m bringing someone to Thanksgiving this year,” she said, biting her lip. “A woman,” she added. “My girlfriend.” Another deep breath. “I’m gay, Grandpa. I’m gay and I’m in love with a woman and I’m very happy and I’m bringing her here next month.”

Maude took yet another deep breath, followed by yet another sip of her drink. The only sound in the room was the hiss of the gas fire. “Well?” she asked, finally forcing herself to look up into her grandfather’s eyes.

But Dr. Jacob Moskowitz didn’t answer.

Had he not died of an aneurysm while sitting in that armchair across from his granddaughter, he may have responded to her confession with one of his own. He may have launched into a long, painful story about a boy named Peter Crawford whom he’d met during the war. He may have told Maude about the nights he and Peter had spent together, their bodies pressed close as they kept watch. He may have told her that even though he and Peter had never kissed, had never consummated their love, it was still the truest thing he had ever felt. He may have told her what it felt like to hold Peter’s limp, dead body in his arms, how he felt like he died that day too. He may have told her that he still lay awake at night, tracing the lines of Peter’s face, staring into those deep blue eyes, counting the little hairs that were just beginning to poke their way out on his still-boyish cheeks. He may have told her all this and given her the insight into his life that she longed for.

More likely, though, he would have nodded silently and excused himself. More likely he would have left her sitting there, listening as the stair lift carried him farther and farther away from her.

Maude didn’t make any attempt to move for a long time. She just sipped her drink and finally let herself look at the ancient man in the ancient chair across from her. His eyes were open, but they were dark and empty behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. The skin on his face looked almost gelatinous, the way it hung there, like it was slowly sliding off his skull. His sagging lower lip left the bottom row of yellow, worn-down teeth fully exposed.

She let her eyes shift downwards to where his hands lay, gently resting in his lap. They were knobbly and swollen, the fingers bending in unnatural ways. She wondered when they’d gotten so disfigured and how he’d been able to do anything by himself for all these years.

Finally, Maude finished her drink. She reached across the empty space for her grandfather’s pipe. She coughed a little as the smoke fell from her mouth in a large, ugly cloud. It was nothing like the graceful puffs of smoke she was used to seeing slip through her grandfather’s once wet lips. A few more tries and she started to get the hang of it. As she let the familiar scent settle over her, her mind began to wander.

She thought about life and death and love. She thought about the one-armed men and the horrors of war and all those boys buried in that cemetery who had died in the name of the Confederacy. She wondered if any of them had gotten their dicks sucked before they were impaled on bayonets or had they had to suffer through their short lives without ever knowing the pleasures that come from connecting with another person on a deep, carnal level.

She thought about the woman she loved and the limitless passion that could exist between two people. She thought about the horrible vastness of the world and all the suffering that was happening at that exact moment and all the things she ought to be doing to put a stop to it. And then she thought about herself and the ten years since that bathroom floor and how cold and small she’d felt and she thought about those text messages calling her a liar and a slut and a whore and she decided it was okay that she wasn’t out there helping people because she had her own shit to deal with.

Eventually she stood up, poured herself another generous portion of whisky, made her way to the kitchen where the landline was mounted on the wall next to a corkboard that was still covered in notes left behind by her grandmother, and called for an ambulance.

Then she went and sat in the stair lift, riding it up and down, up and down, listening to the soft whir of the motor as she waited for the paramedics to come and haul away the lifeless body of a man she’d barely known.