Joseph was losing.
"That doesn't count!" Tarry exclaimed with indignation.
The boy who claimed to be a zombie said, "Yes, it does."
"You haven't got two of the fingers that make up that move," Tarry held up her hand and arranged her fingers in the scissor position.
Joseph held up his stump and Tarry raised her eyes at the thumb and pinky finger. "You're doing the 'dawg'."
"Seven out of ten." Joseph said smugly, "I win."
"You're a zombie!" Tarry said in outrage as her stomach rumbled loudly. "You've got your arm!"
And he had. It was lying on the ground next to his right knee.
"We'll halve it," he compromised.
"No."
"You can't have the whole thing!"
"You have an arm!"
Tarry stood up in a huff and Joseph scrambled up after her. "Alright!" He lurched in her direction and held up his decaying, soggy, bloodied arm mere inches from her face, "We can share!"
"No! That's disgusting!"
Although- was it? She stared at the pale flesh with appraising eyes, as if she was assessing a leafy sculpted unicorn in a hedge-clipping contest.
"I'll halve it so you get the bigger end!" Joesph was saying desperately. Tarry looked up into his brown eyes. She noted that while he was temporarily sagging with the pressure of swaying her judgement, he did have the most attractive brown eyes she had ever seen.
"Do you put anything in them, to keep them so brown and shiny?" she whimsically asked, kicking herself that she hadn't used proper manners and compliments earlier on in their meeting. "They're very brown."
"Huh?" Joseph's desperation turned into bewilderment, and Tarry said quickly, "Of course you do! Sorry! Sorry, I see that you do, of course, how rude of me to think you'd be so careless just because you developed this ailment. Pardon me, please."
She almost bowed but realised the action alone would never be enough.
Joseph looked nonplussed. "Are you saying yes to half the arm and half the apple? The bigger portions?"
Poor Joseph, Tarry thought, also rather whimsically for such a situation, how hard he tries and how often he fails. She sighed and focused once again on the putrid arm shaking slightly before her as it was held up in the air. Maybe this was what her life had been preparing her for. All those lighthearted comments, all those cooking utensils and all those sharp, frosty mornings when she had sobbed into her over-sized mittens at how absurd it was that snow could be that cold. And all those bars on playground! How could one manage to swing around them all and still live to tell the tale?
So many things stretched out behind her.
"Um, girl...?"
Tarry shook out of her reverie. "Sorry? Oh, yes..."
As she considered this token of newly found acquaintanceship , she wondered how she could ever have thought otherwise. The smell of that meaty arm was suddenly so overpowering that she found herself leaning inwards. She took a long deep breath.
"I- I think..." she looked at Joesph, who was gazing at her in that glassy way people do when they've been forced to watch something for longer than they wanted to, and rasped dramatically, "I think I'd like the whole arm."
And she leaned into the stale chunk of flesh that was dripping with blood and coated in a slimy film and took a bite.
~
