At the time, we were having terrible trouble in school. We didn't fit in. We would never fit in.
Our father replied, "When I was growing up, I gave myself horrible nicknames. That way nothing the other boys said could be worse."
It was true that our father never treated anyone worse than he treated himself. A childhood disease had crippled his left arm: it was smaller and paler than his right arm. Because of it, our father was a kind of genius when he held the scalpel.
He never told us the names he'd given himself in school. Instead, he would tell us that he had used his skills and a green powder given to him by a Smaragdinean priest to reanimate a dead woman's arm, which he then used to replace his own, "the better to perform surgery." This tall tale wasn't funny the first time he told
