WHEN THE GIRL is eleven, she will attend one of her father’s lectures without his knowledge. She will slink into the back of the lecture hall and keep her bangs low across her face so he can’t make her out. She will bury her nose in a notebook like the others, but she will only pretend to write. Instead, the girl will watch her father, notice how he carries himself differently during oration, keeps his hands behind his back, tilts his chin up a bit. She will think he looks much smaller from this height, though his voice booms throughout the lecture hall. Smaller not just in size but in scope; he is somehow reduced from this angle. Volume, she will think, must be applicable not just to sound and mass but to form.

He will say:

Believers in the wrist suggest that proof exists in theories of the neck—the union of the head to the chest and shoulder space. They purport the same logic provides a framework for validating the existence of the wrist, though bone scholars have disagreed, as the primary difference between the two is that the neck contains vital organs. Furthermore, there is a wide body of literature on the history of hangings and the valuable role the neck plays in this discourse. Relationships have been drawn between the wrist and ankle, but these, too, are false, given the heel’s value in literature of the joint. Correlations between the wrist and knee or elbow are seldom drawn, given that these act as space breaks in the leg and arm; both do not adhere two separately identified parts, but rather act as an interruption in the rhetoric of limb.

We say that tables have legs and chairs have arms. We say that books have spines and bottles have necks. We say that clocks have hands; we say that shoes have tongues. The notion of the wrist, however, has not been admitted into the domain of dead metaphor—in short, nothing else contains a wrist.

In short, we will lose nothing if we choose to lose the wrist.