The Hand

Shirleen Manzur

 

His hand jolted back to his neck for the umpteenth time. His friend stared at him, exasperated.

“Can you stop doing that? Your hands don’t have healing touch that they will cure your tonsil or whatever it is you have!”

“Tonsillitis does not happen at the back of the neck!” he retorted back.

“I have had enough of your dreamed up swollen lymph nodes and cancer and what not!” she replied and stormed out of the café.

He stared blankly in her direction as she exited through the arched doors of the cafe. It was getting dark outside, and the café was emptying. “She’ll come around”, he thought. “Once she has her temper under control. But WHAT is tingling in my neck!”

He realized that subconsciously, his hands were back at it. Back at rubbing the nape of his neck trying to figure out what the inflammation was. And suddenly, like an electric shock, he felt it. He jerked his hands away. It was impossible. But he was sure he had felt it – the touch. The touch of those fingers he had intertwined his own fingers with for hours sitting by the lake. The touch of the hand he had held while walking miles through lush green forests. The touch of the hand belonging to the woman he had vowed to marry, before he had found that her hand was not devoted to him alone. And all the memories came gushing back to him – the bad ones. The ones where he had found out about her, they had fought, and he had said his last goodbye. “It was for the best,” he told himself. “I need to stop thinking about these before I go back to the dark place and lock myself in the house for weeks.”

He looked around trying to distract himself. Some girls on the next table were giving him furtive looks. They looked scared as his eyes met one of theirs. It dawned on him that he must have been talking to himself again, and the girls must be thinking his mind has gone cuckoo. Smiling at the silliness, he turned back to the report he was supposed to be completing.

As he gawked at the blank word document in front of him (he had been attempting to begin writing for the past 30 minutes), he heard an annoying scratching sound – like nails on a chalk board, or a jagged stick on a brick wall. It started getting louder. He looked around. The few souls left in the café seemed not to have noticed the noise.

“How can they ignore it! It’s like it’s in my head! And it’s getting louder exponentially, by the second.”

It was becoming unbearable, as if insects from inside his head were trying to scratch their way out of his eardrums. That’s when he understood it was indeed inside his skull, and thus, no one around could hear it. Rubbing his ears and his neck, he hastily packed his belongings and dashed out of the café into the cool evening outside. He could not think straight. The noise was interrupting his thoughts. All he could do was walk as quickly as he could towards the walk-in clinic beside his house, three blocks away from the café.

He started limping in pain as his head started complaining at the noise by giving him a migraine attack. As his hand went back to his neck to check on the swelling, he realized it was not a lump anymore. There was something long and thin sticking out of the back of his neck. He slumped down on the dark, empty alley, trying to figure out what was happening.

The scratching noise was actually coming from the lump, or what used to be a lump. Something from inside had scratched its way out from the area behind his ears. And then, he realized what it was. It could not be! But it was. The thin, gangly thing was a finger, and there were more of them scratching their way out from the back of his neck.

He screamed in pain, but no sound came out as his throat felt like it was being clutched tightly. His breathing had become shallow and was coming in sharp gasps of pain. The fingers had already made their way out and now, it was the wrist squirming out. It was all happening too fast to do anything, yet too slow for the pain. “Just end it,” was all he could think of.

Despite the cool breeze blowing, he was sweating profusely. The scratching noise had stopped. But he could feel a tingling sensation from the nape of his neck, slowly twisting its way around his ears and under his chin. The cracked concrete was inches away from his nose as he crouched on all fours in the alley. In a puddle of water on the concrete, he saw his own reflection. There was a shriveled hand coiling around his neck.

He jumped backwards in fear and his hand shot immediately back to his neck – there really was a hand. Attempting to save dear old life, he grabbed it and tried yanking it away from himself. The hand tightened its grip on his carotid arteries. Naturally, he tried grabbing the fingers of the deformity to loosen the chokehold and that’s when he felt the cold touch of the metal. He crawled back on the ground, towards the puddle and this time, he noticed the ring on the finger of the shriveled, bluish hand that was choking him. The heart shaped diamond on it glinted in the light seeping in from the streets into the alley. It was the same ring he had held in his hand and went down on one knee.

He could see flashes from his past and it felt like déjà vu. His strong arms feeling her soft swan like neck, her large blue eyes wide and pleading for forgiveness, her heaving chest as she attempted to breathe and then, nothingness. Paralyzed with disbelief, dread, and guilt, he simply sat in the alley as the hand continued to tighten the chokehold. He could only hear an unnaturally familiar gagging sound coming from his throat as he got engulfed in the darkness of death. It was the same gagging sound she had made when he had bidden her, his last farewell.