A disembodied hand has killed a woman. John is sitting in his bed, watching the news in disbelief. It happened at a gas station just outside the town. There is video footage on the TV. A giant white hand emerges from the darkness offscreen, floating. It’s the size of a man. The woman cannot see it. She is pouring gas into her old truck, scratching at her shirt, trying to remove a small white stain. The hand is silent as it approaches, levitating in the air. The hand is still for an instant, inches behind the woman. She turns to it, and before she’s able to scream or run, the hand grabs her and tightens its grip. It compresses her and blood squirts out of her mouth and nose, and her eyes pop out of her head. The hand lets go, and she drops to the ground next to her truck. She does not move. The hand hovers over her and floats away the same way it came, off into the dark.
Why we are here, looking over John, is unknown. His hands are pressed against his cheeks. He cannot believe what he sees. His bedroom is untidy, and the clock on his wall reads 7:44. It’s dawn. The sun hides beyond the dense gray clouds, and a light rain falls.
“What the fuck?” John whispers. “What the fuck is this?”
John reaches for his phone and dials a number that is not familiar to us. It’s not saved in his contacts, but he knows the number by heart. The phone on the other end is ringing, but there is no answer, and the voicemail message plays.
“This is Linda. Leave a message after the beep!” The phone says in a chirpy voice.
John waits for the beep and says: “What the fuck is happening, Linda? Are you okay? Call me.”
John turns up the volume on the television and watches the news as they repeat the story of the disembodied hand. The anchors cannot believe it, and their eyes don’t blink. They’re stuttering words and breathing fast. They’re frightened. John is frightened, too. A car is honking somewhere nearby, and a man is screaming angry or frustrated, but the rain muffles his voice. The street outside is empty. It’s a peaceful neighborhood. They keep their lawns and sidewalks clean. It’s a beautiful morning, one might say. It’s a terrible morning, one might say, too.
The house where John lives is small. Outside his bedroom there is a kitchen and a small table, and another smaller room where he keeps boxes of things he doesn’t seem to use. A doll is hanging out of one of the boxes. It has red hair and a blue dress. The room is dusty. It hasn’t been cleaned for weeks, perhaps months. A smell of old soap and dirty dishes permeates the hall. The kitchen looks clean except for the sink, filled with plates and utensils and a cast iron pan. A single polaroid hangs from the refrigerator with a magnet. It’s John and a woman, and a small girl in a wheelchair. They’re posing in front of a beach. John is smiling at the camera. The woman is holding the wheelchair, her left hand on the girl’s shoulder. Someone has written on the white space below the polaroid.
JOHN, LINDA, SANDY. OCT 15th 1998.
It’s her. Linda is the woman in the picture. Linda is the woman in the news. It’s her being crushed on the screen. The hand got her. It’s Linda’s eyes popping out of their skull.
What are we doing here, John?
“Linda?” John asks and peeks out the bedroom door. “Is that you?” His voice trembles as he grabs the door frame.
He turns off the TV and walks into the kitchen. He had been crying in the bedroom. Trails of dry tears are stuck to his face, and his eyes are red. He sits now in a chair, and is staring at his watch. Is he waiting for something? Perhaps waiting for someone? Linda will not be coming, we are free to assume. The hand has taken her from the world. Is John sad? Is John remembering the times he spent with her in 1998? A nice day at the beach.
“Let’s go for lunch at the beach.” He might have said an hour or so before the picture.
He might have asked a waiter to take a picture, and they might have had lobster and shrimp cocktails. Sandy might have spent most of those days smiling, a possible departure from her everyday life in a city somewhere. Maybe, at the end of the day when the picture was taken, Linda fell asleep early, in a way she hadn’t done so in years. Carefree, it might have seemed to John, snoring away at some pleasant and forgettable dreams, even going as far as unconsciously slobbering on her pillow a bit. What good times we’ve been given, John might have thought. Who knows how long this oasis will last, he might have wondered. Times could have been difficult before, with Sandy unable to walk, unable to speak. Times could have been difficult after, with Sandy’s health deteriorating. Why wasn’t Linda’s contact in John’s phone? Why is there a doll in a dusty box in a dusty room? Where is Sandy? Where is John, for that matter?
John has had his face buried into his hands for ten minutes now. We don’t know what he’s thinking… but something is creeping beneath our conscious wanderings around the world. Why we are here, with John, we do not know.
Someone is screaming outside. A man is running on the otherwise empty street. Help me, he says. Somebody please help me. His voice is jagged and strained. John props his head up and looks out the window. We can see the man now, through our eyes and through John’s as well. The man isn’t running, he is sprinting. Light rain continues to fall, and a hundred feet behind the man, a disembodied hand follows, floating and silent. It seems bigger still than it did on TV. Larger than a full grown man, covered in blood, the hand moves swiftly through the air. The man runs past John’s house. His shrieks for help continue and dissipate into the distance and white noise from the rain. John’s heart is beating almost through his shirt. The veins on his neck are throbbing and the blood vessels in his eyes have turned bright red. He closes the window and he locks the front door. John is hyperventilating and swallowing more than he should – empty gulps of saliva, a reflex to rid his mouth of all obstructions.
An uneasy stillness surrounds us. The street again is empty and silent. If all we had was the present, there would be no way to know of what transpired. These unnatural events would vanish the way they materialized. A floating hand could be real and impossible within a matter of seconds. We are not bound, though, by the now. The stillness is temporary, and the quiet impermanent. John has gone into the dusty room and is rummaging through the old boxes. He tears them open, spilling their contents on the floor and the tops of other boxes. In the corner, below a Roald Dahl book and old notebooks, the red-haired doll stares at us with old unmoving eyes. They’re not real eyes, of course, but we can’t help but wonder what they’ve seen, how long they have remained within these old boxes, and what they’d say if they were living. A story is forever enclosed inside its dollness, its state of unliving.
John finds what he’s been looking for. A large metal bat. He leaves the room in disarray and heads back into his bedroom.
Why are we here, John?
John peeks out of his bedroom and then looks out the window.
“Leave me alone!” He says. So we do. We leave him be.
He grabs a bottle of pills from under his bed and swallows two of them. He lays down on the bed, clutching his bat. The rain has picked up, and lightning strikes somewhere near the horizon, bringing with it the sound of echoing thunder. His lungs return to calm, and his heart slows into a normal rhythm. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Are we inside his nightmares? Are we part of this unnatural dream?
Who are we, John?
John does not reply. He is snoring now. The day grows dark with heavier clouds and noisy rain. If another man came screaming down the street, we would not hear him. It seems this little house we inhabit has shrunk, in a way, or has been set apart from the world. We can barely see through the winds and the downpour. We are alone now, isolated from reality. If John is dreaming, and we are indeed the ghost in a dream, then why are we still here? He is sleeping, and yet we have not dissolved away. How can we wake him? How can we wake up ourselves? A pigeon has come to rest outside John’s window. Wet and tired, it stands motionless and watches the inside of the room with one eye and the storm with the other. Who knows how the brains of pigeons work. Is it thinking of its family, on some tree out there? Is it thinking it must bring food? Or is it scared of the lightning and thunder? Does it know it will end? Or does it exist, like we do, in a bubble of the present?
It rains. It knows.
It’s dangerous. It knows.
It inhales, and it exhales, and it ruffles its feathers. It sticks its beak under its wings as if to clean them. A minute piece of black string rests on the window sill and the pigeon pecks at it, and discards it. John’s room must seem an unreachable heaven. A realization has come crashing down upon us. Far worse than existing as an entity in a dream, the evidence brought to us by this tired pigeon tells us we exist as John exists. This place and this time exists for us as it exists for this neighborhood and this world. Linda has died. They said so on the TV. A disembodied hand has crushed her. What does it mean?
Wake up, John.
But John does not. A notepad sits on his bedside table.
SEPTEMBER 12
– DO DISHES
– PICK UP DRY CLEANING
– START READING
SEPTEMBER 27
– DO DISHES
SEPTEMBER 28
– CALL LINDA
The digital clock behind the notepad tells us it’s September 29th. Why must we roam this room and read into the private notes of this man sleeping? Is there anything else to do but wait? The ceiling is white with a circular light fixture in the middle. The walls are a light shade of gray and empty except for a clock. There is a small desk with a closed laptop. It’s disconnected. The cord is on the floor, dusty. John must not use it much. The closet doors are shut, and a washed out red towel hangs from one of them. Old deodorant and cologne seem to leak out from inside, smelling of synthetic freshness. A dead moth lies in a corner of the room. The sheets on the bed are white. John’s eyes are moving beneath their eyelids. A pair of headphones peek out from under the covers and a black sock is crumpled by one of the feet of the bed.
The pigeon watches us. It sees into our invisible eyes and flies away into the heavy rain.
We wait for something to occur. There goes a minute. There goes an hour. John is resting, sleeping on his side. The clock is ticking. We exist, but why? There goes another hour, and another two.
A banging interrupts our lull. Someone is at the door.
“John!” a man says from the outside. “John! Are you there?”
John stumbles to the door and opens it.
“Jesus christ! I’ve been calling you for hours. Are you alright?” The man says.
“Sorry. I took some sleeping pills. I wasn’t sure… if I was dreaming. What the hell is going on?” John says. “Come in, come in.”
“I don’t know what’s happening. I’m so sorry about Linda. I’ve been trying to call you.”
“Yeah.” John says. “It’s okay. I hadn’t seen her in years. We weren’t… we weren’t close, you know.”
John’s eyes gleam as he speaks, and he wipes a tear off his face. The man at the door doesn’t notice, but we do.
It’s okay, John. It’s going to be okay.
John looks back into his house, confused, for a moment. We don’t know if it’s going to be okay, but it costs nothing to comfort a man.
“The prisons are full of them, John. You haven’t been watching TV?”
“No. Full of what?”
“Hands. Most of the inmates are dead. Some kind of reckoning has descended upon us. It’s the end times.”
“Hands are killing prisoners?”
“Yeah. Not just prisoners, but yeah, a lot of prisoners, for sure. I don’t know, man. I’m thinking we gotta get outta here. I’m thinking we just gotta go… for a few days or weeks, maybe. I don’t know. We can’t stay here. We gotta go somewhere we can be alone.”
“One of them was chasing a man down the street earlier.” John says. “I don’t know who it was. He was screaming for help. I was sure I was having a nightmare.”
The word ‘nightmare’ lingers in the air. Something about the letters that compose it, and the meaning behind them, echo within us a wicked nostalgia. Emotions remembered from another life. What is time for us floating entities of the world? A nausea without a stomach and a grief without tears. What is this nightmare from eons past? The rain is calmer, but the day has grown darker. From within our ghostly selves, a desperate itch has awakened, a yearning…
“…gonna go pack some stuff. And I’ll be back for you in about an hour.”
“Okay. I don’t think I’ll pack much, but okay. I’ll be waiting.”
The man leaves John’s home.
Fear takes over us. Whatever our incorporeal existence is, an aura of tension and horror has materialized within us and around us. John’s house, both brighter and darker, seems to have grown, or is it us? Are we growing?
“…the hell is happening? Linda would have known what to do. What’s going to happen without her? Socks, underwear, t-shirts, pants. I don’t need anything else. Where are the keys? Didn’t I just take them? We should head to the desert. We should go far into the desert, where nothing can ever find us. If the prisoners are dying… if Linda is dead… what does it mean for me?“
John’s thoughts become our own.
We can hear your thoughts, John.
John is grabbing clothes from his drawers and stuffing them in a duffel bag.
“What is that? Leave me alone. Leave me alone. We have to go into the desert. Nothing can find us there. What the fuck is going on? We’re going to need lots of water. Is this not a dream? Why can’t I wake up? One hour. I have one hour before we leave. What else do you need? What else do I pack? Sandy’s room?“
A floating hand approaches. We cannot see it, but it has announced its presence to us. Where are you? It signals, but we don’t want to say.
What are we doing here, John? Why are we here, roaming this house? Why are we watching you?
John drops to the floor and screams.
“Who are you? Where are you?”
We are above you, John. We have been watching.
John looks in our direction, but cannot see us.
“What’s happening to me? Who are you? What do you want?”
We’ve been watching you, but we don’t know why. The world compels us. We can hear your thoughts.
John opens his eyes wide and stops moving.
“What do you want from me?” He says.
A hand is coming.
John crawls on the floor and hides under the window sill. He is yelling a barrage of questions, but there is a nightmare in this house, the hand has signaled. A nightmare from eons past.
A hand is coming. We tell John, again.
The nightmare lingers in the air, and the approaching hand has heightened it. Is it a bringer of sorrow, this hand? Is it a harbinger of evil and death and the darkest thoughts in the minds of the creatures of the world? A gasping echoes elsewhere, beyond the confines of the walls that surround us. Beyond the plaster and the wood, beyond time, in another space. Where Earth stood, in the far reaches of the galaxy… a sorrow from another place has come to haunt us.
John is crying below the window. Presently, he grabs the keys from the bedside table and runs. He exits the house and drags us along. A giant hand approaches from the east, floating in silence under the light rain and the cool wind. John sees it.
“Somebody help me!”
The gasping is louder now, louder than the rain even.
“…Linda is dead. What more do you want? Linda has died. You have taken everything. What more do you want? Jesus christ, somebody has to help me…“
John’s fear has infected us. The hand seems before us a towering presence, an inevitable act of nature, terrible and destructive like the endless tentacles of tsunamis. He is the nightmare, the hand signals. He is the tsunami, the hand makes it known. The hand’s wave of consciousness is expanding, and the distance between itself and the physical John has shortened. Its presence is terrible, indeed, darkening the space around it, frightening the little insects and birds away, leaking blood from its grotesque stump.
John is panting now and has slowed down.
He is the sorrow, the hand tells us. He is the nightmare. Our eye is met, then, by the eye of the hand, ethereal and powerful. He is the nightmare, we know. He is the sorrow, we know.
What did you do, John?
The answer comes to us from deep within the running man.
“I don’t want to die!” John states.
What did you do?
“It was for the best! We rid her of suffering! We rid her of pain!”
What did you do?
John is stumbling through the street, tired from running.
“You killed Linda! You killed her! It was her idea! It was hers!”
Our purpose is then revealed. We are not watching John. We are looking for nightmares. We are looking for old wounds in the cosmos. We are the mind, and the hand acts by us.
What did you do?
“I’m sorry!” John says. “I’m sorry!”
Tell us.
“I killed Sandy.” He whispers.
The hand floats to him and takes him in the air. John pleads for help, but his voice cannot form. He groans and twists, and his eyes open wide. The hand tightens its grip, and a red stream erupts from John’s mouth. His eyes pop out of his head.
Now he lays motionless on the ground. The world before us is vanishing. The nightmare has ended, we know. We can awaken now, we know. The hand floats away in silence as we disappear into a dreamless oblivion.