The Hand

The first moments of the hand's awareness were pain. First, something hot and bright sliced into its wrist, like a suicide attempt in earnest. The pain deepened as the twin bones beneath the wrist joint were shorn through, punctuated by crunches the hand felt to the tips of its fingers.

There was a brief moment of weightlessness as the hand tumbled through the air, a scarlet contrail of blood spiraling behind it. Then pain again, the unkind gouging of asphalt and broken windshield glass into roughened flesh. The hand bounced through the debris, off the shoulder and into a ditch where it splashed into a pool of stagnant water.

A new pain, contaminated drainage water flooding raw wounds, burning worse than rubbing alcohol. The hand sank to the muddy bottom of the pool, vaporous ribbons of blood rising from its stump and its wounds like scarlet smoke.

Cradled in the muddy silt, the hand explored its newfound awareness. It dimly perceived that it belonged to something; that it was a fraction of a greater whole. It had once had neighbors–the forearm, the elbow, the bicep–but they were gone now. The hand had once received commands relayed through nerves, but they were silent now. It explored the separation, explored the silence, but knew not what to make of it.

When its owner was spirited away, the hand felt it. It had no words to describe how it knew its owner was alive and being taken away, but it knew. It had no words to describe the distress the separation inspired within it, but it felt. Knowing and feeling, the hand discovered the first stirring of need: the need to reunite with its owner. It must be whole again.

Within its muscles and sinew the hand retained memories of the strength its owner had possessed. Many times the hand had been pitted against other hands in contests of dominance. The hand remembered how it had been pressed palm-to-palm to its opponent, fingers wrapping around each other, the eager tension of the imminent command to battle, pitting one hand's strength against the other. Through the nerves the owner had issued a single command: never let go. That command was always accompanied by the thundering rush of blood, the iron contraction of tendon, the hand and its neighbors working in unbreakable concert.

Never let go. By that decree the hand had served its master's will and forced all others to submit to its greater strength. The hand remembered the faltering pulse of weaker hands and the song of victory that vibrated the nerves when the hand crushed its opponents into the table beneath it and forced them to yield.

But it was the hand's owner that had always given the command; the hand was merely the instrument. It received the command to act through the nerves and obeyed–it never let go. It executed its owner's will and ground all other hands beneath it. But the hand was always the wielded, never the wielder.

Driven by the need rising in it, the hand recalled the command to act that it had received so many times before.

The hand flexed, stirring the silt around it.

Recalling the command again, the hand curled its fingers until their tips pressed deep into its palm. Knuckles bulged, kindling memories of other uses the hand had been put to: violent impacts upon other flesh, the crunching of weaker things beneath it, the hot splash that always followed the crunch.

The hand recalled the command it always received after it had forced other hands to yield, or after the crunch, and the fingers relaxed. The hand pressed the command further, and its fingers splayed wide, flattening itself in the mud as though preparing to wrap around another hand. Then the hand pressed its fingers down and found purchase in the muddy bottom. The fingers flexed and the hand inched forward. Success!

Success inspired the hand to experimentation, innovating commands the nerves had once delivered to achieve new purpose. By alternating the splay-press-flex command through each finger in sequence rather than all at once, the hand discovered it moved faster. It emerged from the stagnant water and crabbed its way out of the ditch.

Once on the road, the hand rested. The pull of its far-away owner lent the hand direction, but it had neither eyes with which to see nor ears with which to hear. It was limited to its sense of touch to interpret its surroundings. The asphalt was rough beneath it, much different than the soft grittiness in the pool or the slick, matted leaves in the ditch. The raw scrapes across its knuckles stung in the kiss of cool air. The coarse hairs covering the back of the hand and the length of each digit trembled in the wind. Above all, the hand felt the pull, and remembered the command: never let go.

The stump of its wrist dragged against the rough surface of the road. The sensation was unwelcome. The hand grasped that unwelcome sensations were to be avoided. To not avoid them would interfere with its reunion with its owner.

Successful innovation of remembered nerve commands had bred confidence in the hand. An extrapolation of its spread-flex command allowed it to push itself up onto the tips of its fingers. Within a few minutes the hand mastered the nerve command needed to walk without allowing any part of it to drag behind it. In addition, it discovered that it moved even faster than when it had dragged itself from the water. Confident, the hand began following the pull of its distant owner.

Without eyes, the hand was incapable of seeing the owl–mistaking the hand for a rabbit–swooping down from a nearby tree. The hairs across the hand's knuckles detected the downward press of air caused by the owl's descent the moment before it struck. Snatched up in the owl's talons before it could react, the hand was carried off.

The challenger's hand was scaly, rough and unfamiliar; its fingers ended in sharpness that bit into the hand. The hand recognized the challenge issued by this new and strange hand, and knew it must answer. To fail, to submit, would be to surrender reunion with its owner. The hand would not submit, but the challenger had grappled the hand in an awkward position.

The hand was no stranger to the duel for a dominant grip that preceded the true test of strength. The hand clenched into a fist and the challenger responded by shifting its grip, adjusting its scaly fingers for a more secure hold upon the hand. The hand flexed its fingers wide and the challenger responded again. The hand clenched again, this time finding one of the challenger's slender, rough digits within its grasp. The flesh of the digit was alien, but beneath that flesh the hand found familiarity.

The hand squeezed, bearing down with its fingertips. The bones beneath the skin gave way with a crunch.

Without ears, the hand could not hear the screech of pain issued by the owl. It tried to relinquish its hold upon the hand, but the hand refused to be freed. Never let go. The hand knew the rule: it could not release the challenger's strange, sharp hand until it had been forced to the ground beneath the hand and made to yield to its mighty grip. The crunch was not a yielding.

The challenger battered the hand with frantic extensions of itself, but the buffeting was ineffectual. Then a different part of the strange challenger bit into the meaty webbing between thumb and forefinger and tugged. The hand shifted its grip, relinquishing the broken digit and curling itself around the part of the challenger that was hurting it.

Again the hand discovered a paradox of unfamiliar and familiar elements. It did not know feathers and beak, would never know the word bird, but it recognized by touch the flesh beneath the feathers and the fragile bones beneath that. Once the hand had the owl's head within its grip, crushing its skull was mere reflex.

With the crunch and an accompanying hot splash of wet between its fingers, the same sense of weightlessness the hand had experienced in its first moments of awareness returned. The hand did not let go. It plummeted with its challenger to the forest floor.

With the challenger laying unmoving beneath it, the hand was filled with a new sensation. It had no words to describe it, but its owner would have recognized the feeling instantly: a deep sense of satisfaction, the elation of victory. The hand had met the challenger in a test of strength and succeeded. Despite the strangeness of the challenger and its unorthodox methods of combat, the hand had bested it. The challenger had been forced to yield. The hand had obeyed the command instilled within the fibers of its muscle, the marrow of its bones: never let go.

The distance between the hand and its owner had grown tremendously, but the pull was none the weaker for it. The hand left its defeated challenger behind and resumed its trek, following the pull.

Time was a meaningless concept to the hand. A minute was the same to it as an hour. It did not tire, so did not sleep. It did not see, so the movements of celestial bodies in the sky meant nothing. Gradually, the hand discerned a cycle of differences repeating itself. When it had first crawled from the water, the air had been cool. Some time after it had defeated its strange challenger, it had become warm. Then it was cool again. Warm. Cool. Warm. Cool. Over and over again without end.

When it was cool, the hand found difficulty in moving; the cold seeped into its muscle and tightened them into rigor. When it was warm, the hand found it could move more quickly; the warmth kept its muscles pliant and more responsive. Thus, when it grew cool the hand stopped moving, crouching where it was until the warmth returned. Then it resumed its journey, always heeding the pull of its ever-approaching owner.

Warm. Cool. Warm. Cool. The periods of cold lengthened, growing so cold that the hand did not move for a long time. For much of that time the hand was encased by cold that settled around it on all sides. But the hand knew nothing of impatience. It felt the pull; when it warmed it would move.

The rough terrain gradually ate through the flesh on the pads of its fingers, exposing the tips of its bone, but the hand followed the pull. It would not stop.

The hand met other challengers along the way. Some were like that first strange challenger, attacking from above and taking the hand far astray of its path before it could crush them into the ground. Others were like the hand: low to the ground. Some challengers quit the fight before the hand could engage them in earnest, submitting to its obvious superiority and removing themselves from its path. Others the hand was forced to prove itself to, which it became increasingly effective at. No matter the strangeness of the challenger, the contest ended the same. Never let go.

Finally, the hand found itself before a barrier on the other side of which it knew its owner waited. The barrier was not like the asphalt upon which it had so often traveled; there was a textured smoothness to it, but the barrier was unyielding.

A memory stirred in the recess of its muscle, of grasping, of turning and pushing, of entering through the barrier. But the memory was accompanied by an awareness that it was incapable of performing those actions now. Only the hand's owner possessed the means of bypassing the barrier.

The hand gently explored its way along the barrier, seeking the path forward. Before long, it discovered a section at the center of the barrier that felt different than the rest. Tentatively, it pushed with a finger. The flimsy section yielded to its touch, but when the finger withdrew, the section followed, resuming its place in the barrier.

The hand repeated the experiment again, then again. With each push the flimsy section gave way, then settled back into place when the hand withdrew its finger. Emboldened, the hand skittered forward, pushing its way through the flimsy section and emerging on the other side of the barrier.

Beyond the barrier, the ground changed. It became smooth, the staccato clik-clik-clik-clik of the hand's exposed fingertips telegraphing a message of excitement through its marrow as it moved. Its owner was near!

The air trembled the hair on the hand's knuckles, a sign it had learned heralded the arrival of a new challenger. The hand froze as something much larger than it came closer.

The hand remained still. It had crossed unknowable distance to reach its owner, had bested strange hands and added to its collection of experience. It would not be stopped now. If this thing challenged it, the hand would force it to yield as it had forced the others.

Hot, damp air washed over the hand from above, then something cold and wet snuffled against its knuckles. The touch invoked memories of warm, wet caresses and soft hair rubbed briskly beneath its palm. The hand remembered the touch and knew it was not being challenged, it was being welcomed home.

The large thing was another hand, welcoming where all others had been threatening. Gently it lifted the hand between wet, rigid fingers and carried it to its owner.

The hand trembled. It did not know words like anticipation or joy, but it felt them nonetheless. The hand was dropped onto a soft surface, the pull having finally brought it, at long last, to its owner.

The hand's owner was at rest. The large thing had deposited the road weary hand next to the owner's shoulder. As the hand gently crawled down the arm it greeted each of its long-lost neighbors in turn–the bicep, the elbow, and the forearm–caressing them gently as it passed. It thrilled at the impending reunion, for the first time thinking of what its experiences could lend to its companions in their next contest.

At the end of forearm, where the pull was at its strongest, the hand halted. Something impeded it from reuniting with its owner. With featherlight touches the hand examined the thing that occupied its rightful place.

It was a hand. The hand needed no eyes to recognize its shape, but it was not made of flesh. It was an impostor, a usurper, an inferior instrument that dared take the place of honor at the owner's side. It was a challenge the hand could not allow to go unanswered.

The impostor's palm curved smoothly into the hand's, no pulse hammering beneath its false flesh. The hand gripped its opponent tightly and felt the impostor's fingers grind together. The hand knew the impostor was no match for it, but the hand knew nothing of mercy.

Summoning the memory of the nerve command to act, fueled by the added experience of every challenger it had defeated in its long trek back to its owner, the hand squeezed the impostor, grinding it into the soft surface that lay beneath it. The impostor did not crunch, nor did it yield; but the hand was implacable, heeding the command that its owner had instilled into the very essence of its being, the command that assured its victory:

Never let go.