The beast with five fingers

07 December 2011 07:43 AM Categories: Writing prompts

Sometimes I wish I could perform this neat trick of cinematography: I want to look down at my hands, middle-aged now and starting to show it, and see them change. We'd begin with chubby baby hands that slowly morph into slightly less chubby toddler hands that develop into the thinner fingers of an elementary schooler. My middle-school and early high school hands have things written on them, reminders and stupid sayings in blue ballpoint pen. The late high school and early college hands are slack (tired from work, tired from lifting too many cups and bottles) and we keep on moving, even through this time, into old age, so that at the end – depending on my end, of course, –- my hands are thin-skinned and bent with use, maybe grasping the chubby fingers of a grandchild (if I am lucky, if I am lucky).

But right now, I am balancing my two 42-year-old hands on my laptop. Later I will use them to grasp spoon, knife, bowls. I will run them through my wet hair, I will pat the boy and the dog and the cats. The hands work, they are mine, with little scars from little accidents, and I am grateful for their smooth movement.

I used to watch old style horror movies on Saturday afternoons when I was a kid, schlocky things on the UHF channels. After I saw The Beast With Five Fingers (with Peter Lorre!), I imagined my hands somehow escaping from my arms at night and tiptoeing around whatever poorly heated mildew-laden apartment my mother and I lived in at the time. They would climb the pipes in the kitchen, play with matches in the dark, crawl into my mother’s room and watch her, stroking her hair as she tossed and turned. If I was lucky, they could figure out how to open the front door. My hands would be out on the street, watching the stumbling adults with their twisted agendas. My hands were pure, but they wanted to watch, they wanted to learn what adults did under the cover of night, while inside I slept under my Mickey Mouse blanket.

Thank goodness I never woke up gasping for air, in the middle of another midnight asthma attack, only to discover that my hands were missing, that the things I needed to grab my inhaler, to push my covers down before leaving my room to wake my mother, were gone, out on the town, watching the dissolute souls tying one on at the corner bar, the hands making plans for our adulthood, for the grasping of bottles and other people, for the long slow stroke down another's back.

They've been corrupted, my hands. They know the scene, they've played the games, they can't be trusted. Sometimes I let them take over just to see what they'll get up to, to watch them feed their appetites. Eventually they'll forget their grasping neediness, the way they always want more and more. Time and arthritis will tame them. My hands will start to fall in line, to fit the expectations people have of the old. Wine glasses and beer bottles and stolen cigarettes will be replaced by warm milk before bed and weak tea in the afternoon, and when I do hold that grandchild's hand, if I make it that far, no one will suspect my hands of their crimes. We will be innocent by association, trembling with the memory of what we once held.

From the prompt "Reaching out."

Image from Black Hole Reviews.

Tags: the beast wIth five fingers, old horror movies, hands, aging

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