Hand
The woman nursed her baby in the deepest cell of the dungeon. The space
was quite large but she stayed mostly in a corner on a pile of
decomposing straw, the infant close to her empty breasts, rocking,
singing it pieces of songs. Astringent-tasting water trickled down the
masonry of a nearby wall; if she placed the side of her head against the
stones, enough was diverted into her mouth to keep thirst at bay. Near
the bed of straw there was a hole in the wall created by the absence of
a stone. Once a day, a hand would protrude from the hole, offering one
hand full of food. Most often it was bread. There were days when it was
potato mush. One time it was an apple. The woman ate it all, and the
hand waited until she had licked its fingers clean before it retreated.
The baby cried, but it was when the baby didn't cry that the woman's
worry turned to panic. She had not been educated in the sciences, so she
could only rely on her intuition and her twisted stomach when gauging
whether the daily ration offered by the hand was enough to sustain both
her baby and herself. On a couple occasions the baby cooed after
feeding, and this noise was like a hundred doves riding beams of
sunlight through the woman's body.
The woman kept her mind occupied with memories that soon began to wash
out and crumble. She surveyed the confines of her cell with the
inevitable diligence of the long-confined. After the food was gone from
the hand she would hold onto it until it struggled and retreated and she
cried into the opening in the wall, pleading with the hand's owner to
tell her something, speak its name, but the owner of the hand was mute.
The hungrier the woman became, the more she pleaded, imploring the hand
to deliver her baby from this cavernous prison. She had no way to count
hours besides the dripping seconds of water, but her lightening breasts
and baby told her that the hand came less frequently, and when it did
come it seemed to offer increasingly smaller portions of food. Finally,
one day it appeared empty. The woman searched its creases for crumbs or
residues, but it had nothing. Angry, the woman dug her fingernails into
the wrist, and when the hand struggled she bit down on its fingers. If
she had to, she knew, she could transform blood into milk.
Then the hand trembled and went limp. The woman tugged on it and it kept
coming, sliding out of the hole until she held the bleeding arm, severed
at the shoulder. The horror quickly passed as she continued gnawing on
the flesh. The limb, she found, weighed as much as her baby.
After the third day, when the bones had been chewed clean, the door of
the cell was thrown open, and the soldiers said, "Yes, yes, we've found
you at last!"
Ryan Boudinot's work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, Hobart, and The Mississippi Review. He lives in Seattle.