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Hand By Ryan Boudinot 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!" If you would like to link to this story, please use this link. | ||
