He was on the way up, the poor lad.
Up from an infancy of neglect, out of the fistfights of his adolescence, the mind-addled haze of his twenties. Now, early thirties, he was peeling away from that self-sabotaging behavior, proudly clean of booze, weed, fast food. He was working out. He was healthy. He had, and held, a job.
He just couldn’t keep his damn hands to himself.
The morning after it happened he woke up to find two little faces in his hands: four eyes, two nubby noses, two smiling lips.
Us!
He screamed and scrubbed until the skin was red and bleeding and we had to close our lids and mouths because soap suds are horribly, disgustingly sour. But he couldn’t get rid of us. We existed, our birth memories the riot of the night before, and what he did. Good memories.
So good, in fact, that a week after that, when he was asleep, we degloved him, separating the skin neatly from each wrist and peeling free to skitter and scatter across the bedroom like fleshy spiders. He kept the window cracked open at night.
One of his many mistakes.
Bonelessness was no challenge for us. We muttered to each other as we fingered our way over the windowsill, skittering over lawn and tarmac and sidewalk. Do you feel it? Do you feel it? Some malevolent animating force in us, some dark consciousness.
The God of Restless Hands.
We did terrible things in the night.
In the morning we returned to him, slipping ourselves on and dozing a little, for our exertions were great.
We awoke when he did.
The usual: tears, retching, washing. We persisted on his palms, untouchable faces.
“Can you talk?” He cried. “What the fuck are you?” We tried to answer. We really did. “I can’t understand you . . . Jesus . . . ”
Not our fault our voices were tinny little helium voices. Not our fault he couldn’t bear to bring us up to his ears to hear us better.
We had another day of darkness, contained within leather gloves, as he went and clutched a steering wheel to drive to work and typed messages on a keyboard and went to the toilet and wiped himself, the stench curling our lips.
Filthy, dirty little lad!
Him pleading on the phone to someone (“ . . . no, it was consensual, we were both drunk, it was after the office party . . . yes, I agree to a formal investigation . . . how many days? Unpaid? Can you . . . what is she saying? I would never do that, never! Ask anyone!”)
Ask us! We screech and shout into the sweat-stinking fabric of his gloves. Ask us, that was the night we were born! WE know what he did!
But no-one asked us.
Back in the car, the rumble of the journey to his house. A million succulent sensations: a metal doorknob turning. A plastic game controller grasped. A half-hearted groping at his genitals—but he couldn’t get up with leather gloves on, not really, and we squealed and giggled inside them because he was so naughty! And in our two little palmbrains we wondered how he could get hard so easily, and so long, with the lady after the office party, but not on his own, with us, in safety?
He took the leather gloves off when he went to bed, and we gasped cleanish air. Then we said a prayer to the God of Restless Hands: God, what can we do to make the man happy?
And He answered us from the shadows pillaring the corners of the room, from the fingerling dark.
. . . Oh, the things we got up to that night!
A riot you wouldn’t believe. Stealing. Flicking. Pinching. Taking and entering (do you know how many people leave their bedroom windows open at night, their back doors unlocked?)
Shushing and smothering crying out mouths with our bodies, granted strength by the God of Restless Hands.
Morning brought disappointment. Hangover.
As one, the thought came to us: we need others to know. We need to write it down.
Was it our thought, though? Sometimes in the middle of our antics a thrumming, throbbing sound, like someone plucking the bloated strings of a great cello, hummed into our substance and increased our frenzy, drove us harder, faster. We made such a mess.
Write it down.
Our lad wasn’t awake yet as we hauled ourselves over the window ledge and slopped back into the room. His laptop screen was a portal of light in which an email draft, half-sentences to someone, HR HEAD, overlaid.
Head! An authority figure. Someone to appreciate our nonsense.
Our pads were quite clean, wiped dry on the soft of his bedding. Our lad was out cold, blood glistening on his skinless hands, cans of beer and an ashtray acrid with used blunts on his nightstand.
Oh dear. He had fallen down. Backsliding. Anyone would. Poor thing.
Clean: that was a word that didn’t describe him any more, we’re afraid. He was no longer clean. He was using. A silly little word that signaled that collapse of a whole life.
Anyway.
We typed all the things we had been up to.
Pinning her down to—
The words came too slowly
Putting our fingers in the—
and the images of our memory couldn’t possibly be captured quick enough
Gripping the shaft of—
but we tried
Pushing into the warmth of—
we moved like pistons for our God
Hooking our thumbs into the corners of—
and if it came out in fractured sentences, we were blameless, blameless—
Clamped ourselves fully over—
Balled into fists and struck the back of the—
Wiped up the—
Stroked the hair of—
Dried the tears of—
Drove away from—
We wrote down all our Godly deeds, from the beginning, our birth memory, and then everything we had done, since then, and everything we would do.
As the first rays of sunlight slid under the window the God of Restless Hands told us we had done well, and that He was proud. Little-lipped, we crooned him a hymn. Then, exhausted, we slipped ourselves back onto the lad on the bed, and slept the sleep of angels.
Except: where our skin refastened to our lad’s wrists there was now the stench of nicotine, of raucous stimulants in his bloodstream and oh we went a little crazy, a little jittery at that! He didn’t even bother to hide us in his leather gloves anymore; just woke up, tugged himself to climax, stumbled to the bathroom (we cupped around glasses full of not water but clear spirit, the first drink of the day) and held a cell phone for hours, and hours, and hours while he sat stinking on the sofa.
Sometimes the phone rang and that brought interest; the vibrations tickled us.
“I’m fired? I . . . I don’t remember sending that email. Did I really say all those things? Maybe I did. I dunno. OK.”
Eventually he fell asleep, and we detached ourselves—but as we stood on our fingertips in the cold tv light of the room we felt sadness, yeah, a little sadness, looking at him with our palm eyes and squeaking consolations with our little palm mouths that he didn’t or couldn’t hear.
There there there. It’s not your fault. It’s the God, our God, Restless Hands. Can’t you tell them that?
Then the God himself appeared in all His glory: a man with two unfurled fists for a head, waving fingers as long as the man himself from the corner of the room. He had such a smart suit on. Being a God, he had higher anatomy than us; no eyes, no nose, no mouth for him, but two interlinked thumbs instead, the space between them whickering open and closed to vocalize.
Go out, go out, go out!
So we went out.
And we fucked up a lot of people. We did.
We really, really did.
We were such a mess when we came back in the pale of sunrise that we had to climb over to the sink, fill it, and sit until we were so soggy, like wrinkled up pieces of parchment.
The God watched us, and He was pleased.
He was lighter in the morning, less solid but still physical: a perfected version of us, mighty-handed. Our lad didn’t seem him standing by the laptop blaring with pop-up boxes, emails coming in, missed calls, missed texts.
If you do enough you too can become like me, He told us, for there is not one God of Restless Hands. There are many.
How we hurried to wring ourselves out and reattach!
No more working out for our lad, no more self-kindness. We had driven him to ruin. Our skin smelled all the time now of oil and grease, and booze, and as he slopped food around a frying pan spots of oil spat out and scalded now one of us, now the other, and we yelled at him to stop but he didn’t stop.
He forgot about the gloves.
Most annoying of all: he kept the windows shut and locked all the doors, so not matter how much we might patter and poke around we couldn’t get out of the house! Screeching in his ears did nothing. His mind was blitzed to oblivion by the cocktail of pills and liquids he took each night, and our cries fell on insensate ears.
The God of Restless Hands floated spread-fingered beyond the bedroom window at nights, his head now more like two giant prehensile wings. Thumb-gaps clapping shut and opening as he called to us. We couldn’t hear him, though. And He couldn’t hear our squeaking cries, either.
Eventually he stopped communicating. Just floated there, watching.
We flung ourselves like rags at the glass. We scratched it until our nails bled and chipped.
Nothing, nothing. No riot. No raucousness. Just sleep, and darkness.
Trapped.
And then one day our lad stumbled out of bed (we hadn’t bothered to detach ourselves and roam, for a few nights, because where could we go?) and showered and dressed and brushed his grotty teeth for the first time in weeks and got into his car. The leather gloves slid back on over us—and though we were hot, and blinded, we were not sad, but quietly patient, biding our time—because we were out. Out and about.
We whispered plans to each other across the fabric: all the things we would do.
The car stopped, at some point, and muffled voices of other humans and beeps of electronic machines surrounded us. Shoes clopping like hooves. We wondered if our God was outside, all dressed up nice for us again.
One voice cut above the others:
“Security check, Sir. No metal objects allowed in the courthouse. Please empty your pockets and place all your belongings into this tray.”
Our man’s wheedling response: “ . . . even my gloves?”
“Yessir. Even the gloves.”
We held our breaths. Our little palm lungs stilled; our little palm ears quivered at the strain of listening to what would come next.
“I- I- I have a medical condition.”
“Do you have a letter for that?”
“ . . .No . . . ”
“Then you’ll have to take them off.”
He did so, in one quick motion. Held his arms palms-in though, so all we saw was the stained brown tweed of his pants, and no one saw us. Cunning little lad! If only he could have put all those brains to good use.
It was nice to see the world again, to see all the little vectors of mischief afforded us, here. Skirts. Legs in tights. Thick jugulars within necks. Purses and cell phones and wallets lolling out of pockets (our eyes roved around, as much as they could, taking it all in).
Our lad retrieved his belongings after they’d gone through the metal detector and placed the gloves back over us, almost dropping them, twice, because his wrists shook so much. The motion made us sick.
Chomping and champing at the leather, we came up with a new plan: we could eat our way out of these. We could bite anyone who came near—and, when the time was right, tear ourselves free and do Praise Things for our God.
Our lad stepped into a small space, and we felt the bump and jostle of other bodies around him. Our palm eyes could just about make out the forms of people, and we counted them: four, plus our man. Tan and black suits, white blouses. Ever so formal.
One other man. Three other women.
Perfect.
There was the ping of shutting doors; there was the artificial voice of a woman (we couldn’t cut her larynx out, sadly, it was just a disembodied voice over a speaker) announcing our descent to a lower floor.
The elevator never moved.
We held our breaths. Knowing it was very important to listen. Feeling our lad’s blood quicken in the meat beneath us and knowing exactly what that meant.
“Is it . . . ”
“Did you push the button . . . ”
“I did . . . ”
“Fuck . . . ”
“Is it stuck?”
“Fucking thing.”
“Maybe we can open the door—help, HELP! Can anyone hear us?”
The others took to banging and hammering on the doors and the buttons of the control panel but nothing worked. Everyone was stuck in here with us.
Everyone.
Was.
Stuck.
In.
Here.
With.
Us.
Our lad made a low, sickly moan, and we already knew what that was all about.
The gloves came off. Dropped to the floor.
Unsheathed, panting our glee, we saw, inobtrusive, in the corner of the elevator, unseen by the frantic women and the other man, trying to remain stoic, but sweat spoiling the creases of his collar—
You know exactly who we saw.
Meaty thumbs came apart to speak two words.
Do it.
If any of the trapped people had been listening, they would have heard a sharp ripping sound, as of paper being torn in half, as we detached and flew free.
No-one listened. And no one heard anything, until the screams began.
Seizing the tie of—
Whirling like a fan’s blade to strike the skulls of—
Pushing faces into the metal of—
Pulling the tie until the veins popped and the man’s tongue slathered out like—
Tearing clothes from—
Nailing the necks apart until—
Slipping and slicking on spilled blood to—
Tearing out tongues to stop—
Tearing great chunks of hair from—
Hammering interrupted our reverie. Someone outside had heard the screams.
We stopped for a moment to take stock. Everything we saw was red, because red covered us—
and the walls—
and the clothes—
—and the faces of everyone, even our unharmed lad, and the God watching us in the corner of the elevator, his suit pristine despite the carnage. Those great fingers curled out and then in, clapping, in his own Godly way.
More.
One of the women was not moving and lay in a pink crumbled heap (like our lad liked: face down, ass up) against one of the elevator walls. The other man sat slumped, naked, holding his face that had no eyes in it anymore, nor tongue: just an endless dribble of blood. The other two women moved, very slowly, like glistening worms on the elevator floor that was just red, just all fucking red.
Everyone looked, at least, to be still alive.
Good.
Our lad made a sound of horror.
“Oh no . . . ”
We turned and glared up at him.
Shut up. You wanted this.
More.
Yes, yes, yes. More!
We will deliver, oh God! We will make such handiwork for you!
Did Godhood await us?
There was only one way to find out.
We gathered our strength. Stretched our own fingers long. Planned the next atrocities with these bodies stuck in here with us: bodies that still contained breath, and blood, and the spark of life.
We would stretch it so thin before breaking it. We would spin it fine as sugar until death was just a child’s step into a puddle.
This would take a while.
Fingers flexing, as one, we moved, with the God of Restless Hands standing quite still—leaning forward, watching us with eyeless glee.
Fresh hammering and wrenching noises tore into the room from outside as someone or someones brought tools to try to open the stuck elevator doors.
Maybe they would succeed before our work was done.
Maybe they would rescue these people still gasping for breath, still clinging onto their unfun stupid little lives.
Maybe not.
It doesn’t matter, either way,
because,
one way or another,
they’re all
going
down.
