Hand in Hand

2024's Scary Storytober Creation

Dr. Malone says that the pain should subside in a couple more months, but Cassie says it could be a forever thing. If I have to choose between them, I’ll believe Cassie every time. She doesn’t bullshit.

Not that Dr. Malone is full of shit, only that she doesn’t like to believe that anything is incurable. She wears a variety of crystals around her neck. Sometimes her office smells like Palo Alto, which I don’t think is allowed. She’s a good doctor. She’s always made sure my vaccines are up to date; she schedules me in for regular check-ups. She visited me in the hospital after what I did. Not as my doctor, but to see if I was okay. I don’t know of many doctors who would do that. I know I didn’t deserve it.

But Cassie doesn’t like her. As soon as she turned eighteen she switched to someone more practical, as she put it, which was her being kind. She told me if I wanted to keep seeing a mad scientist who believed that the power of positive thinking would cure me of a lung infection then that was my funeral, but I told her that that wasn’t fair. Dr. Malone had also prescribed amoxicillin.

But that was the difference between Cassie and me. She had been born with both feet planted firmly on the ground while my head had always been soaring through the clouds. She’d tried to tug me down with her, but I was too slippery, too stubborn to walk beside her. I didn’t like the weight of reality, always found the ground too hard to walk comfortably on. I preferred to float. When you’re floating you never think you’re going to fall. You never think about how far the ground really is below you.

But like every other time in my life I should have listened to Cassie. Feet always on the ground, the fall never too painful when it came. Because it always came.

I didn’t think it was a bad thing to be positive. I thought it was considerate even for Dr. Malone to believe that anything could be cured, but I was starting to lose my patience. It was no secret that my arm wasn’t going to grow back. She could at least be honest about the pain, though maybe in her own way she was. After all, how can a doctor diagnose pain in a limb that no longer exists?

Phantom limb syndrome. That’s what Cassie read to me from her phone, while the morphine dripped through my veins, tried to put me back in the clouds. After the doctor told me what happened, before the police told me what I’d done. Well before the lawyers came, Cassie told me that pain was common, that I might feel pain in my arm forever. Nerve damage, maybe, or just plain old trauma. No one really knows why phantom limbs can be felt.

The pain is still there, more of an ache now like it might actually be healing if such a thing were possible. It’s more sensations now. I’ll be lying on my bed and feel my fingers tapping on my comforter, actually feel the fabric only to remember that I don’t have fingers, or a hand, or an arm on that side of my body anymore. I look over still, just to make sure, like all of this might still be a bad dream.

I’ll watch the empty space where my arm should be laying, my hand should be resting, my fingers should be tapping against the comforter and stare at it looking for a rhythmic indent that never comes.

*

There’s a small hole in my comforter, a long-ago remnant from the spilled ash of a cigarette I shouldn’t have been smoking. Even though the hole was barely there my teenaged self was certain my parents would notice it and so I took a new interest in washing my linen. My parents thought I was finally being responsible. They never found out about the hole, but my fingers always found it. Even now I can feel my index finger burrow into the little hole even while watching my bedspread lie flat.

Cassie keeps trying to get me out of bed. She says it isn’t good for me to lock myself away and I’ve told her that I’m just getting used to what will inevitably be my future. She had nothing to say to that, a rarity for her. She looked away after I said it, mumbled some excuse about needing to check on Wren and left me alone. I wanted her to come back.

I moved in with my parents after the accident. It made the most sense, and Cassie comes by most days with Wren. The walls have always been thin here, voices travel well. When not looking at the place where my arm should be I listen to Cassie tell my parents that she’s worried about me and hear my parents tell her to leave me be.

They come into my room sometimes to ask how I am. We all eat dinner together at the small kitchen table when Cassie drags me out. Cassie keeps up the conversation and sometimes my parents will look my way but when they do it isn’t long. Their eyes don’t linger. It’s like they’re trying to look through me, like one of those optical illusions. Eventually the image of me will shift until I am nothing at all.

My phantom finger burrows deeper into my comforter while lying flat when Wren barrels in. I try to look through her, the way my parents do to me, but it’s an impossibility. She demands to be noticed, a beacon I can’t help but find. Still, it hurts to look at her.

It hurts more when she scrambles up onto my bed and sits on where my arm should be. She isn’t heavy, but she’s a child of force and I wince at the weight of her which only causes Wren’s forehead to furrow, her mouth to pucker. She peers underneath herself but sees only the bedspread. She cannot feel my phantom arm. I feel the fingers of that hand skirt away from the hole which Wren’s small fingers find, burrowing in the way I swore mine did before.

She has something clasped tightly in her other hand which she thrusts in my face. I clumsily sit up in bed, feel my arm underneath Wren try to steady me but do nothing to help as I struggle. I sigh and look that she’s found one of my old dolls, not even a Barbie but a dollar store variety. I don’t know where she found it. Her hair is a tangled mess, she isn’t wearing any clothes, her naked body is scribbled with marker. Her right arm is missing.

She thrusts the doll in my face again, beaming, too bright to look at and says, “She’s just like you.” 

I think there’s a specific type of cruelty saved for childhood. It’s an uncensored, innocent form of viciousness that is allowed and excused. A kid doesn’t know any better after all.

When I was small, I apparently had a laughing attack over an old man hobbling down the street, oxygen tubes squirming into his nostrils from a canister safely kept in his walker. My parents didn’t know what I was laughing at at first, I kept pointing and talking about the strange clown across the street and it took some moments for it all to click. When Cassie was Wren’s age she looked intently at a young, bald woman wearing a pink ribbon behind us in the grocery store and loudly asked our dad why she didn’t have any hair.

In most cases a child hasn’t had enough happen in their little life to understand what an oxygen tube is or what cancer treatment does to a body, what cancer is at all. A child is seeing something they don’t understand and trying to make sense of it by asking questions. They aren’t trying to hurt, but it’s that unknowing that makes their questions hurt worse.

I know that Cassie has probably coached Wren about what she is to say to me, about not bringing up my arm. Cassie brought her to visit me in the hospital once after it happened. Unlike my childhood self Wren cried when she saw the tubes in my nose. I tried to take them out but got yelled at by a nurse, which did make Wren laugh.

She hobbled up onto my hospital bed, sat beside me while I felt my phantom arm draped over my stomach and I saw her look at the bandage on my shoulder, watched her dark eyes flicker between where one arm had been and where the other still existed. I saw the gears turning, wondering how an arm could be missing, but she never asked me about it.

Wren is old enough to make memories, old enough to wonder what happened. I wonder what Cassie told her, what she keeps telling her. If she’s keeping things simple like saying I was in a car accident or if she will hint that it was my fault. She should. I might not see her much after this, and I don’t want Wren to visit me in jail.

I know that Wren has had to keep all of these questions locked inside of her head as she makes up stories for what happened to me, that somehow, she found the one-armed doll and was only making a connection when she saw it. She didn’t think it was an awful thing to compare me to the doll, she only thought we looked the same.

I should have been kinder when she showed it to me. More patient. I shouldn’t have grabbed the doll from Wren’s hand and thrown it against the wall. I shouldn’t have yelled.  I shouldn’t have asked what was wrong with her.

There were words. I should have let Cassie have them, should have let them bruise me while I listened in silence like she deserved while Wren peered at us from the doorway, but I’ve never been the patient sort, even after all of this. I said things I shouldn’t have. About her. About Wren. About who she was as a mother. If our parents heard us they pretended not to. The house was quiet that night. Cassie took Wren back to their place that night and I was worried I’d be stuck in the static whine of my parents’ silence. I wondered if they’d ever come back.

Cassie did, at least, the next morning which I didn’t deserve. I didn’t ask about Wren. Neither of us acknowledged the argument. She spoke to me with a smile sweet enough to hurt my teeth, the doll still sat slumped in the corner. Cassie wouldn’t move it even though she saw me looking at it. When we looked at each other I could read the words she wanted to say in her eyes.

I still had an arm. I could move the doll if I wanted to.

Cassie told me that my room was rank and that she was going to clean it. She didn’t wait for me to refuse, just pulled my comforter off from on top of me while my phantom finger burrowed into the hole. She threw it on the floor and started pulling at the fitted sheet under me when I forced myself out of the bed. I asked her where I should go and she shrugged. Her eyes told me that I could figure that out.

This was how I found myself at the library. It wasn’t a far walk from my parent’s house. It seemed like something that might impress Cassie, that might make her think I was better than I am. I’d get a library card, find a book on the shelf, something that made me look like I knew what I was doing. I’d pretend I was an average person.

I felt the gazes of people on me as they took in my missing arm, wished I could turn to stone from it. If the library worker was curious about my lack of limb, she didn’t let it show. She went about her “how great the library is” spiel and then slid the card across the desk for me to sign, pen thankfully uncapped.

When people are bored enough that they start considering any form of trauma happening to them, it’s almost always in a way that is convenient to them. A person is paralyzed before feeling suddenly returns to their limbs. A person is told they will never walk again until they force themselves into rehabilitation and miraculously walk again. A person’s arm is amputated, but it is on their non-dominant side.

Unlike the fantasies, I was not so lucky. I remind myself daily that I deserve this, but accepting it isn’t as easy.

My phantom limb groped for the pen while I unsteadily bent over the desk. My left arm fumbled to grip the pen. I struggled to sign my name as something legible on the back of the card. The plastic moved against the desk, and I gritted my teeth, tried not to cry. I could hear Cassie’s voice nagging me in my head about trying to strengthen my other arm, could see those same words in her eyes. I wanted to throw the pen when the library worker steadied the card with her fingers, and I was able to scribble something that was my name.

I didn’t thank her.

I didn’t know what book I wanted. I figured reading something Non-Fiction was more impressive, but I couldn’t think of what topic Cassie might admire me for taking an interest in. Probably something about amputation or addiction or continuing on after adversity. I wondered if there were any books to prepare you for going to jail.

Nothing had been decided yet, we hadn’t even gone to court. But the couple were suing, which wasn’t surprising, and the lawyer Cassie found was honest when she said what the most likely scenario would be. Maybe if it were the first time, maybe if I didn’t have a history, maybe if I were rich, maybe if it wasn’t so bad, but none of those things were true. She had said this as the coffees her assistant brought us cooled.

Cassie cried. I just felt cold inside.

But justice took time to be served and in that time my lawyer would try to change the couple’s minds. She’d try to offer some sort of settlement, and time healed all wounds so who knows? Maybe the charges would drop. Maybe jail wouldn’t be an option.

This was another thing Cassie and I fought about. I wanted to get rid of the lawyer, Cassie didn’t. There are many things I could say to argue for my case but it all came down to the same truth: I don’t deserve to walk away from this. And somehow, despite everything, Cassie believes I do. She has always been better than me.

I’m not used to being around so many people. There glances crawl like ants over my skin. I wonder if anyone recognizes me. There were only pictures of the crash in the paper, but they did put my name in. No statute of limitations for someone in their thirties. It didn’t take long for the hate letters and phone calls to come to my parent’s house. I deactivated my social media accounts. My parents unhook the landline at night. If anyone in the library recognized me, they don’t say anything. They watched me like some loose, feral thing that should be put down.

I ended up around the children’s section and figure that if I couldn’t think of anything to borrow for myself I could at least get something for Wren. I focused only on the display of picture books, tried to turn the screech of children into white noise when I felt a small hand fold itself in my mine, so much like Wren’s. I squeezed back before realizing I’d done so with my phantom hand. Looked down and saw that just like my arm, there was no one standing beside me. But the small hand squeezed back.

Not much is known about why phantom limbs exist. There isn’t a limb anymore for the brain to connect to, so really it could be seen as a trick of the mind, or the trauma of it, to have the fingers of my right hand flex the air and crack my non-existent knuckles. To burrow into the hole in my comforter, to squeeze a hand that feels like Wren’s. But of the little I’ve let Cassie read to me from her phone there’s never been anything about feeling anything against it.

I try to tell my phantom hand to let go. I am not linked hand in invisible hand with someone who, like my arm, doesn’t exist. I tell myself it’s the stress of everything, that I’ve exerted myself too much for one day when I should have mooned about my room which has become my habit. But none of it works. It isn’t that my phantom hand doesn’t try. I feel the struggle, the urge to slip away but the little hand holds strong. The little hand grips tighter. The invisible hand in mine tugs me away.

I’m always amazed by the strength of children. Resilience, sure, but I’m talking literal strength. I remember holding Wren after she was born, her small palm finding my thumb and squeezing with all her might. I was surprised by the pressure of it, the force of one so new to the world. How her small nails would slice my skin, her small teeth latching into Cassie so she cried. So sure of her own strength at so small when she didn’t know anything else. The hand pulling mine is the same, not painful exactly but sure. There is no looseness in the grip of our hands, just a confident lead that I have no choice but to follow.

I look around the library as if someone might be able to help me, but no one offers me a glance. Now that I’m looking their eyes look down, a curiousity to observe but not to acknowledge head on. The same way my parents treat me. As I swivel my head, pulled with whatever is holding my hand each head turns down, turns carefully away like I am too much to look at. Like my gaze might turn them to stone. Even the library worker is too busy to notice me.

But what would anyone see anyways? Myself looking frantic as I stumble off-kilter in a direction I’m not sure of? I’m missing an arm, a hand is holding onto my own invisible hand and taking me somewhere. What could anyone do to help? Unless I’m experiencing some sort of reverse psychosis where I’m the only one who can’t see what’s tugging me away while they are so clear to everyone else? It's impossible to say when no one will look at me.

The hand leads me through the children’s section where the area has been decorated with stars and planets and rocket ships. I think about how Wren would love this, how when not too long ago I’d take her outside to touch the stars. I’d balance her in my arms, lift her up onto my shoulders and feel her small body stretch up and up and up as she reached for them. I wish I had known the last time we would do that.

The hand pulls me forward through a door I’ve never seen before. If it even is a door. A literal hole in the wall, a gap into darkness. A doorway, I guess, is a better way to put it. It doesn’t look like something that should exist, is something that appears in the wall which makes me think that all of this must be a dream, or perhaps I’ve just gotten very good at daydreaming. Maybe my mind finally cracked, tired of disassociating for hours on end it decided to make something up instead. Or maybe I was so upset after Wren and the doll that I finally lost it, that I did something even worse. Maybe I’m still in bed and all of this is my subconscious wish of how I could be spending my day. That Cassie might still love me enough to force me out of bed, that I could motivate myself to walk to the library. Or else maybe I was sane until I came to the library, until I thought about Wren and went to the books, when the little hand slipped into mine.

I close my eyes. When I open them the same soft darkness meets me. I look behind me but the doorway is gone, the library, everything that was ceases to exist and it is just me and the hand that pulls me forward.

If that’s where we’re going, it’s impossible to tell in the dark. We could be walking in any direction, could be hanging upside down like bats. There’s an urge to scream, the pressure of it sitting on my throat but the darkness is a thing that swallows whole. There’s no guarantee my scream would come back to me.

But there are noises. All the sounds I can’t remember until I fall asleep, that stick to my subconscious and torture me there.

The crunch of metal on metal.

A horn pressed too long.

A scream.

A cry.

A cry.

Silence.

I put my real hand to my ear to block half of the sound, try with my useless phantom limb but it stays firmly locked with the hand that holds mine. I try to plant my feet firm in the dark nothing of wherever we are but the hand despite its size is stronger. It doesn’t yank, doesn’t squeeze harder so it hurts. Whatever is attached to the hand simply keeps moving and my body has no choice but to follow.

I try to block out the sounds which fade in and out, grow crisp before turning foggy like a radio trying to tune into a station. It’s impossible though, I can only cover one ear and the other seems to gain all the sounds that I can’t block out. So I place my one good arm to my side, allow my other phantom limb to be stretched and pulled as the sounds continue.

There are things in the dark too, flashes of them, like lightning.

Red and blue lights.

The ground glitters with glass that shines and crunches under my feet.

The red brake light of a car.

A toy.

I don’t know what the toy is. Something soft, something faded, something loved. Something that was hugged and drooled on and never let go until it was flung out of his arms.

All of these in lightning flashes of blue and red lights.

The paramedics had to use the jaws of life to get me out. That was what the doctor in emergency told me as she explained what had happened, not caring that I didn’t remember, speeding through the facts. She read off of her clipboard like that was all of the attention I was worth. My arm came clean off, the way it all happened with how twisted the car ended up I didn’t bleed out. A miracle for anyone who wasn’t me.

I still don’t remember the accident. Not when the police asked or the paramedics, not when my insurance company asked or the lawyer. But these things exist, the memories are there in this darkness but it seems foreign. I can’t make myself believe that it wasn’t someone else. That I didn’t cause all of this. There’s the fact of what I did but no memory, so I can accept what people did but it’s too much for me to feel it.

We go forward and, somehow, the darkness mists into light.

And now the smell, different from the dark. I didn’t notice it then. Like my parents house, I know the area too well for it to have a scent to me anymore. Even if my only memories of the dark are buried deep into my nightmare world, my body knows it’s familiar enough. The car exhaust doesn’t stick to my skin and perfume me in a noxious way.

Outside though, in the light that makes me squint, it smells different. Sweet. Not blooming but cloying, rotting. Fermented. A smell that reaches down into my throat and fills my mouth with saliva so I have to spit. When I do there’s a faint alcoholic taste that lingers at the back of my throat. I haven’t drank since the accident. If I was aware enough afterwards, I would have denied the pain medicine too.

I blink slowly until the light doesn’t hurt so much and the world sharpens into focus. There is green at my feet, blue hiding between the limbs of the trees above my head. I look behind me and the dark is gone. Like the library it seems to never have existed.

The little hand tugs me forward.

It’s not a forest, not so dense as that. There’s something familiar about the trees, about the shush of grass at my feet. It’s a peaceful enough looking place but being in this spot makes my shoulders rise, makes my breath feel halved, my heartbeat drum in my ears. Unlike the darkness and the flashes there this place is something I do remember. The answer on the tip of my tongue, and I am forcing the answer to it away.

This is a place I never visit, an area I only go to when there isn’t a choice. This is a place of obligation and respect, and it is beautiful. Whoever they’ve hired to maintain the area does a good job. The grass is short, there isn’t any trash littered about, the pathways are clear. Even this copse of trees is well taken care of. Something that mimics the wilderness while still coming off as safe. A place you couldn’t get lost in.But a lot of work must go into maintaining the appearance of Holy Gardens, of making people focus on the beauty of the place instead of all the dead people underneath.

It seems they clean the headstones too. The names are legible, the granite and stone shine with the names of the dead, but I can only remember my worst moments here, the times I most felt sad. It feels as though an axe has cleaved part way down my centre and stuck there, refusing to split me perfectly in half. All that old grief becomes fresh and bleeds again as the little hand leads me to an area of the cemetery I’ve never visited.

There was a boy in the car, just a bit younger than Wren. I tried to avoid learning his name, learning he was there at all made my throat ache for something that would make it burn. I wanted to inject something into me that would dull my mind and numb the world when I found out about the boy. His photo was everywhere. Those big eyes, that dimpled smile. Folded on the back of the newspaper Cassie was reading, flashing on TV, scrolling its way onto my social media feed. I saw him and it looked like he saw me, like he was looking right at me. I’d look away from the paper, I’d close my eyes and focus on the white noise of appliances, I’d scroll and scroll and scroll before deleting everything all together just to avoid him.

But I can’t do that here, not in front of his grave surrounded with all the other children’s graves. They are flowers like any other grave, but there are also toys. Some of them have scribbled pictures taped to the marble. Lego blocks and teddy bears. And after all of that his name, etched black into the grey.

Amir.

Sure, my car was totalled, and yes I lost an arm. But you should have seen what I’d done.

He was dead on impact. His grandmother driving, babysitting him for the night to give his parents a break. No one expecting the drunk idiot on the road, driving the wrong way down an onramp. Head on. To my understanding she hasn’t woken up yet. She doesn’t know her grandson is dead.

I want to push it all away again like I’ve been doing, like I’ve always done when having to face my unpleasant moments. I want disassociation to wash over and plug my ears like I’m underwater. I want to feel myself leach out and let the shell of my body to stay behind. I want to close my eyes and open them to find myself back in my room, back in the library, anywhere that isn’t here.

I close my eyes.

I open them.

Still in the graveyard, in front of Amir’s grave, surrounded by stuffed animals and plastic dollar store toys, with small blankets and scrunchies, all things that were loved by the children in the ground, that their parents and caregivers have brought back to them now.

Amir’s grave has a line of toy trucks and Hot Wheels on the lip of the stone, under his name. I imagine his parents must have hated putting those toys there considering how I killed him, but his love for them must have outweighed the fact of what happened.

I told Cassie I was a murderer once and she wouldn’t look at me when I said it. She tried to be pedantic, told me that murderers intentionally kill people and what I’d done was a mistake. An accident, a literal car accident. But I told her I had the intention to drink, I had the intention to get drunk, I had the intention to drive. That even if I hadn’t intended to kill Amir my other actions were intentional and led to his death. We don’t talk about that anymore.

I count the row of trucks and at the end of the line see a small worn stuffed dog, the toy that flashed in the darkness. Its fur lies flat in some parts, the fabric turned grey and stained in other areas. A lot of damage to a toy for a kid who was so young, but I guess Amir just loved hard. Maybe he wanted that puppy everywhere. Maybe he thought it would protect him.

Amir’s hand squeezes mine as if to say, this is me. This is where I live now.

Kneeling in front of his grave, I let his name worm its way into my brain, feel the syllables pulse like a heartbeat until it consumes me.

Amir. Amir. Amir. Amir.

I trace his name with my phantom fingers. My fingertips fit into the groove of the black and follow the carving, just like they did all those years ago with crayon and paper when I was first learning how to spell. I follow the grooves from one letter to the next.

A-M-I-R

And then I start again, over and over, his name in my head, at my fingers, and it is only then that I realize Amir has let go, that he is gone. Our phantom hands are no longer entwined.

Nothing at all has changed.

Amir is still dead. I am still armless. I will most likely go to jail. Being here at Amir’s grave doesn’t fix any of this, all it’s done is force me acknowledge what I’ve done. It isn’t that I was ever avoiding it. Only that I didn’t want to know it fully. But knowing it fully, learning his name doesn’t take away the feeling in my arm that isn’t there, it doesn’t bring Amir back. It won’t ease the anger and grief of his parents; it won’t make his grandmother wake up. Cassie might see it as a form of closure, Dr. Malone may see this as a spirit quest, but whatever it is it hasn’t made me a better person. There is no ease of my heart, no lightness in my chest. I am the same person as I’ve always been.

Whether I ever drink or use again or stay sober for however long my life ends up being, it won’t change the facts. I will live without an arm; Amir’s parents will live without their son. Amir will stay dead and Wren will grow-up and someday Cassie will tell her exactly what I did to lose my arm. Maybe she’ll be old enough to ask about that time her mean aunt threw the doll, or maybe she’ll ask about the time I went away and came back again.

Maybe Amir will come back to hold my hand and drag me here or maybe my phantom hand will always be reaching out in search of him as if any squeeze I give will accurately show how sorry I am.

All I know for certain is that I will always haunt myself.

Special thanks to my Instagram followers who sent me the words for this year’s story: Sydney Dusselier, Amanda Paal Medeiros, Melissa, Meaghan O’Connor, Kayla Jensen