Hand of Glory

Jeremiah was born with a blue right hand, and his mother Olivia cried when she first saw it. It was a pale blue, like hypothermic lips, from his tiny fingertips down to his wrist. The doctor had a look and couldn’t find anything wrong. Said it must be some kind of odd birthmark. His father Roy still didn’t like it.

“My mother would have called that a witch hand.” Roy said on the night he first drove Olivia and the baby home, watching a dry dirt road rise up under yellow headlights. “A sign of him having been hexed in your belly.”

“Well, who would have any cause to hex us?” Olivia murmured, half-asleep. She leaned against the pickup window, breath fogging the glass. Jeremiah was in a tiny white blanket bundle, held tight to her chest. “We’re good people.”

“I don’t think witches hex people for being bad. They hex them just because they can, and that’s why they’re wicked.” He paused, then corrected himself. “Or why they would be if they were real. I never believed in any of that. Just thinking about what my mother would say.”

“I don’t much care for what she would say.” The truck jostled as its wheels dipped into a pool of standing water, splashing filth. Jeremiah let out a little bubbling cry. “He’s a beautiful, healthy boy.”

“That he is.”

On the third day after they brought Jeremiah home, something came to the doorstep. Olivia had woken with the sun and gone to check for mail. The thing on the doorstep was much bigger than a rabbit, and held none of the same innocence. Its fur was a coarse grey-brown, its ears stood rigid like limbs, and its eyes shone amber yellow in the new daylight. It was a hare. Olivia stood for a moment in her nightgown, looking at it, almost afraid it might spring up and dig its buck teeth into her cheek. Then it spoke.

“One day, your son is going to take a gun into his blue hand and start to squeeze and squeeze. He will kill twelve pretty ladies with blonde hair.” The hare’s voice was like cold clear water. It didn’t move its mouth when it spoke.

“Is that true?”

“Every word.”

“Has my baby been hexed?”

“No. He’s just been dealt a bad hand.” The hare gave a hard, humorless laugh.

“How can I stop him?”

“You have to cut it clean off. Bone it like a chicken. Put the meat in your husband’s soup and make sure he swallows. Plant the knucklebones like seeds.”

“That’s a dreadful thing. I can’t do that.”

“It’s the only way.”

“I can teach him right and wrong. Teach him to never hurt nobody.” She bit her lip, catching dry skin between her teeth and tugging at it.

“You can’t teach any morals to that hand. Cut it off. Let his father eat it. Plant the bones. That’s the only way. Do it tonight.”

“Thank you.”

“No need. I’m only the messenger.”

That day, Roy drove into town to put new shingles on the roof of the post office. The mayor was paying him well for it. Once the truck was over the horizon, Olivia took all the things she would need and laid them out on the kitchen table. A length of leather shoelace for a tourniquet. Her heavy meat cleaver. A little hooked knife for getting the bones. Whiskey to disinfect the blades. Rags and vinegar for blood. The table was covered with old newspapers to keep the mess off the wood. There was no avoiding this task.

After a few pulls of the whiskey to steel her nerves, she went to the cradle. As she picked him up and rocked him against her shoulder, she forced herself to remember what the hare had said. It was the only way. What else could she do?

She did it quick. Two chops. She seared the stump on the stove to stop the bleeding. When she was done, she took the rag from his mouth and he did not cry.

Jeremiah fell quietly to sleep again while Olivia set about following the rest of the hare’s instructions. She sliced the tiny hand open with care along the palm and each finger and dug out the white pebbles with the point of the blade. The meat was that same pale robin’s egg blue, all the way through. Once all the bones were out, she laid them on her handkerchief, drew the corners in, and tied it with the shoelace. Those were for later. What was left of the hand was like a worn-out glove, all flat and floppy. Olivia chopped it into the finest pieces she could manage, and dropped them into a big pot of water to make a broth. She let it simmer on the stove while she cleaned up. It smelled sweet, filling the house.

The hare was waiting for her out in the garden.

“Very good.” It said. “I think you might have saved him.”

“Might?”

“It isn’t done yet.”

“And what if I haven’t?”

“Then we’ll see.”

The hare sat by and watched while she poked a row of finger holes in the loose earth under her bedroom window and carefully dropped Jeremiah’s knucklebones in. She smoothed the ground over with her palm and went back inside, waiting beside the cradle for Roy to come home.

When Olivia saw her husband’s dull gunmetal grey truck climbing up the winding road towards the house, she held her eyes open wide until she could feel the air on them, dry and stinging, and tears came in glistening twin trails down her cheeks. She met him at the door.

“Thank God you’re here.” She threw her arms around his sturdy ship’s mast of a neck. She breathed fast and shallow, pumping her lungs like a set of fireplace bellows, face buried in Roy’s shoulder. “Something happened to our baby.”

“Jeremiah?” Roy asked. She felt him grow tense and solid. “Where is he?”

“He’s all right now.” She followed him to the cradle, still in his work boots. “We’re all safe. But God, it was horrible.”

“His hand! Liv, where’s his hand?” Jeremiah stirred and cooed at the sound of his father’s voice, rolling his downy-haired head back and forth. Roy scooped up the baby and clutched him close.

“It’s all my fault. I was cleaning and I’d opened the windows up to let some air in. There was a coyote. Hopped in over the sill and crept through the house. I only left him for a moment, but when I came back…” Here she let the air singe her eyes again, tears leaking. “When I came back, that mangy thing had him by the arm, was trying to take him away. I chased it out with my broom. Would have gone for your rifle but it ran off and took our baby’s hand with it.

“I didn’t know what to do. I knew I had to stop him bleeding so I burned it to make sure it was, what’s the word, was cauterized. It hurt my heart, but I couldn’t let him die. I called Doctor Hayward and he said that was the right thing, that I saved him. The Doc gave Jeremiah a round of rabies shots right in the belly. He took them just like a little soldier. Then they prescribed a syrup for the pain and I put him to bed.”

“Why didn’t you call for me?”

“Well, I knew you had to finish your job in town. I didn’t want to worry you until you could see for yourself that Jeremiah was safe and sound.”

“I would have come straight home if I had known, Liv. I would have come home and killed that coyote myself.”

“I wish I had. What if it comes back?”

“I won’t let that happen. I’ll keep watch and if it comes, I’ll blow its rotten pink brains out the back of its head.” He kept Jeremiah in a vise grip as he spoke, tightening with each word, and the infant turned pink and started to cry as Roy’s arms clenched like grinding teeth. Roy’s face softened and he passed the sobbing bundle to Olivia. Jeremiah only screamed louder. She went around the room, gently rocking and bouncing until he fell quiet again.

“We ought to have some supper.” She said, laying her son back down.

Olivia watched her husband’s spoon dip below the still surface of his soup. Her own bowl remained untouched, steam drifting up and condensing into fine dew on the tip of her nose. Roy brought the spoon to his lips, once, then again, and again.

“This is delicious.” He said, “I can’t believe you had time to make anything among all that ruckus.”

“To tell the truth, I don’t even remember doing it.” She forced a smile. “I wasn’t really in my head after the doctor left, so I guess I did what I always do.”

“You should have yours before it gets cold.”

“I’m not very hungry after everything that happened today.”

“You’ve got to nourish yourself still.”

He had her fixed in his gaze. There wouldn’t be any way around it. Just three spoonfuls. She thought. That’s all I’ll eat, just to show him my head’s right, and then I’ll say I feel tired and I can go to bed and forget it all. She lifted the spoon, and the trembling of her hand made the broth slosh back and forth, lapping up against the edges of its small silver vessel, spilling over and falling back to her bowl in tiny droplets. In the broth was a little blue morsel, waiting for her. Her eyes shut as she put it into her mouth. It was sweet. So sweet. She had another spoonful. Her hand had stopped shaking. Then another.

All done. Just three. No more. You can’t. She could. It didn’t taste like any other meat. It didn’t taste like anything she’d ever eaten. The flesh of her son’s hand tugged at her somehow, as if she were a dinghy in a whirlpool, pale blue water dragging her deeper. She finished it. So did Roy. They maintained just enough restraint to keep from licking their bowls clean afterwards, but they both thought of it, of their tongues lapping against the porcelain to absorb any last trace of that wonderful blue meat.

The soup filled their bellies and made them warm and heavy, and before long, it came time to go to sleep. Olivia nursed Jeremiah before bed. His eyes stayed open and glossy, like they were painted with lacquer, and he stared up at her. As she placed him in the cradle, he was silent, still gazing. The moon came and cast taffy-pulled shapes onto the walls. Roy was already fast asleep by the time Olivia laid down, and soon she drifted off to the sound of breath whistling into his nose in time to the crickets outside.

In the garden, funny little sprouts were just beginning to peek through crumbs of earth. They were paper white and soaked up moonlight with their miniscule leaves, no bigger than a ladybug’s wing. Their stalks were long and wavy, thin but strong, like wire. They grew quick, snaking up from the dirt, taller and taller, until they reached the window. Olivia had left it open an inch or two, so cool, fresh night air could come in. The sprouts came in too. Those little white threads stretched through the crack and over the floorboards, towards the bed. Then they started to curl. They curled around the necks of Olivia and her husband, wrapping around and around. Their stalks were thin as hair but strong as piano wire. A big squeeze came slow, tightening at a molasses pace. It was so gentle neither one woke up.

The hare sat beside Jeremiah’s cradle, yellow eyes gleaming in the moonlit dark.

***

Max Firehammer is a horror writer living in Saint Paul. She has previously had work appear in Hash Journal, The Molotov Cocktail, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She is also a co-founder of Transgoria, a transgender horror magazine.