HANDS

It always starts with the fingertips. They look like ridges at first, just budding from my spine, or abdomen, or, at worst, my face. When it’s just the fingertips, it doesn’t hurt. It merely feels like a slight pressure. It never hurts till they start breaching the skin. Then, it’s agony. I can feel the fingers forming, moving, scratching beneath my skin, arms lengthening and pushing outward until my skin feels like it will rip. It never does, though. Instead, it parts gently, slowly, opening of its own accord, as my body senses that the body within is becoming too big to remain inside. That’s when I see the hands.

The hands tell me what I’m going to see over the coming week. At first, when I was young, the hands would look like mine, child’s hands, reaching and scrabbling for the outside air. Move as they might, they weren’t truly alive yet. My dad learned that when he brought me, a year old and sobbing, to my grandmother’s house in distress. She found him on her porch, clutching me and crying. According to him, she didn’t seem surprised. She tugged on the hands and found the beginning of arms, no more. Whatever grows inside me grows hands first. “As they always do,” she told my father, and she refused to say more.

Now, the hands look deformed, sometimes with too many fingers, others with palms that are much too thin and knuckles too knobby. Last time, the fingers were an ashen grey and much too long, with no fingernails gracing the tips. That one was terrible. It awoke as soon as it had a head and torso formed, still attached to me. I awoke to it trying to strangle me in my sleep, its face like a melted candle inches from my own and leathery grey skin covered in sweat. My dad killed it before I lost consciousness, cut it from me as I lay gasping. He hasn’t mentioned it or the things that spawn from me since.

They weren’t always monsters, and we didn’t always kill them. Once, they looked like regular children, always the same age as me. The first to grow a full body and survive was a little girl. I was five, and my parents had given up on cutting the arms before they spawned further, realizing that the more they cut off their growth, the more often they would grow. Having another body split from mine was the most painful experience of my life. I remember screaming for hours and drifting in and out of consciousness, but when I awoke there was another child lying next to me. That little girl was with us for only a few days and followed me around silently, staring at everything with wide eyes. My parents treated her like she belonged with us, though I didn’t miss the worried looks they cast our way. I found her one morning lying on the floor of my room, staring at the ceiling with eyes that could no longer see. My dad bundled her stiff body up in a blanket, and I didn’t see her again after that. More children came after, once per year and always the same age as me. They only lasted a few days, and then my dad would take them away. I never asked what he did with them, and we never talked about them once he returned.

Things started changing around the time I turned thirteen. That year the hands that spawned had six fingers on the left hand and four on the right. My parents looked worried but told me nothing. I remember sneaking downstairs one night, just as the arms were beginning to show through my skin, when I heard three voices talking in the kitchen instead of two. As I crept closer to the kitchen, I recognized the third voice as my grandmother’s.

“The door cannot be shut once it has been opened,” she said. “They come as they can, and others like them are taking notice. You—“ She stopped, and then quietly, “he is listening.” I ran back to my room, ducking under the covers before wincing in pain as the hands attached to me began to flex and squirm. Surprisingly, no one came to check on me that night, and I wish to this day I’d confronted my grandmother instead of running. I could have learned what exactly is happening to me, why the things that come from me are becoming more and more grotesque. Instead, my grandmother never returned to our house again, dying of a heart attack three days after that mysterious evening visit. My parents refuse to talk about it, claiming I must have dreamt about her visiting. I don’t know what they learned, but they couldn’t look me in the eyes after that night.

Now, a new set of hands has pushed out from inside me. I can see just how wrong they are, perfectly white and smooth, no lines on the palms or on the knuckles, fingernails like glass ovals. Somehow their perfection is worse than the long, grey fingers that appeared last time. That’s not the only thing that scares me, though. With this new set of hands, I’ve started hearing whispers, barely audible, but there. I haven’t told my parents about them yet. I don’t want them to be scared—or rather more scared than they already are. I definitely won’t tell them what the whispers told me last night, because if they are to be believed, my fate is sealed and more horrible than I thought. Because last night, just as I was about to drift off to sleep, the hands moved for the first time, opening and closing into fists, and I heard a voice say “I can’t die, and neither can you.”