Great Big Hands

When she was younger, she had a reoccurring dream that she would not quite call a nightmare, though it had many times driven her into her parents’ room, and left her wrapped around the body of her mother, beneath the sheets, too stifled even to breath.

            The dream would begin with her standing at her front door, late at night. The moon would send white spiders’ legs down through the leaves. She’d look at the door for a few minutes, and then, drawn by some unspoken force, She’d gently move her hands to the door—in the dream she had big hands—and slowly they would glide over all the paint chips and cracks and the molding and the spot where the cold glass disappeared into the wood. The hands were very large, though not cartoonishly so, and though the nature of the dream demanded she not be aware of her dreambody yet, she knew the hands somehow fit her. An underlying and ragged edge of anxiety—tension—would unfold over her like a wing as, nightly, she realized this.

            The hands were long-fingered bones, and the flesh on them slipped not unlike a glove. The fingers stretched out in a vulturesque grace and a cracking, weathered texture shadowed the thousand scoriations of her skin. They did not shake. Nor did they make a sound.

            In some faraway place, she remembered smooth, small, white skin, like an eggshell.

            The hands would drift gently in the gentle moonlight until they fell on the brass doorknob, bright and cold and hard in the night.

            She did not like to play much, the girl, but preferred to watch. To listen. To smell. Never to touch. She recoiled at the thought of the sandbox, with the feeling that a snake would bite her if she came too close to it. She would fold her tiny, bright hands in her lap and watch her siblings playing, smiling with them as they ran. Some nights she couldn’t sleep, and she would look out the window into her backyard, and the farmer’s field behind it, and she would imagine the deer in the long, brushing grass.

            She would walk around the house, in the moonlight, with the great big hands touching everything. The fingers would graze the rough fabric of her family’s couch and slide along the glass of an heirloom cabinet. Hundreds of pieces of China glowed inside. She would crouch and feel the floor: the cracks between the boards, the grain undulating almost not at all, the gentle, nipping stick of the finish. Her whole hand would press against the floor, moving in slow circles.

            Everything in the room would yield, ever so unnoticeably, to her calloused fingertips. The television: antenna, screen, plastic casing, buttons, dusty top. The magazines: frayed pages, glossy and crinkling cover, bent spine. She would move around the room dozens of times, running her long fingers along the wall, tracing a pattern she did not remember.

            She would find her toys, placed lovingly in a drawer that slid beneath the couch. But when she touched them in the dream, with those big, dark hands, it was different. It was as if the toys had been taken away and replaced with others exactly the same. She knew, in an oblique way, this was a reflection of herself and not of her toys, and that the hands informed her of this fact.

            There would come a divergence, now, in the nature of her being, in the dream. She would become aware that the body was not hers, and would seem to float above herself, somewhere above the moonlight shining in through the windows. A part of her would yet remain, though, with the hands—the seeing and feeling and breathing part—but nevertheless she became a separate thing.

            The sense of anxiety and unease that had once limned the dream now flooded in, pervaded every part of the dream like a virus.

            In response to this, she began to move quickly, tracing the walls with her fingers, towards the bedroom in which she slept. The strip of wallpaper that ran beneath the ceiling was covered in pale roses.

            She would come to the door of her room, and lean against it, her palms against the warm wood. The knob would make no sound as the hands turned it, and the door would fall away. In the last, pallid moment before she awoke, she would see herself—lying in bed—holding her hands between her face and the ceiling, the pale, little things, neither trembling nor alive in the moonlight.