Fiction
A Fable About Seashells that Used to Be Hands - full text
Some runners had found it washed up on Castlerock Beach. The detective called Laine that afternoon. The experts had identified it: Susan’s hand, severed from the rest of her, cupped slightly.
“Which hand?” Laine had asked the detective over the phone.
“The right one.”
Laine waited, took a breath, then asked, “Did the hand have a ring on it?”
The silence lasted a long heartbeat, and finally the detective answered, “Yeah. There’s this silver band with a black stone embedded in it.”
Laine’s breath stuck midway through her exhale.
“You know this ring?” the detective asked.
Laine nodded. She looked at one just like it on her own right hand.
“You there?”
Laine finished her exhale and said, “I’m here.”
“You give it to her?”
“Yes,” Laine answered, “it was a sort of . . . engagement ring.”
“Engagement, huh?”
“Actually, yes. We had plans.”
“You wanna see it?”
“The ring?”
“The hand—the ring, too, ‘cause it comes with the hand.”
“I don’t know.”
Susan wears bright scarves, feeds the birds, and listens to jazz. Susan walks along Castlerock Beach, next to Laine. She smiles at Laine. She reaches out to touch Laine’s hand, and Laine notices Susan’s fingers are water. Water’s supposed to be a good thing, Laine thinks, a womb thing. Laine tries to feel that womb thing, she tries to imagine her own hands forming inside the womb of Susan’s touch.
And then Susan is gone, as simply as she came. All of her ripples and waves, and then she disappears into the shoreline. Water. Nothing but water.
Laine’s bare feet sink into the sand, and the tide water slaps across the footprints she leaves behind.
“So are you coming back or what?” Laine wants to know. She looks across the day at the sky and its clouds, the sea and its waves, an abandoned boat, the wind. But no Susan.
Laine turns her back on the water. About 100 feet across the sand stands a forest that separates the highway from the beach. Laine moves closer to the ancient evergreens. One tree attracts her attention, seems worn to Laine, tired somehow. Still, it reaches out its branches, massive and muscular, as if inviting Laine into its arms. She hesitantly touches its trunk, notices its steady pulse beating in rhythm with her own. She leans deep into its bark. She slides down to its roots and feels the easy curves that mold to her, allow her to curl, like a cat, into sleep.
Just hours before, she had been at the police station, looking at Susan’s hand. It lay on a sterile table in a basement morgue, its palm toward the ceiling, fingers slightly curved. And the ring, silver and delicate, its black stone dull from the salt water, looked as much a part of the hand as the fingernails, the lines on the palm, the creases in the joints. Laine imagined the fingers forming into a fist, tight, solid, as if hiding something inside.
“You all right?” the detective asked.
His voice reminded Laine of the inside of a seashell on her ear—muffled and slow motion.
“I should cry,” she said.
The detective just looked at her. She started to sway.
“You should sit down.” He led her to a chair in the corner. “You were gonna faint,” he said.
Laine nodded, put her head between her knees. She had been like this, fuzzy-headed and dizzy, ever since she heard the news. And now, actually seeing Susan’s hand, detached from her body, Laine so much wanted to remember the wrist and the arm that went with it. But she only saw the hand, and then she went dizzy.
The detective stood over her as if at attention. He guarded her grief.
“That hand touched me,” Laine said.
He did not respond.
“Stroked my hair. . . “
He stared straight ahead.
“Collected seashells. . . “
She stayed there a long time, huddled in a metal chair, and the detective stood beside her, waiting for his next orders.
“The rest of her?” Laine asked.
He looked down at her; she noticed something like sympathy in his eyes.
“Her body . . . her face . . . “
He shrugged. “We just don’t know.”
Laine nodded. “I have to go now.”
And she ended up at Castlerock Beach.
Laine sleeps for a long time. When she wakes up, her hands feel numb under her head where they had served as a pillow. She wiggles her fingers and makes a fist, waiting to bring life back into her palm.
“I was wondering if you’d ever wake up.”
The voice startles Laine. She looks up to see an old woman with cinnamon-colored skin, looking down at her through
green eyes. And Laine remembers the tree, its roots forming a bed for her.
“It’s damp today,” the woman says, “I feel it all through my veins.” She cups her hands over the sand and blows into them. A fire starts, at first just sparks, then the flames. Laine immediately feels the warmth and moves closer to it.
“Who are you?” Laine wants to know.
The woman shrugs.
“Have you been watching me sleep?”
“You kidding? Who’s got time?”
“You just started that fire with your bare hands.”
“So I’m an illusionist, sent from God to entertain you in your grief.”
“My grief? What do you know about my grief.”
Again, the woman shrugs.
“Who are you?”
“I’m the tree that used to be here.”
Laine laughs, but then she looks for the tree and sees that it is gone. “Wait a minute.”
“No time for minutes. You’ve got just a small window of opportunity here to actually see your . . . uh . . . girlfriend, is it?”
“Excuse me?”
“Just look. Down by the shoreline—over there—” the woman points. “See?”
Laine feels her hands go numb; she feels the ocean on her face.
Then Susan shows up, just like that, all shivering. The woman leads her over to the fire and sits her down. Laine instinctively puts her arm around Susan’s shoulders, but they no longer feel like the shoulders she remembers. She notices that Susan’s chest looks empty, sunken.
“I was stolen from myself,” Susan says.
“I want you back.”
“I’m in pieces.”
“I want you back. All in one piece.”
“He took both my hands.”
Laine looks down at Susan’s hands—they seem to float. She is afraid to touch them.
“He said that women shouldn’t have hands—he didn’t understand why God gave hands to women. ‘Tits and cunts.’ He kept saying that, ‘tits and cunts.’”
The woman tends the fire.
Laine sees the air of her breath, the air of Susan’s. They hang there, the two airs, in plain sight.
“He said he’d remove all the hands from all the women and
throw them in the sea.”
The fire listens to Susan’s story. Laine expects to feel dizzy but instead tastes the salt water on her face. Finally, she has tears.
The woman’s arms become limbs and leaves, her body bark, her feet roots. The breeze whistles through her and falls on Susan as she ripples and waves and disappears back down to the shoreline.
Laine watches the night air, the water that was Susan, the tree that was the woman. And just like that, Laine falls asleep beside the fire.
They held off the funeral for several weeks, hoping to find the body. Finally, there was no body, so there would be no burial. Laine stood outside the church next to Susan’s parents and shook hands with all the guests. She listened to “I’m sorry,” and “what a shame,” and “she was so young.” With each handshake, Laine felt the pressure of her own ring against her flesh, and she knew it would always be there.
The detective, wearing that same blue suit, came through the line and dropped Susan’s ring into Laine’s hand. Laine placed it in her chest pocket. She would return to Castlerock Beach; she would give Susan the burial she deserved.
Susan laughs at bad jokes and listens to bird’s sing.
The sun sets over the ocean at Castlerock Beach, and Laine remembers Susan’s hand on her breast.
The worn tree stands behind Laine, her limbs wild, her leaves green and wide. Wind blurs the air, and the rain begins.
Laine uses her fingers to dig a small hole in the sand. She digs it deep and drops Susan’s ring inside.
Then the rain comes full force.
“I love you,” Laine whispers.
On the edge of her vision, she sees a man struggling against the wind. He carries a bag. Then he stops. He opens the bag and begins pulling objects out, tossing them into the sea. Laine squints through the rain and realizes the objects are hands. She screams, and her scream is thunder.
The tree’s limbs sway hard. One loosens, cracks and flies through the air. Its edge is sharp, sword sharp, and it finds the man’s neck. The wind takes the man’s head out to sea and drops it there. The rest of him stands headless on the shoreline. Rain beats at his body until he is nothing but bones on the sand.
Laine leans into the shelter of the tree and knows the storm cannot harm her now. In the morning, Laine walks down to the shore.
The sea has swept the man’s bones away. And the hands, the hands lie scattered on the wet sand. Some are flat, some are fists, and some are cupped toward the sky.
Laine touches each one, and when she does, they turn to shells, the kind people wish for but seldom find: fragile, complete, and so full of color, they make eyes smile.