From talk.bizarre Sat Jul  8 07:55:03 1995
From: kjc@ [APOCALYPSE] (Kelly J. Cooper)
Date: 7 Jul 1995 08:33:45 GMT
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: nobody, not even the rain...


  I have noticed recently that my hands are empty.  I pick things up
and put them down but still my hands open and close of their own free
will, containing nothing, flexing to do what they should.  They seem
to remember something - something about touching, something about
holding, something about ownership and belonging that I have
forgotten.

  The fingers curl and uncurl smoothly.  Knuckles whiten as the skin
tightens and then color floods back in as they relax.  Each moment
trades for the other, back and forth smoothly, without overlap.

  (I do not remember when I recognized hands.  Nor do I recall when I
began to stare at them.  I do remember the moment I noticed opening
and closing with the rhythm of walking.  I was on the sidewalk, behind
a mother with a small child in a kid-back-pack web and aluminum tubing
contraption, and I gradually realized that with each of the mother's
smooth steps the child was bounced just slightly enough to cause a
reflex - the opening and closing of the baby's hands.  I watched, for
three blocks.  The movement was unconscious and rhythmic.)

  Sometime after that came the realization that my hands are empty,
and that they have begun to open and close as I walked because they
had ritualized the clenching and relaxing.  My hands have their own
ceremony.  (Maybe they bless each step, or greet and dismiss the
terrain.  Perhaps my hands have their own god.)

  My only real fear is that they will begin to write for themselves.

---
Kelly J. Cooper                                   kjc@ [APOCALYPSE] 
	    http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/kjc/home.html
         "How long before wings?"  -mary szmagaj, "nocturne"