I misplaced my hands on my 13th birthday. They were there one moment and the next, they weren’t. I hadn’t even had my birthday cake yet. My closest friend had to feed me for the time being.
My room, surely they were in my room, under all the clutter. Or in the back of my closet. On top of my dirty clothes pile. In one of the many desk drawers.
For days and days the failed attempts to find them tore me apart, but I still pulled myself together in the end. Pulled together every single body part again, just with no hands.
The kids at school pointed and whispered. They mocked. I shrank away from all of it.
“Who doesn’t have hands?” they said.
“Just pick up your pencil,” my teachers would plead exasperatedly.
“I have extra hands you can borrow,” my friends would offer.
But I didn’t want their spare hands. I wanted my hands back. I had grown those hands myself. They were rightfully mine.
Years passed. I learned to cope. At times, in the dark of the night, when my brain was the only part of me still awake, I’d even forgotten that I’d had hands in the first place. I’d forgotten what it was like to hold things. To hold someone else. Those times were bliss.
Then, boxes filled the house; household appliances started getting packed away. Posters taken down, shelves disassembled, personal momentos wrapped in fabric to keep them safe on the drive to the new house.
And there they were. Under an old, forgotten shirt on my closet floor. Sitting there, looking as young and chubby as they had on my 13th birthday.
A spider had made itself a home between the thumb and the pinkie. Its small, frail corpse still laid upon the palm.
I closed the door and didn’t open it until moving day when I last-minute grabbed one of the hands to keep for nostalgia’s sake. Whoever had bought the house could figure out what to do with the other one. I had no use for it anymore.