The Man Who Lost His Fingers
One morning a man awoke to find that all four fingers and the thumb of his right hand had detached themselves and crawled away sometime during the night.
The man stared at his right hand for a moment. Then he got out of bed and began to search for his missing fingers. He looked under the bed and behind the closet door; he pulled the sheets from the bed and shook them out carefully, using his left hand.
The fingers were on top of the high wardrobe. The man stood on a chair and tried to coax them down, but they gestured rudely at him and scuttled out of his reach with the thumb hopping clumsily behind.
Without his fingers, the man could no longer put pen to paper to write the stories that kept his pockets full of coins and his belly full of bread. He could no longer count coins, or break bread, or tie the simplest of knots, except in a clumsy and childish fashion. He tried to keep his right hand hidden whenever he left his lodgings, but despite his efforts, the man heard whispers everywhere he went.
"If a man can't keep his own fingers," he heard the respected men of the town mutter, "how can he keep a steady job?"
"If a man can't keep his own fingers," he heard the mothers of the young girls murmur, "how can he keep a wife and children?"
"Poor fellow," he heard his former cronies say with a shrug, "it looks bad for him. If a man can't keep his own fingers..."
Chagrined, the man sank into poverty and decrepitude. When his money ran short, he sold his belongings to buy food, and stopped paying his landlord. At last he found himself on the street with nothing but the clothes on his back.
Even then, the man secretly believed that someday his missing fingers would return to him. Night and day he strained his ears to catch the faraway scurrying sound of the fugitive fingers. Sometimes he darkly imagined that the fingers had attatched themselves to someone else, and he cast sidelong glances at the hands of the old men and young men who hurried past him and refused to meet his eyes. Once he thought he saw the ring finger gleaming whitely in the gutter. There was nothing there.
Haunted by the ghosts of his own fingers, he wandered the streets, singing aloud in a cracked voice, making improvised ballads and airs of the stories that he would have written once. He held his battered cap in his outstretched hand. Every now and then a compassionate person would drop a coin into the cap, and with the money he bought bread, and so he lived. The songs soon faded and were forgotten.
In the summer months, the man's aimless wandering brought him to the woods on the outskirts of town. There he serenaded the trees with his wavering melodic stories and plunged into thickets of blackberry vines in search of sustenance. Thorns caught at his flesh and cut his overcoat to ribbons. His eyes remained bright and watchful in his thin, lined face.
There he stayed as the days drew in and summer faded into fall. The grasping vines turned yellow and brittle, curling around his ankles as he walked, and falling leaves nestled sadly in his tangled hair.
Soon the first frost gleamed in the bare trees. That night the man lay down to rest in a clearing, and there he dreamed.
While he slept, his missing fingers crawled into the clearing and waited.
The man awoke to starlight and moonshine and the soft patter of his fingers running through the leaves. He raised his head and they fell silent. All was still for a moment, and then the fingers began to dance.
They ran in a circle around the man's prostrate body, moving with surprising dexterity and fluidity, tracing complicated patterns in the frost on the carpet of fallen leaves. They leaped into the chill air and floated across his vision. The man saw his own fingers sketching the outline of a story, showing him the shapes of all the stories he could have told, telling him all that they had learned and all that he knew, etching truth into his mind in searing lines of movement. At intervals, a single finger paused only to brush against his cheek before rejoining its pale companions in their dance. The moon sank below the horizon. The night grew darker and still the fingers whirled and leaped and ducked over and around each other.
The man lay on the cold earth and watched, entranced. His eyes opened wide and his limbs stiffened starkly.
When the snow came, it crept slowly over his body, soft and thick and deep as dreaming.
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