Swath of Scarlet, Tie These Bitter Hands

A short story.

Mar 25, 2025

Have you ever looked at your hands and reflected on what they have done? Not merely the tasks accomplished, nor the curves of flesh traced—the heat ingrained in every crevice carved into the pads of fingertips. These, the moments we’re meant to remember.

No.

The babies cradled with their soft heads supported upon our supple palms—I recall the texture, the smell, but in the vague way the sky is only blue when asked, and the ocean blue, and my heart, my dearest—my heart. . . as black as my barren soul.

My father’s hands were large, and with their size, swollen—swollen like clouds but red, red with everything he’d clenched throughout his day. For how large and heavy, for how crushing, his hands were seldom used for work.

I’d often watched those hands tenderly pluck hunks of bread from the center plate, where he would pat them gingerly against the oil-slick stain of whatever stew coated his. The same grease filmed my mouth in something both waxy and full of grit and I would watch him, upset that he was still trying to sop up more.

He was disgusting. But still, those pillowy hands, oh how I wanted them once to cup my cheek in infantile adoration. For those hands to show some warm torrid tremble before the more likely tempered admonishment.

If there was a time when that had taken place, I can no longer recall.

Some believe evil to be a corrosive presence—the grime, the violence and hatred and malfeasance burning through the flesh like some black acid, smoke coiling as a ribbon of gold cascades across a canopy of sin.

I wonder what the hands of businessmen look like as they deny an old woman an extension in favor of foreclosure. A manager as they terminate an employee for vague performance details after returning from medical leave or losing a loved one to cancer.

All the pictures of bad men, their hands are dainty and clean. Bundy, his weak wrists in handcuffs as he pretends he has charm and wit, and fails. Ramirez, the Nightstalker, aside from his penned-in pentagram, had fingers thin and terse as the maudlin old.

Were Adolph’s hands brutish, black and rotting things, as he made strokes signing off on millions of lives with barely a spark of joy? Or were they small and dainty too, meant to make gentle brush strokes on brighter canvases? If only the world hadn’t been so unfair.

My hands are monuments to pain.

The bones twist and come together at strange angles; sometimes when I stare at them it feels as though they are mocking me. Do something about it, they seem to say. Each broken bone, improperly set, they add character. I don’t want anybody to be confused.

When I show my hands to people, I want them to know that I have done things they could never dream. I want them to know that each scar, each scab, and bent phalange served a purpose. None of my disfigurements have come about without a reason.

I am meeting someone for lunch—a date of sorts—and I think they chose lunch because it seems safer. I don’t like the light, and I don’t like dates regardless of context. My hands, which I do like, I’m forced to hide in my lap. Like my teeth behind my lips, it’s better for them not to see. She’s not here yet, but everybody else is, and I can feel their looks. I stand to leave, because, if they look at me in this manner, how will they look at her?

Despite my nature, this is something I do not wish to inflict on her, being witnessed here with me. I envy them, the narcissists surrounding my table. The willing throng, as they seem. I envy them their ability to still find disgust.

This all before noon.

As I pass the other patrons on my walk toward the exit, seldom does one make eye contact. I am paranoid that this is now simply the state of the world, and not the effect of our insides forcing our outsides to match.

It’s not until the cab driver rounds the silent, electric vehicle onto my even quieter street that my date sends me a text message—my cell phone vibrating against my house keys so loudly on my lap, that I knock my head against the window out of fright.

The driver’s eyes are digging back at me, shrouded under the shadow of his eyebrows. He speaks to me through the rearview, and I have the sudden feeling as though nothing is real. His disembodied eyes undulate over the rolls along my patched and broken street, staring daggers, while a mouth—only vaguely attached—murmurs at the edges, lapping at me like a dog who hasn’t yet been taught.

I tighten my gnarled hands on an invisible leash.

I saw you leave

I read her text message on my couch while holding a cold, wet cloth over my right eyebrow. It hurts to squint, but it makes me want to squint harder, so I form a face made of less confusion.

Part of me wonders if this proclivity is one of the many reasons my hands have never healed.

I’ve never let them. Even as a child, the darker the bruise, the more it prompted me to push. That sickly sting, deepening with the rate of my pulse as I hoped for something in there to pop, some sac of infection, so it could wash over my vile blood like a cleansing tidal wave.

Even now as I contemplate how to respond to this—this cryptic admittance, I am grinding away at the sticks and tubings of the inner workings of my hands. The wires in my forearms jump, and something inside of my elbow twinges and goes numb.

I respond with my right hand only, the better of the two.

Why

I leave her with that, because she left me with this towel that had been white before her ill-timed text started the events that turned it pink. What was bright red washes out along and in between the lay of the fibers, riding the tail of the wrung water, and I squeeze the rest out in the sink.

My mind is a struck match.

My father’s father, and his before them, they all had soft hands. Small hands. I remember my grandfather, a veteran of the Greatest Generation, whispering to me as I sat atop his knee. In the other room, my grandmother sat with her back against the wall, reading her cookbook and kneading the hem of her dress, and as I traced the lines on Grandfather’s palm, I thought him kind.

Grandma’s cheek was soft and lined like my grandfather’s hand and they made a wonderful pair.

So much so that that palm cradled her cheek in her casket, spreading tears across my grandfather’s face—him flaunting them down to cascade around her, mottling her eggshell face like he wasn’t just spilling tears of joy to wash away her smile even then.

Even in death.

I delighted in the pain. The memory even now is thick with an oil-black cloud of enjoyment. The contemptuous sneer I felt that such an offense could befall this space before, and so openly. The egregiousness of my grandfather, it ripped my soul in two.

Grandmother, if the word righteous, in any right, could ever be applied to a single soul of this verse—if sweet, kind, and loving weren’t mere adjectives to describe the abject normalcy of a giving being, one being of your own relation—but one of exaltedness, of grandeur, of Godliness, then those descriptors are, were, befitting of her.

The hatred I felt toward my grandfather in that cruel moment is the very fiber that mended my gushing wounds.

I was scared

This is the text message I wake to, well past nightfall. It has been nine hours since my missing date admitted this to me. I wish I was brave enough to tell her she should be, but I am not, so I do no such thing.

Instead, I remind her of what we’ve discussed; I type, There’s nothing to fear. I tell her, I think you’re watching me.

My doorbell rings and I dislocate my thumb. I don’t have time to dwell on these mishaps—these little lurches that have injured me twice in the last bits of wakefulness—so with the muscle memory of a pianist, I snap the joint back into place as I walk toward the door.

I try to control the cold sweat I don’t want her to see, because I am the one who told her not to be afraid.

When I open my door, no one is there. Behind me, my phone buzzes on the table and I taste blood in my mouth. I blink, and when I open my eyes I’m back in the taxi, and we are sitting in front of my house.

“Thank you,” I say, check the meter, and I pay him generously. There’s a waterfall of crimson down the window on the inside of the door he will have to spray out. I notice my blood is still wet when I leave the vehicle, so I couldn’t have been unconscious for long, but part of me feels as though I’ve been through an overly long film, and now the day is far too bright. I can’t remember the last time I have seen the sun; even now, I’m only out because the gray.

My front door is open and I can’t remember if I bothered to close it. I’m forgetful sometimes. My blood blackens and starts to bubble on the inside of the cab’s window. I hold my breath and let it out only when the driver pulls away.

There is something else about my father. He has been dead and buried behind our home for some time. His hands are no longer soft like big red pillows, but putrid and crumbling, uncrossed within his casket.

These broken hands buried him face down after I burned his corpse.

My date messages me back, and it’s as it was in my dream.

I saw you leave

This time, I do not wait to respond. I say: Why did you let me go.

I already know what she is going to say before she says it, but I let her say it anyway.

I was scared

I give her that. Let her have it. I can only guess at how I appear to someone like her. I’ve seen her photos, a Rising Starlet they say, and I cannot help but think of Elizabeth Short.

They said the same of her in this same town. I wonder if she met her end at the gangly hands of someone like me. The work they did to her, it stirs something inside of me, and I don’t know if it is rage or jealousy. . . or something older.

I think on that for a moment, and then I respond.

You should be scared, I send.

Although I know my situation is different than that of the killer, I cannot help but wonder if Margerie, my fellspoken date, is making a similar deal as the young Black Dahlia once had.

Giving herself so freely for such a loathsome gift, Jesus—why would anyone? And I’m certainly aware that she is more than certainly aware of the risks involved. After all, I’ve evolved certain needs over time.

I shower, scraping my skin clean of the lotions I’m forced to use, and wait for her response. Watching the blood from my head go foamy and pink as it washes down the drain, I am thinking of the cab driver. The water runs down my smooth head where it beads off my nose and chin in spiked rivulets, and I hope the driver hugged his family when he made it home from work. I hope he never questions if there was ever a day he almost hadn’t.

My front door is open, but I know it is just a memory. I close my eyes and let it wash over me.

There is a crash that stirs me from my sleep, and I sit awake, craning my ears for some other sign. My mother screams and I jump from my mattress and don my boots, caked with mud from the fields. The horses scream too.

Over and over they scream. I slam the shutters closed and yet have to cover my ears. They thrash and kick at their stalls, and ignoring the shattering glass and the rising orange—yellow licking up the walls through the crack in the shutters, I run toward the sound of my mother in pain.

The man who crushed my family’s door through its frame, throwing my dear mother against the wall, he had hands like mine.

I grip mine now and savor the bruises. My opposing thumbs trace the buds of decades of fracture—the seams of the healed splinters where the intruder crushed my hands as I held them to protect my face.

No matter how often I clip my nails, grate them down, pluck them from their beds and grind them into a fucking powder and flush them away—when I wake, they are back, thick as knives.

My flesh has long healed from where I was ripped into all those years ago. I open my phone to another text from this unfortunate woman, and again I question why anyone would choose such a thing. Her ploy to catch me in the light, knowing I’d fucking do it, the nerve.

You’re not what I expected

My hands are worse than my father’s. Worse than his before him. I want to tell her this. I dream of being honest, but that would get me nowhere and then I would starve.

To this day, I am unsure why I was spared. Why my father was spared, and not my mother. I woke days later full of hatred and hunger after that incident, and the night was day in a different world. Maybe a time here in this place before people, before we had a name for colors and we polluted the dark with all of our squabbling, and climbing, always chasing something we could never be.

It was as if I could finally see for the very first time, and my first vision, my first fucking sight was tainted by my butchered mother, cracked open in the dying rays of the setting sun.

I tell her, this girl who wants me to drink from her, No, I am not what you expected.

Then, back on the night of my awakening—this dawning of a new sort of night—I reached my father where he lay just as he was coming back to life. At that time, I didn’t yet know what I was. Only that my mother was dead—stripped nude and covered in tiny holes, with a mammoth pile of ashes across her chest.

My father lay face up, blinking away the black blood that had once pooled, and now crusted in his eyes. He made a snarl as he tried to sit, and it was then I saw his back was broken. His upper body struggled, stuttered as it reached and pulled to get to my mother. He opened his mouth in what I thought was to be a wail, but hundreds of tiny filaments—spiked tubes with barbed tips uncoiled from his mouth and slid underneath my dead mother’s skin.

When I pulled him off of her, flipped him and began to dig my new nails into the sinew, through the fascia of his chest, his tentacles slid back where I now knew they hid, and he looked at me and smiled.

I think it was genuine. I felt a strange sheet fall over us then, this gray mist that connected us in some moist communication. His thoughts were mine, and I could put mine into him.

His smile faded as I dug deeper, but he did not cry out. His eyes melded over with tears, like poured-glasses about to tip. Something creaked in his chest and then cracked as something shifted. Blood, thick and gobbed black spattered from his lips as tears finally rolled from his eyes.

I felt his soft hands around my wrist, and even with his newfound strength, there was nothing he could do. My fingers pushed through and I gripped his heart and squeezed. He put his hand against my face and I rested my cheek against his pillow-palm as he died.

My crooked fingers tap across my phone, feeling my way across the plane even as my eyes well with whatever I have left to give. Margerie, I tell her. I am so… so much worse.