Kim Aron Personal Trainer, writer, blogger, networker and coach. I need help with this short story! Here’s the story:
Corlette ‘The Hand’
He had fallen asleep on his young wife’s shoulder, and she proudly bore the weight of the man’s head, blond, ruddy-complexioned, eyes closed. He had slipped his big arm under the small of her slim, adolescent back, and his strong hand lay on the sheet next to the young woman’s right elbow. She smiled to see the man’s hand emerging there, all by it self and far away from its owner. Then she let her eyes wander over the half-lit room. A veiled conch shed a light across the bed the color of periwinkle.
"Too happy to sleep," she thought.
Too excited also, and often surprised by her new state. It had been only two weeks since she had began to live the scandalous life of a newlywed who tastes the joys of living with someone unknown and with whom she is in love. To meet a handsome, blond young man, recently widowed, good at tennis and rowing, to marry him amonth later: her conjugal adventure had been little more than a kidnapping. So that whenever she lay awake beside her husband, like tonight, she still kept her eyes cosed for along time, then opened them again in order to savor, with astonishment, the blue of the brand-new curtains, instead of the apricot-pink through which the first light of day filtered into the room where she had slept as a little girl.
A quiver ran through the sleeping body lying next to her, and she tightened her left arm around her husband’s neck with the charming authority exercised by weak creatures. He did not wake up.
"His eyelashes are so long," she said to herself.
To herself she also praised his mouth, full and likable, his skin the color of pink brick, and even his forehead, neither noble nor broad, but still smooth and unwrinkled.
Her husband’s right hand, lying beside her, quivered in turn, and beneath the curve of her back she felt the right arm, on which her whole weight was resting, come to life.
"I’m so heavy…I wish I could get up and turn the light off. But he’s sleeping so well…"
The arm twisted again, feebly, and she arched her back to make herself lighter.
"It’s as if I were lying on some animal," she thought.
She turned her head a little on the pillow and looked at the hand lying there next to her.
"It’s so big! It really is bigger than my whole head."
The light, flowing out from under the edge of a parasol of bluish crystal, spilled up against the hand, and made every contour of the skin apparent, exaggerating the powerful knuckles and the veins engorged by the pressure on the arm. A few red hairs, at the base of the fingers, all curved in the same direction, like ears of wheat in the wind, and the flat nails, whose ridges the nail vuffer had not smoothed out, gleamed, coated with pink varnish.
"I’ll tell him not to varnish his nails," thought the young wife. "Varnish and pink polish don’t go with a hand so…a hand that’s so…"
An electric jolt ran through the hand and spared the young woman from having to find the right adjective. The thumb stiffened itself out, horribly long and spatulate, and pressed tightly against the index finger, so that the the hand suddenly took on a vile, apelike appearance.
"Oh!" whispered the young woman, as though faced with something slightly indecent.
The sound of a passing car pierced the silence with a shrillness that seemed luminous. The sleeping man did not wake, but the hand, offended, reared back and tensed up in the shape of a crab and waited, ready for battle.The screeching sound died down and the hand, relaxing gradually, lowered its claws, and became a pliant beast, awkwardly bent, shaken by faint jerks which resembled some sort of agony. The flat, cruel nail of the over long thumb glistened. A curve in the little finger, which the young woman had never noticed, appeared, and the wallowing hand revealed its fleshy palm like a red belly.
"And I’ve kissed that hand!…How horrible! Haven’t I ever looked at it?"
The hand, disturbed by a bad dream, appeared to respond to this startling discovery, this disgust. It regrouped its forces, opened wide, and splayed its tendons, lumps, and red fur like battle dress, then slowly drawing itself in again, grabbed a fistful of the sheer, dug into it with its curved fingers, and squeezed, squeezed with the methodical pleasure of a strangler.
"Oh!" cried the young woman.
The hand disappeared and a moment later the big arm, relieved of its burden, became a protective belt, a warm bulwark against all the terrors of night. But the next morning, when it was time for breakfast in bed-hot chocolate and toast-she saw the hand again, with its red hair and red skin, and the ghastly thumb curving out over the handle of the knife.
"Do you want this slice, darling? I’ll butter it for you."
She shuddered and felt her skin crawl on the back of her arms and down her back.
"Oh, no…no…"
Then she concealed her fear, bravely subdued herself, and, beginning her life of duplicity, of resignation, and of a
here’s the last sentence of the story, it cut off at the end..
lowly, delicate diplomacy, she leaned over and humbly kissed the monstrous hand.
http://moodle.parkrose.k12.or.us/mod/resource/view.php?id=679
here’s the last sentence of the story, it cut off at the end..
lowly, delicate diplomacy, she leaned over and humbly kissed the monstrous hand.
http://moodle.parkrose.k12.or.us/mod/resource/view.php?id=679
here’s the last sentence of the story, it cut off at the end..
lowly, delicate diplomacy, she leaned over and humbly kissed the monstrous hand.
http://moodle.parkrose.k12.or.us/mod/resource/view.php?id=679
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