handless/chain link
short story
My big secret is I am missing my right hand.
Well, not entirely.
The medical report (recovered from my father’s desk) said something like: Traumatic amputation of the right middle (digit III), ring (digit IV), and little (digit V) finger...amputations are complete at the level of the proximal phalanges, with extensive associated soft tissue avulsion and crush injury extending along the ulnar aspect of the hand...full-thickness tissue loss involving dermal, subcutaneous, and muscular structures with exposed bone and tendon.
Translation: I lost my pinky, middle, and ring finger on the right hand, along with a big chunk of the hand itself on that side.
I was left with a sort of finger-thumb halfmoon combo. It looked more like a congenital defect than a traumatic amputation, especially since I was a little kid and it was obvious it hadn’t been blown off by an IED in Iraq or something. I spent a lot of time in pediatric occupational therapy and support groups with kids who were actually born with such defects, and it always made me feel guilty and stupid, because their thing wasn’t their fault, but mine was, or at least it felt like it was for a long time.
My parents told me a million times not to go near the fence, I don’t blame them.
But I was five, and even more unfocused and forgetful than I would ever be. We had a dog I loved. What could a dog do to me? The neighbor’s dog barked all the time because he was angry, all he needed was a little love.
I was thirsty and my dad had forgotten the lemonade. The burgers were already grilling, he’d be back in a second to flip them, and besides, the dog wasn’t out.
Right as my dad went inside, I heard my neighbor’s sliding door open and the familiar smell of marijuana waft down from their porch, the prelude to the dog padding down the steps, like he always did, full speed and barreling toward the fence to ward us away from his home, his huge balls clanging together between his legs.
The last thing I remember was picking a dandelion from our un-mowed lawn, the last employment of more than two digits on my little right hand, small enough to still carefully reach it through one of the diamonds of the chain link fence that separated our lawn from our neighbor’s, and present the snarling Rottweiler with a peace offering.
My whole life I’ve been thankful not to have remembered the actual happening, for the trauma center of my brain to have shut out the part where the dog chomped through the dandelion and into my flesh, when I must have instinctually retracted and gotten caught on the way back through the fence as the dog took it in the opposite direction.
The rest I remember on a reel of film I can see frame by frame; my dad grabbing me, an ambulance, my mom.
I credit my mom with saving me from a lifetime of cynophobia, because when I was in the hospital she whispered, “It wasn’t a bad dog, honey, it wasn’t his fault, it’s not yours either.”
I believed the former, but not quite the latter.
For years she talked about how tough it was to have known the neighbors had to put him down. “Poor, poor Butch, imagine we had to put down Addison?” she’d say. Butch was the offending dog’s name, half of my hand had, I imagined, been incinerated along with him. My dad would shake his head when she acted like this.
“If Addison ever did something like that to a kid, she’d deserve it. You would have killed that dog with your bare hands if you were there. You’d kill him now if he were still alive,” he must have said to her a million times. He was right.
My story could be about fearing dogs, dogs with big testicles, and a bigger bark. Instead, for the the rest of my life I was afraid of chain link fences, and reaching through them.
My way of dealing with the hand thing was to keep it hidden.
Functionally, I adjusted. Technically I am right-handed, but I learned to write with my left, throw with my left and, when the time came, masturbate with my left. It was an impediment, and a differentiator, but with some therapy and a supportive household and friends, I regarded it overall as a plucky differentiator, an unfortunate obstacle that made me stronger.
Yet I became weak the only time I was made fun of for it soon afterward, right in that sweet spot of an age when some of my peers were insensitive and guileless enough to do so. They called me ‘Hook!’, because it does have an unfortunate pincer-claw appearance.
After that, I noticed the looks wherever I went, how it seemed to make people uncomfortable. My custom-fit, three-fingered prosthetic was delivered and I not only wore it, but wore a glove on top as well.
My life, from that point on, was exceedingly normal besides the deformity, so long as I kept it hidden, as if the universe were compensating for the horrible accident by packaging up the rest into a milquetoast experience that would be up to me to imbue with any strangeness or worthwhile happening, which I was understandably reluctant to do.
Until life did it for me.
I lost my copywriting job, for something like the same reasons that anyone loses their job: layoffs, positional elimination, outsourcing, AI. Except the truth was I had lost inspiration and was doing very little actual work.
We were supposed to get a house, get married, have kids; my high school sweetheart, the only girl I’d never have to explain my hand to again. The loss of my job and its income put the house thing on hold, and certainly the marriage thing, as it turned out we didn’t have much in common besides a shared set of simple idealism and convenience once the promise of a future fizzled out.
My parents were happy to have me move back in, but I wasn’t happy to be there, despite those old neighbors long gone and the chain link removed and replaced with a six-foot wood panel one. I resolved to find any job I could, and with renewed time to work on my portfolio and some contacts with old friends, I found one, working on a massive IP as a narrative designer for a video game company.
The only problem was I had long resolved to stay in colder climes; such weather gave me more of an excuse to wear a glove without scrutiny.
Too bad the job was across the country in Los Angeles.
Having one (and a half) hand helped me get ahead in the writing world.
Certainly not because it helped me write faster (I had to employ a point and peck method), but because Butch had given me a story, a hardship to have overcome.
I wrote about it in eighth grade for English class and my teacher submitted it to a journal, where it was prodigally published and lauded, a paradoxical expose leaning into the very thing I kept physically hidden. I parlayed it into a killer college essay, and made connections at a renowned university, along with the somewhat ancillary accomplishment of a degree.
People like a good story, especially when it’s true, and doubly so when it’s tragic.
Why, then, was it so hard for me to explain to this young woman who I’d been texting for weeks what my condition was?
We met on Hinge because my place of employment was markedly testosterone-filled and I had no other friends or methods of meeting anyone new, nor any experience in meeting individuals in the real world, especially not a place of intimidatingly beautiful people like L.A. I was only good at writing, and texting is, primarily, a form of writing.
I was drawn to Helen physically because she had a dimpled chin and the right amount of freckles, features that aroused something Freudian inside me. She was the kind of girl who was suitably embarrassed about liking Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes in the early 2010s; who laughed at puns, no matter how poor; and had at least one tattoo, but not more than three.
Most importantly, she was also a writer.
Yet we were planning our first date and I had not told her about the hand (or lack thereof). All of my Hinge photos had the hand behind someone else or out of frame.
thursday? I’d asked. She had a work thing.
what about friday? She was visiting her parents.
saturday, then! I proposed.
i am supposed to volunteer at the dog shelter that day, she texted. you should come!
So our first date was at a dog shelter up in Van Nuys, which was part of L.A. or maybe wasn’t, depending on who you asked, and seemed pretty close to where I lived, or at least it did when you looked at a map, but I had quickly learned that it could be a 20 minute or 2 hour drive away.
We met and I was grateful custom dictated we have a reluctant hug rather than shake, her eyes only straying to my gloved hand for a half of a second. She was more beautiful in person and smelled wonderful.
The shelter did not. It smelled like every rough dog smell I’d ever smelled. Rows and rows of dogs, some barking, none with big balls, all of them sad in some unknown way, all behind chain link cages.
Our task was, apparently, to sit with this one specific dog.
Just sit.
They put us in a little room with a grey Pitbull called Misty, on the opposite side of a chain link cage. The poor thing cowered in a primal way, as though it lived on an Earth where gravity was twice as heavy.
“She’s been abused. All you can do is exposure therapy. Gain their trust,” Helen whispered to me. We sat on the concrete ground next to the cage while the dog eyed us wearily from against the wall.
It was the saddest thing I’d ever seen, the only thing that could have made me desperate enough to change the topic of conversation thusly:
“So, uh, you probably think it’s super weird I’m wearing this like, glove, and uh you should know...”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I already know. And I don’t mind. I’m not the kind of person to mind, but I think you already know that. I googled you and found the old short story. Pretty good for an eighth grader.”
I took this in, and said slowly:
“And you still invited me to...a dog shelter?”
“I mean, the point of the story was that you weren’t afraid of dogs, right? I wanted to test you.”
“Fair,” I laughed. “But it wasn’t totally a setup, right? Like you actually do come here all the time, right?”
“Oh yeah, have been for years. It makes me whole, you know?” she said, and I did know.
“How do you do it, coming here all the time?” I asked. “Don’t you just want to take every one of them home? Save all of them?”
“One time I did take one home. Do you want to come meet him?”
Helen had a room in a small house she shared with four other people, like most writers in L.A., although I gleaned they didn’t even own the house. None of her roommates were home, but we were greeted by a dog, a smallish hound mix who was happy enough to see Helen but recoiled when he realized she had company. He growled and paced in the hallway.
“It’s okay,” Helen explained. “He won’t bite or anything. Just nervous.”
“Is this one of those, ‘he doesn’t like men?’ type of deals? Because he was mistreated by one?” I asked. I held out my hand, my left one, the whole one.
“He has a history,” was all she said. “His name is Milo.”
Milo sniffed my hand skeptically. I could see that his left eye was a glass fake, an accoutrement I felt was probably unnecessary for a dog, then realized the irony in me thinking so. I scratched under his chin and felt him relax, then his tail wagged and he bumped himself up against my legs.
“Holy shit, he’s never taken to anyone like that!” Helen said.
“Not once? Not for any of the hundreds of men you’ve brought back?” I teased.
“Stop, I’m serious! He loves you for some reason.”
“What happened to his eye?” I asked.
“His owner used to keep him in a cage in the backyard, and apparently some kid stuck a stick through and poked it out.”
“That’s horrible!” I reached down and slapped Milo’s chest in the way dogs like.
“We have a cat, too. He’s pretty skittish though. Do you like cats?”
“Sure.”
“Let’s try and find him. Milo, can you find your cat sister?”
We took our shoes off and went through the house, undoubtedly inhabited by three of the most bohemian artistic Angeleno women you’d ever know, macramé hoisting up plants, thrifted mirrors and trunks, a mandala tapestry, a Dodger’s hat hanging next to the door. Milo took us to her room and went sniffing under the bed.
“This is one of the cat’s favorite spots to hide,” Helen explained. We got on our knees to look beneath, but saw no cat. When we came back up, our faces were simply too close to each other not to kiss.
Milo didn’t seem to mind. I lifted her sun dress off, she took my shirt off, helped with my belt, rolled each other onto the bed. It became clear to her I was favoring my gloved hand, keeping it from her, feeling her body with only my good left.
“Take it off,” she said, looking at it.
“Are you sure?”
She nodded, lips half open, pulling the glove fingers from each false digit and unstrapping my prosthetic as though it were nothing more than another article of clothing.
I addressed this by kissing her even more. I wielded my fleshy hook and brought it down to the gap in the fence between her legs, and put my finger through it.
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Before I give a little feedback, let me say that I adored this. It’s hard for me to like most romance in fiction literary or otherwise for a variety of reasons but what you’ve done here is create a situation with major tension that’s also very mundane and it works very well. The almost confessional tone to the beginning feels right to me and you did a lot with a difficult breadth of time to work with (in my opinion).
That said, the second half is what really shines for me here. I think that the exposition in the first half is too freely given. You’ve got strong scenes in the first half that could carry much of exposition that comes later in that section. Basically I’m saying we don’t need a rough outline of his whole life up to the date. A few memorable scenes would work (for me).
Of course this advice is predicated on the idea that I actually understand your vision for this story (I might not). In my view this is a story about how a man has moved past something intellectually but doesn’t know what to do with his emotional need for closure. He made it through being bullied for his hand. He survived the actual attack, and he even did something transformative with the pain he’s felt but none of this changes the fact that his hand creates an emotional distance between him and other people.
The date with Helen— at least in my interpretation (which can be wrong)— is the elimination of this final barrier. Someone not only accepts him with his altered body, she considers it unremarkable in some ways and wants to bond over a shared love of animals. My bias says looking the narrator up is pretty natural but I think “testing” him lends the story a darker tone than intended. I think emphasizing that Helen admires that he still liked dogs after the experience with his hand while also making her a little apologetic for the fact the experience could have been jarring would be a better move. If she was testing him this directly it feels more like the start of a terrible relationship in my mind. I think that trying to just jump right into sharing the animals with him because she hopes he’s telling the truth is a little more grounded. The love interest doing something that would be unhinged irl is a common problem with romance though and I still love her as a character. Thematically her calling it a test feels almost mythic but I (don’t think that suits this story). I can be wrong though.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the person who wanted less of Helen. I agree her power is in her subtlety but she’s thematically very significant and I think you’ve struck a crucial balance that giving her less dialogue would upset. If anything I’m arguing that the direction you were taking Helen (in terms of a less is more approach) is not only right, it would also work for the narrator. Understatement is one of this piece’s strong suits because it conjures the emotional complexity without adding words.
As far as the ending itself I agree that you’ve clinched it thematically but there is an emotional anticlimax with the tease of intimacy. I’m not sure if a full sex scene is the right move (it totally could be if you wanted to take it that way) because I often find that a sentence or two is enough to capture sex (outside of erotica which I could actually see this being). I think the real kicker would be her stroking the hand after sex, and him liking that, or maybe he feels the absence of his fingers against the mattress but isn’t bothered by it for the first time in his life— something that would show a change in self image and the narrative he’s built around the partial loss of his hand. That said, as it stands now a sex scene would be a suitable ending. You could just finish it and there’s something interesting about him fingerbanging her with what he has left. It’s emblematic of leaving what he lost behind and using what he has. So I guess it just comes down to how comfortable you are with writing a sex scene. I will not be shy about saying I’d read a more complete sex scene.
Sorry if I went overboard. I liked this. If any of this works for you happy to help. If not just ignore me. In parting I will echo what others have said. This is my new favorite from you.
I loved it. I never read any short stories. I didn't know how it worked at all. I love novels, and thought you at least hundred pages to understand the characters. Yours are the one of the first short stories I've read and I got hooked. Midway into this story, I even forgot that it's a short one and as it ended I was thinking I should keep scrolling to get the rest. I wish to be like you, writing some amazing stories.