Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: alt-J – Left Hand Free

Since the accident that cost him his left hand, Calvin had been haunted by weird sensations. Someone touching, caressing, his missing hand, and worse. His therapists says it’s all in his head but he can’t shake the feeling that his missing piece is still out there, somewhere, and he’ll do anything to get it back.

======

“It feels like it’s still there,” Calvin said. “On my wrist, I can’t move it or make it do anything but I can feel it.”

“We talked about this, phantom limb pain or phantom limb sensation is perfectly common in recent amputees,” the therapist said.

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“Phantom limb sensation then.”

“I’ve read about that though and it just doesn’t-, I don’t know, it doesn’t match anything I’ve read.”

Talking about it, Calvin had a hard time tearing his eyes away from the stump of his left arm. About a finger length from the elbow, his arm ended in a nub riddled with healing scars. It reminded him of a chewed up eraser on top of a pencil. He was still getting used to the sight of it as well as the difference in weight that now threw off his shoulders, and it wasn’t made any easier by this so-called ‘phantom limb sensation’.

“There is no normal when it comes to these sensations. Or maybe it would be fair to say the normal is anything abnormal,” his therapist, Dr Rachael, said. “The nerve pathways that sent signals from your hand and up your arm suffered a trauma, they’ve been damaged, cut off or turned in on themselves. They literally don’t know what to do with themselves anymore so they send your brain these phantom signals. You could experience itching or temperature changes. Pressure or vibrations or you might feel yourself touching something or something touching you. It’s strange and maybe even frightening, I’m sure, but normal.”

Calvin pulled his eyes away from the stump and fixed them on his therapist. Starting at her crossed ankles, his gaze traveled up her stockinged legs to the hem of her skirt. She had both legs, nice ones, they were kind of sexy actually. He realised he’d been staring too long and swapped his gaze to her hands. She tapped a stylus against the side of her tablet with one hand, holding the tablet with the other. Two living hands. So she could talk all she wanted, she’d been recommended to him as an expert on trauma and accident recovery, but she didn’t really know how it felt or what was normal.

“It’s not like that,” Calvin said.

“So what does it feel like?”

“Wet, mostly. Cold and wet, and sometimes it feels like it’s touching glass.” Calvin measured the empty space extending from his stump with his right hand. “From here to here, I can’t feel anything. It’s just missing. And then from here on, at the wrist, it feels like it’s soaking in something. All the time, twenty-four hours a day, cold and wet, it’s driving me crazy.”

“Anything else?”

Calvin shuddered. “Yeah, sometimes it feels like someone is touching me. I can feel them holding my hand and-, stroking it, playing with it almost. It feels so real, it’s horrible.”

“There’s obviously the aspect of nerve damage, as I say, but there’s also often a strong psychological component to these things.”

“You mean it’s all in my head.”

“Kind of! That’s not a bad thing. People say that things are all in their head like that means they don’t matter or that they’ve failed somehow. But your head is where all of our sensations get interpreted, real or otherwise. The feedback from your damaged nerves needs to be translated through a mental filter and figuring out how that mental filter works is where I come in.”

“I guess.”

“Was there anything else? Any other sensations of note?”

There was but Calvin couldn’t bring himself to voice it. Dr Rachael would have definitely thought he was imagining it or making things up but sometimes it felt like whoever had his phantom limb wasn’t just touching it but using it to touch themselves. Sexually. And more than ever when that happened he knew something had to be wrong. It was so grotesque, such a violation, that he couldn’t believe his own brain would inflict something like that on him. And it was different, but he didn’t want to explain it to the attractive shrink who was probably only a few years older than him. Before losing his hand, yes, he’d masturbated with his left hand, his nondominant hand. He knew the feeling of his own dick in his fist and what he felt wasn’t it. How was something like that possible?

“No, no, nothing.” Calvin shook his head.

“Tell me again about the accident and what you remember afterwards,” Dr Rachael said.

Calvin sighed. He’d been over the story so many times by now. He’d been working as a delivery driver for the FetchAll app. He had accounts on a bunch of different apps and was constantly bouncing between them so he was pretty tired and maybe not as aware of his surroundings as he should have been. He’d been driving through an intersection, not suspecting a thing, when a truck plowed into the side of his car. Another delivery driver had gone hurtling through a red light and T-boned Calvin’s vehicle. The weight of their delivery truck had driven his much smaller car sideways and into a post. The driver’s side door had been crushed and created a pincer around his left wrist. Vaguely, he remembered, semi-conscious, trying to free himself but finding his arm totally stuck before he passed out.

When Calvin woke up in the hospital, his left hand was gone. The doctors had saved as much as they could. The hand itself had, apparently, been mostly intact, but the section between his elbow and wrist was badly mangled and hanging on by only a ribbon of flesh. They had severed the connection, removed the splinters of bone and sanded down what remained. They’d stitched the muscles and stretched skin over the stump before sealing it closed. He also had several cracked ribs and a partially collapsed lung as well as a minor concussion. He remembered the shock, the disbelief that part of him could just be gone like that.

“This may sound funny,” Rachael said. “But I wonder if part of the issue is that you never got to say goodbye.”

“What, goodbye to my hand?” Calvin said.

“In a manner of speaking. The accident was extremely sudden. You hadn’t even processed what was happening, what might happen, before you woke up and your hand was gone. Did they tell you what happened to it after it was removed?”

“No, I don’t think so. I assumed it was just, like, medical waste at that point and they threw it away.”

“It might be good for you to see exactly what happened to your hand after the surgery. One minute you were driving along, having a normal day, the next minute your hand was gone. Your brain might be struggling to process that, that it is really and truly gone. Hence that’s adding to the confusion when it receives nerve signals from the remaining limb.”

“I don’t get it, so what am I supposed to do?”

“If you’d like, I could probably arrange for someone at the hospital to take you through, step by step, what happened to your hand after it was removed. Would you like me to do that?”

Calvin laughed. “I don’t think that would help.”

“No? Why not?”

“I mean, gone is gone. I get it, the feeling like it’s still that, that it’s all wet, it’s just nerve damage or whatever. I’ll get used to it.”

xXx

As soon as Calvin got home, he crossed to the kitchen and got a beer. He was back to living with his parents for the moment but often he had the place to himself, for better or worse. Most of the time he was okay but he struggled to get the beer open with one hand. Finally, he pinned it to his side with his stump and punched the can open. It fizzed onto his shirt and he hurried to swallow some of it off the top.

Previously, when he had down time, Calvin would play some video games. He was going to have to switch to PC games though, where there were more options he could play with only one hand. His old game system, with its doubleheaded controller, was basically useless now. He had no job. Dropping onto the couch, he grabbed the remote and tried to find something to watch. His parents had half a dozen streaming services but nothing took his interest. He couldn’t surf between them and hold his beer at the same time. Couldn’t drink and scroll on his phone. Multitasking had become much harder with only one hand.

The delivery driver who hit Calvin had worked for AZTR, the biggest online retailer on the planet. Calvin actually felt bad for them. They’d been overworked, overtired, trying to adhere to an impossible schedule when they accidentally ran the light. On another day he could have easily made the same mistake himself.

But there was no doubt about who was at fault and various news outlets had blamed the draconian timetables AZTR forced their drivers to adhere to. To make it go away, AZTR had offered Calvin a settlement in the low seven figures. His lawyer had advised him to take it or else risk being held up in the courts for literal decades by AZTR’s army of lawyers. It was life-changing money but then that was only fair when his life had been changed. None of that seemed real yet either. He couldn’t find it in himself to care. It made him think of one of those stupid hypotheticals you might see on social media or something. Would you cut off your nondominant hand for a million dollars? Easy to say yes when there was no one who would actually hold you to it. The reality was a lot more complicated and confronting.

Calvin held the can of beer in his right hand until his palm felt almost numb with cold. Wet and cold and numb like how his left hand felt all the time. Evening them out, he couldn’t get past how real the sensation surrounding his left hand felt. If he closed his eyes, he’d be sure his left hand was still there. But, staring at the stump, he could see nothing but empty space floating a handspan from his stump exactly where the sensations seemed to originate. Impossible, it was impossible to think of any explanation other than the one Dr Rachael had given him. Nerve damage and something about the way his mental filter translated it all.

Something jostled Calvin’s left hand. His numb fingertips seemed to brush against a curved piece of glass. The sensation was enough to make his butt cheeks clench in nervous anticipation. Liquid felt like it was sloshing around his hand. He could see his arm, its abortive stump, remaining perfectly still and yet his hand sensed movement.

“No! No, stop it! It’s not real, it’s in your head!”

Ghostly but somehow solid fingers took hold of his hand. He felt a breeze as his hand was lifted free of the liquid. More movement, it was disorientating to have one part of his body feel like it was in motion. His brain tried to convince him the rest of him must be moving as well, as if his missing left hand was running the show now.

“Stop it!” Calvin said, feeling a little dizzy.

More movement, and touches, caresses, from some ghostly, unseen molester. If Calvin didn’t know better, he’d say his left hand was being gently towelled. The hand remained numb and cold, however, making it hard to distinguish wet from dry.

Had he made this happen, somehow? Was he thinking about his missing hand too hard and some broken part of his brain decided to put on a show?

Something rasped against Calvin’s missing fingertips. His hand moved, or was moved, and he recognised the contours of a man’s jawline. He was feeling, or imagining, stubble on a man’s face. Foreign and familiar at the same time. He tried to pull his fingers away but while he could feel what they felt he couldn’t make them move.

“This is making me crazy,” Calvin said, as the sense of caressing and being caressed dragged on. “If I’m not crazy, this is going to make me crazy!”

And then it got worse. Teeth, Calvin was sure it was teeth nibbling at the very tip of his left index finger. The finger that no longer existed in any capacity and yet he could feel it precisely at the end of his arm just as sure as he could feel the fingers on his right hand. Human teeth, he was fairly certain, square and blunt but hard. They snipped at his fingertip and scraped against his fingernail then seemed to work their way past the first joint. Behind the teeth, he felt a tongue that lapped and wound around the end of his finger.

“No, no! Come on, stop it!”

Calvin smacked his right hand against the side of his head in an attempt to rattle the alien sensations loose. It didn’t work. Ghost teeth sought the gap between the distal and proximal interphalangeals and began to pinch, and gouge, and bite.

Pain. No longer just strange and alien sensations but very real pain. Calvin’s scream tore at his throat. He whipped his left arm backward again and again and again, unable to help himself, like he was touching a hot stove. It didn’t matter, the sensation, the pain, followed his arm. Human teeth, not designed for knifing and tearing, squeezed the bone. Crushing and grinding, slowly working through the flesh and wearing the bone down. Calvin’s missing nerve endings exploded like fireworks. He gripped what was left of his left arm, his whole body shaking, face contorted in agony.

“Stop it! Stop!”

With a snap, Calvin’s missing finger tore free. Missing a second time, doubly gone. The gap where the stub of his finger invisibly existed burned although the agony did lessen almost immediately. He felt his left hand being fumbled but behind the curtain of pain it was hard to make any sense of the other sensations. After a minute or two, his hand seemed to drop, wrist-first, into a pot of cool water again. He could almost hear the plop. While he had come to hate the sensation of constant wetness, he appreciated the way it further dulled the pain in his missing missing finger.

Calvin’s hand jostled and sloshed for a minute then everything returned to its relative state of normal. His hand felt wet and cold and still again. The throbbing pain where his index finger once was declined sharply then almost, but not quite, dissipated. Experimentally, he tried to sense the spot where the end of his index finger should have been but he was sure that this time it was gone for real. He regarded the emptiness above his abortive forearm with fresh horror long after the pain faded. Any time he considered the possibility of that sequence happening again, his heart began to race.

“I can’t live like this. I can’t do it again! I’ve got to do something.”

Only one option came to mind. Fumbling with his phone, Calvin found the number for his therapist and called her. It was after hours so he got her answering service.

“Hello, Dr Rachael? It’s Calvin, listen, what we were talking about today with the hospital visit? Seeing what happened with my hand after it was cut off? I’ve changed my mind, I want to do it. Please, if you could make that happen as soon as possible that would be awesome. Obviously I’m available whenever, so whenever you can make it happen I’ll make it work. Thanks, bye.”

xXx

It took a few days to make the hospital visit happen but Calvin turned up at the main entrance mid-morning, sunlight at his back, for the appointment that Dr Rachael had told him about. He had mixed feelings about being back there again. The lobby bustled with people. People in hospital gowns trailing IVs, in wheelchairs, a man on crutches with a missing leg, another with a bandaged face, as well as plenty of visitors coming and going. No one paid any attention to him and the foreshortened arm hanging out of his shirt sleeve though, which was nice.

There had been no repeats of what he’d felt when his index finger was bitten off the other day. Still, any time he recalled it Calvin felt a cold sweat coming on. Occasionally, he felt a jostle and his heart rate would spike but his hand hadn’t left the wetness in that time. Still, he needed to find a way of resolving things so he’d kept the appointment.

Eventually, Calvin was met by a short, jolly man with a grey beard and white lab coat. He approached Calvin and shook his hand without hesitation.

“I’m Doctor Rajesh Bhaduri, sorry, I’m running behind. You were here for the tour, yes?”

“I guess that’s what you’d call it,” Calvin said. “Sorry, I’m not, like, taking up your time, am I?”

“Not at all! Believe me, I’m happy to do it.”

Dr Bhaduri first took Calvin to one of the surgical suites that wasn’t in use. Calvin had no idea if it was the same one where he’d been taken after his accident or not and Bhaduri didn’t clarify. The room was as sterile as he would have expected, a stainless steel table in the centre and sides cluttered with equipment and cabinets. Bhaduri wasn’t a surgeon, he clarified, but he gave a general overview of how Calvin’s amputation was performed in blunt terms.

“Afterwards, the excised limb would have been placed into one of those bags over here,” Dr Bhaduri said. “And transferred down to our pathology lab.”

The pathology lab was in the hospital basement. The corridors and rooms were well-lit, cool and air conditioned, but windowless and in that way timeless. The pathology lab was adjacent to the hospital morgue. On the way down, Calvin, half-seriously, pictured a basement filled with gruesome equipment and jars of severed limbs and organs and malformed foetuses. Like the lab of some kind of mad scientist. The morgue, at the very least, he anticipated being lined with refrigerated racks of bodies behind stainless steel doors and containing a few lumpy corpses beneath white sheets, perhaps with a few pallid toes jutting from underneath. Disappointingly, there was none of that. The pathology lab was a long and particularly boring room. There was little medical equipment even to be seen. The room was instead filled with stainless steel benches and guttered tables, cabinets and refrigerators along the walls. He couldn’t even spy any of those square, vaultlike doors built into the walls like he’d seen in TV shows. A couple of lab technicians of some kind busied themselves in the corner, staying out of the way.

“Once it was transferred here, they would have taken some measurements of the limb. Those would all be in your file. If you choose to wear a prosthesis or some such in future, those measurements might help.”

“Those guys would be doing that?” Calvin gestured toward the men in the corner.

“That’s right, they are qualified pathologists. If there were any other tests that might be needed, they would run those as well. We’re not a research hospital so after that the limb would be disposed of in the hospital incinerator. It’s just down the hall if you would like to see it?”

“And they would do that?” Calvin asked, referring again to the technicians.

“Oh, uh, yes, I suppose so.” Bhaduri looked confused.

“I mean, it’s not like a janitor comes and takes it out with the rest of the trash, right? They would do it themselves, not someone else.”

Bhaduri laughed, thinking he was making a joke. “Oh, no, not the janitor. Yes, the technicians would certainly dispose of any such medical waste personally.”

Both technicians busied themselves, out of the way. Only one of the two, however, looked like they actively resented the presence of Calvin and the doctor. A big man, tall but hunched over, round shouldered, heavy. If Calvin was ungenerous, the man looked much like he would expect someone who worked in a basement around dead bodies and body parts should look. His hair was unkempt and felt greasy even from across the room. His face was unshaven and bristled with stubble. Calvin felt like he knew those jowls and that stubble.

In setting up this visit with Dr Rachael, Calvin had claimed he’d changed his mind about whether it might help him to say goodbye to his severed limb. The truth was, he was really only interested in establishing the chain of contact his hand would have gone through between the surgical suite and the incinerator. His hand had never been incinerated, he was sure of it. Everything he’d felt, everything he’d been feeling, it wasn’t just in his head. Somehow it was real and his hand was out there somewhere, being abused, used for some sick fetish, and that abuse was escalating.

The slobbish tech kept staring at the two of them, glaring. On impulse, Calvin turned to bring his left arm into view. The tech’s face immediately changed. His eyes slid to Calvin’s scarred stump. It brought something to his face that Calvin really didn’t like. Some kind of hunger. He was still getting used to attracting stares when he went out in public but he’d never experienced anything quite like the expression on the lab tech’s face. He suspected it was the same kind of look any moderately attractive woman saw when she caught some creep staring at her chest or her ass. It was there for a few long moments and then the tech seemed to realise what he was doing and he made an effort to hide it. He turned away, back to his work, but he kept following Calvin from the corner of his eyes.

“Did you want to see the incinerator, would that help?” Bhaduri reiterated.

“No, no, thank you,” Calvin said. “Thanks for your time.”

Calvin had come to establish a chain of contact. Now, more than that, he was pretty sure he had a top suspect.

xXx

With some online stalking, Calvin figured out the lab technician’s name, Oliver Lindell, but couldn’t find out where he lived. Instead, he spent the next few days watching the hospital’s entrances and exits. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one particular entrance where the hospital employees came and went. But he didn’t have much going on to fill his days and no one questioned him as he went about his stakeout.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, Calvin was thrilled to spot the tech, Lindell, leaving the hospital with a light jacket tossed over his scrubs. He had to hold himself back then followed the man at a distance as he slouched through the exit and set off down the street toward the nearest train station.

If the tech spotted him, Calvin was sure he’d be recognised. To try to reduce the chances of that happening, he wore a black hoodie too warm for the current weather with the left sleeve tucked into the hoodie’s front pocket. Aware he’d crossed a line into very real stalking, Calvin followed Lindell to the station. He boarded at the other end of the same carriage that the lab tech entered and watched him carefully as the train took off.

The train journey took them out to the suburbs. Calvin kept his distance as Lindell got off. He had to increase the distance to avoid being seen as he followed him out of the station then down a series of side streets. Luckily, Lindell didn’t seem to be on alert. Calvin managed to follow him to a rundown neighbourhood and a small house with a large, overgrown yard. He hung back and thought about his next move as he watched the tech disappear inside the house.

Calvin’s missing left hand soaked at his side. He felt positive that it must be inside Lindell’s house. The creepy lab tech had removed it from the hospital instead of disposing of it like he should have done and he’d taken it home with him, he could almost sense the proximity now. But what was he supposed to do? The police wouldn’t do anything without proof. If he confronted the guy and he just denied it, well, there wasn’t much he could do about that either. If he broke into the guy’s place and then couldn’t find his hand, if he was wrong after all, crazy, then he would be the one in trouble.

“I could tell them it was trauma,” Calvin said, muttering to himself. “Temporary insanity. I got fixed on some crazy idea after losing my hand and lost my mind for a bit too.”

Dr Rachael might testify in that case. The money he had coming in compensation would probably help smooth things over. He didn’t care anymore. His hand was inside, he was sure of it. Suddenly, his left hand felt a jostle. Glass bounced off his remaining fingers as if it was inside a jar being shaken. It spurred him forward, sending him tearing across the road and across Oliver Lindell’s lawn.

Calvin pounded on the door with his remaining fist. He had no idea what he was going to say or do exactly. The jostling around his left hand ended immediately.

When the lab tech answered the door, he stared at Calvin for several moments in confusion. Recognition failed to spark in his eyes.

“Can I help you?”

“Where is it?” Calvin said.

“What?”

Calvin thrust his left arm forward and ripped the sleeve back from the stump. Lindell’s eyes widened, swimming in the middle of his face.

“Where is it? The hand that belongs on the end of this fucking arm?”

The lab tech stammered, wordless. His brain locked up. Lindell was bigger than Calvin and considerably heavier but Calvin barrelled into him. Shouldering him aside, he invaded the man’s home.

“Where is it?”

“Hey! You can’t just come in here, I’ll call the police!”

“Yeah? Call them,” Calvin said.

“What?”

“You want to call the cops, call them! I bet you don’t though.”

Lindell stammered some more. Calvin turned away and stalked through the house. The living room was messy, cluttered, but looked like a normal bachelor pad. It was a similar story in the kitchen. There was nothing weird or out of place. No severed limbs on chopping boards or blood leaking out of the refrigerator. Calvin moved to the hallway that led to the bedrooms and bathroom.

“Stop!” Lindell said.

The tech tried to grab Calvin by the shoulders but Calvin shrugged him off. The first room he checked seemed to be the main bedroom. Again, there was nothing out of place. It was messy, clothes on the floor, old posters taped to the walls. He moved down the hallway toward what was, presumably, another bedroom. Its door was closed.

“No, wait!”

Lindell tried to grab Calvin again. Calvin escaped the bigger man’s grasp and lunged for the door. He noticed at the last second that there was a latch above the door’s handle to accommodate a padlock but the lock was missing. Shoving the door open, he stepped into a nightmare soaked in neon lights.

“Motherfucker,” Calvin gasped.

It was a small room, originally a child’s bedroom maybe, although there was no bed and little furniture. Dimly lit, the only window in the room was covered in thick drapes that had been stapled shut. Instead, lighting was provided by a bunch of neon signage. The signs looked completely random, beer advertising and home decoration, their tubes buzzing, mismatched colours battling with one another. Between and behind the signs were posters plastered across the walls like wallpaper. Posters for bands like Cannibal Corpse and other death metal acts that seemed to have been chosen for their grotesque imagery more than anything else. Posters for movies featuring zombies and other monstrous stuff. One that caught his eye was titled ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ and featured a naked woman impaled on a sharpened pole that emerged from her open mouth, blood pouring onto her chest. But, of course, that was just the background for the real collection.

The other day, at the hospital, Calvin had pictured the pathology lab as the lair of some kind of mad scientist before being shown the boring reality. Now, here that vision was realised in all of its horrible glory. Shelves had been placed or secured against all four walls. Lining them were over two dozen jars and every jar was filled with murky liquid. Their contents were difficult to make out at a glance in the chaotic neon glow but Calvin’s eyes adjusted and he recoiled.

Body parts, of course. All the jars were filled with human body parts. Over half the jars contained human hands in various states of decay and ruin. Severed at the wrists, or halfway down their forearms, or at the elbows. Most were missing fingers and some had hunks taken out of them that Calvin knew immediately were bite marks. There were several jars containing feet, both male and female. One vessel, it looked like a very tall vase with a stopper in the top, contained almost an entire leg. He saw a jar containing a shockingly large but undeniably human penis. It almost looked like a sex toy except for the strings of flesh trailing off its base. Another jar contained what he took a couple of moments to realise were two wads of misshapen breast tissue. Worse, however, were two jars sitting side by side that contained human heads. They drifted in the murky preservative, jaws hanging open. One had both eyes, its nose, and its lips missing. The other was largely complete with only one eye socket hollowed out, the other white and blurry and staring in open horror at its surroundings.

“You motherfucker, you sick piece of shit,” Calvin said.

The only other piece of furniture was a swivelling gaming chair in the dead centre of the room. So Lindell could sit and rotate and take in his whole collection. Based on his experiences, Calvin knew the man’s interest was sexual. From time to time, his fetish must have driven him to take a bite from one of the parts as well.

Calvin’s brain almost blocked out the horror as he scanned the jars. Looking for his own hand and ignoring everything else. The lab tech and necrophiliac stayed frozen in the hallway behind him. After a few long moments, Calvin spotted his hand on a prominent shelf. Of all the hands it was the most complete and presumably the newest. Only the end of its index finger was missing. He crossed the room and grabbed it, jostling it violently. At the end of his left arm, past the gap of nothingness, he felt the ghost of his left hand bouncing against the glass.

“You piece of shit, I’m taking this,” Calvin said. “And I’m calling the cops.”

Suddenly, the other man hit Calvin from behind. He was driven into the shelf he’d just taken his hand from, rattling the other jars. The jar with his hand jammed against his side. Lindell pulled him back then threw him to the carpet.

Calvin had a split second to reflect on how stupid he had been. No one knew where he was or what he was doing. He’d barrelled into the man’s home and told him to his face he was about to destroy his life. The man was a thief not a serial killer but anyone could react violently in that situation. And maybe he actually was a burgeoning serial killer for all Calvin knew. Maybe those heads or some of the other parts hadn’t come from the hospital at all. He’d been so set in retrieving his hand and proving that the sensations weren’t all in his mind that he’d disregarded the obvious danger. He hadn’t been thinking. Going by the look on Lindell’s face, he wasn’t thinking either. He was acting on instinct. He seemed surprised in himself as he fell on top of Calvin.

Calvin dropped the jar and it rolled across the carpet. He was vaguely aware of the feeling as his left hand seemed to revolve in place. He put his arms up but he only had the one hand to defend himself. Lindell landed on him and painfully jarred his stump and his still-healing ribs. Breath blew out of his body. The two of them wrestled and knocked into Lindell’s chair, sending it crashing to the ground.

Lindell wrapped both hands around Calvin’s neck. His thumbs gouged Calvin’s windpipe, cutting off his supply of oxygen. The lab tech’s eyes looked desperate and crazed. Calvin smacked him and pushed his face with his remaining hand but the bigger man twisted away. One of Calvin’s feet lashed out and hit a shelf. Several jars fell to the carpet, clunking and sloshing, but Lindell ignored them. He wasn’t going to stop until Calvin was dead.

Calvin looked around and grabbed the jar containing his own severed hand. As Lindell choked him, and pain flowed through his injured side, he concentrated on the jar’s lid. It was a struggle but he’d gotten used to doing things with one hand over the last couple of months. With his thumb, he unthreaded the lid then spun it loose. Upending the container, he dumped the liquid and his left hand onto the carpet. Vaguely, he felt the tumbling sensation through his left arm.

“Go!” Calvin squeaked with the last of his air, face turning purple. “Help me!”

Clearly, he was still linked to his left hand in some mystical way. Now, beside it, he poured all his concentration into the hand and willed it to move. Mentally, he tried to pour life back into its dead sinews. Reaching through his stump and pushing the hand to throw itself into Lindell’s face and defend him.

The hand lay there, inert. Calvin could feel the preservative fluid draining off of it. He could feel bristles of carpet under its fingertips. But by all appearances, it remained dead, unfeeling, and unmoving.

Calvin’s conviction was so total, however, that Lindell was also convinced. This one-armed man had barged into his house, tracked down his secret room of horrors, and now seemed to be giving commands to his own severed hand. Anything might happen at this point. Eyes bulging, he watched the hand expectantly. His grip loosened enough on Calvin’s throat that Calvin could draw breath again.

Calvin fixed his grip on the empty jar that had held his left hand. He’d been genuinely surprised trying to control the hand hadn’t worked but he recovered from that surprise quicker than his attacker. As hard as he could, he swung the jar up and into the side of Lindell’s head. The glass shattered. Lindell rolled sideways, blood streaming from a fresh cut on his temple. Calvin dropped the pieces of glass he’d been left holding and pushed. He dropped Lindell on his side and writhed out from under him.

“Stop, hey!” Lindell slurred, trying to rise.

Calvin grabbed another one of the jars behind him at random. He punched it forward into the middle of Lindell’s forehead. It was the tall, skinny jar containing the severed penis, the glass thick like a wine bottle. It hit without breaking and left a swollen, red circle on the man’s forehead as he fell to the carpet.

Recovering his left hand, Calvin shoved it into the pocket of his hoodie. Strange to feel his right hand wrapped around his left from another angle, and then to feel it hanging inside the pocket unanchored from his arm. His throat throbbed as well as his ribs. Watching to make sure Lindell didn’t spring back up, he staggered out of the room.

Calvin returned the way he had come, unsteady on his feet. Passing back through the living room, his eyes fell on the coffee table. The bag Lindell had been carrying when he left the hospital sat on one side of the table along with a set of keys, a wallet, and the man’s cellphone. On impulse, he picked up the phone. He couldn’t unlock it but he could call the emergency line. Talking to the operator, he gave them the address of Lindell’s home and requested police, explaining there was an unconscious man in one of the rooms but not explaining what else they would find. He refused to give his name. Hanging up, he wiped his prints off the phone before tossing it on the couch. Not that it mattered, he was sure they could find more of his prints back in the jar room and if Lindell talked then it wasn’t like he’d be very hard to identify. He didn’t care, he’d gotten what he came for and he would come up with a way of explaining it all when he needed to.

Calvin walked away in a random direction and kept walking. He didn’t know the area and didn’t know where he was going. He could feel his hand, cold and dead, in the front pocket of his hoodie. He wasn’t sure what to do with it now. He couldn’t make it move, he couldn’t reattach it, and without the jar of preservative, whatever Lindell had been using, he would have to suffer through feeling the hand slowly rot.

Coming to a public park, Calvin wandered the grounds until he came to the top of a low hill. It was shaded by the branches of a beautiful, wide, spread out tree and overlooked a kidney-shaped pond. Using a branch and his bare hand, he chiselled out a pit between the roots of the tree, small, narrow, but relatively deep. Removing his left hand from his pocket, he lay it gently in the bottom of the hole.

“Uh, thanks, I guess?” Calvin said. “I was always very attached to you. Uh, and you were always by my side. I guess I shouldn’t make jokes. I’m sorry about everything, I’m glad I got you out of there and I’m sorry it wasn’t any sooner. Rest in peace, I guess?”

Calvin scooped dirt back into the hole. He felt it falling on his ghostly other hand at first, enveloping it, but the sensation faded as he filled the miniature grave. By the time the ground was level again and stamped flat, all the foreign feeling beyond the end of his left arm had disappeared. Grinning, he stood up and wiped the dirt off his remaining hand then returned the way he’d come.

======

Sean: If you’ve read more of my work, I hope you were fooled for a moment that Calvin’s hand would actually spring to life. I mean, feels like that would be typical of me, right? But I already did that with Hurting Hand. That is a super fun story though, I enjoyed that one!

I think I’m going to be able to limp through the rest of the year with Mixtape before I take a break! There’s some other projects I want to work on but I haven’t had a heap of time. A big reason for that just turned one this week, my wonderful daughter Zoe!

On the one hand, I can’t believe it’s been a year already but then she’s also grown so much in that time that I can’t believe it’s only been a year since she was this tiny little thing, laying on her mum’s chest with this expression of “What the fuck just happened?” right after she came into the world. She’s a great kid, right now she’s hassling me to pick her up then put her down again, has got that real toddler energy but all year she has been happy and largely healthy, always cute and loving, sleeps well, eats well, only ever cried for food, we’ve just been really lucky with her.

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