David’s hands didn't feel like they were a part of his body, not anymore. They had turned against him like disobedient children, refusing to act the way hands were supposed to. Doctors were useless. They eagerly diagnosed him with ludicrous ailments like Alien Hand Syndrome, smiled wolfishly as they discussed publishing his case in the Lancet and JAMA. He tried to convince them that his hands were just wrong, pure and simple, but no one knew how to fix them.

It had started with a sensation of numbness. He'd find the fork or paper that he’d been holding mysteriously lying on the floor. It began to happen with such frequency that he feared picking things up, certain that whatever it was would end up dropped and broken. He gave up driving, forcing his boyfriend to take him on numerous appointments with increasingly baffled doctors. David worried it might be the onset of severe arthritis like his mother had, but there was no pain in his joints. In fact, his hands had no feeling at all. Diabetes and localized paralysis were ruled out along with a long list of progressively obscurer diseases, leaving him frustrated and certain he was going crazy.

The mysterious ailment escalated over the course of months until his hands dropped to his sides, dangled from his useless arms like dead pigeons. David could feel nothing with them, not the laces of his shoes, not the skin of his own body. He couldn't even unzip his pants to piss and had to have his boyfriend help him go to the bathroom. He couldn't even feel Ethan when David cried against his muscular shoulder, asking, Why is this happing to me?

The numbness was preferred in retrospect. After months of inactivity David's hands took on a life of their own. The right one crossed over first. The devil’s got it, he told skeptical doctors. His fingers would dart under the bed sheets and pinch Ethan purple, or ball into a fist and punch the wall, or crush a glass into shards leaving him bleeding but still numb. He had Ethan tie his hands to his sides with a belt, but the reprieve was short-lived. The left hand, which seemed to be the smarter of the two, would craft an escape and free his partner. Then both would conspire against him, tearing at his clothes and hair, threatening to injure him unless he forced his feet to move him closer to the things they wanted. Food, alcohol, cigarettes, Ethan…

His hands would grab Ethan, who initially responded with trepidation, but quickly crossed into blind ecstasy as David’s right hand worked his boyfriend’s cock with alarming skill, his left tweaked nipples and explored dark orifices. Ethan would close his eyes in unbearable pleasure, his body writhing beneath David’s alien hands; he’d explode in breathless gasps, hide his face in guilty contentment. David would turn away shamefully, despondent that his hands had become better lovers than he had ever been.

Once they discovered the landscape of Ethan’s body, his hands became insatiable. David was amazed at their bravado and lack of tact, their adventurous sensuality, their incessant drive to stroke Ethan into a maddening stream of ejaculations. They did things to his boyfriend’s body that made him flush with equal portions of embarrassment and excitement. They knew no boundaries and exploited the body eagerly offered itself up to them. Ethan started calling out from work, chained to the bed by his libido, became stupid with sex.

One night David looked into his lover’s blissed-out face, dark shadows under his eyes from lack of sleep and nutrition, and knew it had to end. The adulterous hands had to go.

He rose in the early evening and ransacked the garage with his feet, searching for an axe or some sharp implement to sever his relationship with his treasonous limbs, but his hands refused to pick up anything. He stared at the car, thinking desperately of having Ethan drive over his hands, but he couldn’t ask him to do such a macabre thing. Gasoline, insecticide and rat traps were quickly rejected… and then he remembered the train.

David ran out of the garage, dashed haphazardly through suburban obstacles to reach the train platform, then waited impatiently for one to arrive. His right hand worried his clothing, tugged at him to return home. The left hand obnoxiously loosened his pants and pushed his shorts down to manipulate his long-forgotten penis into a hesitant erection.

The alien hand warmed his cock against the chilly night air, tugged his desperate flesh, inched him to the edge of teeth-shattering climax. People moved away, muttering complaints about the crazy homeless, trying not to watch him beat off under the darkening sky but failing to curtail their curiosity. Two men darted off the platform into the station’s restroom to relieve themselves in a shared stall.

A whistle announced his opportunity, but he couldn’t force the hand off his cock. His left hand pummeled him, delivering the same excruciating ecstasy that it his boyfriend had endured, as it attempted to distract him from this final act of desperation. David’s head rolled back, mouth groaning, and months’ worth of ejaculate spilled over, coating the platform and the track in shimmering white puddles. His knees went rubbery and his legs, swaddled in his discarded pants, betrayed him. David stumbled forward, his hands automatically reaching out to brace him for the fall, and slid onto the track as the train pulled into the station.

David stared at the evil things on the other side of the rail, guilty with his blood. He rolled onto his back and smiled up into the faces of the people gathered nervously around him. He raised his bloody stumps. I'm free, he cried, free at last.

They called it a miracle when his hands were surgically reattached after a ten hour operation. Ethan hovered at his bedside, eagerly anticipating his recovery.

 

© 2008 Sean Meriwether

Sean Meriwether’s fiction has appeared in Best Gay Love Stories 2006, Hot Cops, Best of the Best Gay Erotica 2, and other notorious publications. In addition to managing Velvet Mafia, he co-edited Men of Mystery: Homoerotic Tales of Intrigue and Suspense with Greg Wharton. Sean lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Wanna know more about Sean? www.penboy7.com