The weblog of Robin Camille Davis

This is the last fiction short of my Week of Flash Fiction. To those who read: kudos. To those who marked as read: whatever, man. Today’s is inspired by La Gamme Jaune by Frantisek Kupka, one of my favorite paintings.

     He dozed lightly, one finger curled into the middle of a collection of Baudelaire verse. The autumn sun was weak but still gave a pleasant tingle. Half-sentences wisped into his sleepy mind, sometimes conjoined into nonsense. He liked those thoughts best and often drank a little at night to bring on the necessary, middling fatigue. Perhaps in a few hours he would help himself to the brandy on his writing desk. Perhaps he would now.

     But when he opened his eyes, he did not get up. For he noticed something bright blue upon the back of his left hand. Like the unmoving tail of a comet or the reflection of a lightning bolt in a lake, the vibrant streak crossed his flesh from the outer bony protuberance of his wrist to the soft hammock between his thumb and index finger. He ran his right hand across it and in doing so lost his place in Baudelaire. To his great surprise, the blue stripe smudged. Like paint. But it was not wet. Was it chalk, then? The ochre light of sunset dimmed his vision, and he peered closer. A stench of something unidentifiable — metallic, perhaps — pinched the inside of his nostrils.

     Then he realized the smudge had depth. Inward.

     With a small cry he flung Baudelaire to the ground beside his rocking chair and scrabbled at the blue with stiffened fingers. Crumbs of it tumbled into his lap as he rubbed his chalky skin away to the bone and through it. Was this what he was made of? This soft cake of blue and red, white and pink? His exhalations were wails, horror at the lack of pain.

     His stopped. He held his left hand to the sun and saw the light streaming through his palm as through a magnifying glass with no lens. Slowly his eyes traveled down and atop his trousers he saw chunks and shreds of his substance. How could this be? Was he not made of flesh and blood and bone like he had been taught? Shaking, he scooped some of it into his right hand and made a fist to form a ball of it. Then he fit the clay flesh into the hole of his other palm and pressed it in an attempt to fill the gap as with caulk. But the patty tipped out and onto the wooden floor with a soft thud.

     All of his fingers were still functional. And if he did not pick at the hole, he found his loamy flesh would not fall away, at least not as quickly. It took some getting used to, having a hole in his hand. He had to be careful not to get his palm caught on gateposts or doorknobs. Children asked shyly if they could look through his hand, believing that the first person they saw through him would be their future spouse. He cottoned on quick and aimed accordingly, matchmaking with his aperture. Women, strangely, seemed to love it as well, sensing new sensual adventures unavailable in other men’s whole hands. And one night, a fortuneteller, while running her fingers in and around the opening of his palm, said to him across their pillows, I have a business proposition for you. And then he became the planchette for her, dispensing people’s fates across the ouija board while pretending to be hypnotized. Soon he had scraped out holes in his other hand and in both his feet, and he and the fortuneteller traveled to nearby churches and put on a show of stigmata for the wealthier Christians, whose shocked, open mouths corresponded with their open purses. The fortuneteller loved to drop coins through his extremities, grinning the conspirator’s grin, thirty perfect teeth gleaming in the light of a silver moon. You are my messiah, she said to him, your holes have made me whole. And rich. He placed his hands over her face and two sly eyes blinked back at him, covered and uncovered, hidden and revealed.