The Hands of Strangers by Michael Farris Smith

Author:Michael Farris Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Beautiful dreams full of numbers. A crowd on a boardwalk watching fireworks. An army of coyotes playing tug-of-war with a bone as long as a flagpole. In another, he has a big family, eight brothers and sisters, and they’re all there, laughing and arguing and slapping one another in the arm. But they don’t have names, and when Jon asks them, they laugh big, will say anything to keep from giving him names. He doesn’t know whose house they are in but it’s old, and when he looks out of the window there’s no street or neighborhood or city lights, only a flat field that runs into a dull horizon. He shifts from happy to frustrated, knows that these people share his blood but they won’t be handled too carefully. But even frustrated, it’s a room of people all pieces of him, all familiar with one another. One by one they leave until he’s alone and then he notices there’s no furniture in the room and the window is shrinking. The room gets smaller and smaller until he opens the door and walks out and there’s a forest where the open field used to be and it’s so dark. He walks into the woods and the only sound is the crunch of leaves under his feet. No birds, no squirrels, no snakes. He stops and leans on a tree and the tree is rotted and falls over, then he moves to another tree and gives it a shove and the same thing. And another, and they start to fall like dominoes and he turns to run back toward the house, leaping and ducking, but he’s lost and only running and running, dodging crashing trees and looking into the sky for some light to steer him but in every direction the sky is mud.

Jon wakes with a jerk, sits up, then falls back again. Estelle calls out to him from Jennifer’s room and he says he’s okay.

“What are you doing in there?” he asks.

Estelle leaves the child’s bedroom, walks into the living room, and turns on a lamp. Jon shields his eyes, then rolls over and puts his face into the sofa pillow. Estelle sits on the floor.

“It feels different tonight, doesn’t it?”

Jon answers into the pillow and it comes out in a mumble.

“What did you say?”

He turns to her and says, “He said don’t get excited.” In her face he sees that he’s too late, that she’s decided this is it. In only a few hours, a lift has appeared in her tired eyes.

“Her smell is gone,” she says.

Jon sits up on the couch, stretches his arms and twists, then says, “I went in there last week and noticed the same thing.”

“Do you think it’s her?”

“I don’t know. He said don’t get excited.”

“You already said that.”

Jon stands and goes into the kitchen and makes coffee. The microwave clock reads 3:59, the first morning light of a hopeful day still hours away. Jon brings over coffee for both of them and Estelle turns on the television.

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