The Hand Collector

by Marian Gray

  “Why would anyone want to harm me for being a flup or… what was that word you used?” I asked.

  “Snuffed,” she said. “And they won’t want to harm you. They’ll want to kill you, Zuri.”

  “Kill me?” I whispered. It sounded like something straight out of a nightmare.

  My mom was right. It wasn’t worth the risk. Everything my aunt and uncle said was fascinating and the stuff of dreams, but my life wasn’t bad enough to throw away like that, was it? I couldn’t leave my mom behind. For eighteen years, it had just been the two of us. With me gone, she would have no one.

  “But that’s only if you’re a flup,” Uncle Hank said. “Snuffed hands aren’t illegal, and if you are in fact a blackhand descended from the Ebenmore line… people will be falling over themselves for you.”

  My mom took a sip from her mug before setting it down on her coffee-soaked pineapple placemat. “In your correspondence with Blacksaw… did you tell them where Zuri and I are?”

  Uncle Hank shook his head. “No.”

  My mom’s shoulders relaxed. “That’s a relief.”

  “Just that you were in North Carolina.”

  “What?” Her eyes shot wide open, and she cupped a hand to her mouth. “How could you? They’re going to come for us.”

  Chapter Two

  The following day at school was anything but normal. Everyone was still chatting about finals, the summer, and college preparations, but my head swam with yesterday’s conversation. It cycled through my mind a countless number of times as the day passed in a sort of haze. When the last period finally came and went, I skipped my after-school clubs and headed straight home, eager for some time alone to be with my thoughts. My mom wouldn’t be home from work for another two or three hours.

  I slid my key into the metal deadbolt and gave it a slight twist, but there was no subtle resistance or click. The bolt had already been retrieved and the door unlocked.

  Something was wrong. Someone was in my house.

  I took a step back as my stomach plummeted to my feet, slipping between my toes. Fright spurred my heart into quick and heavy beats that pounded like an angry fist.

  It was too early for my mom to be home from work, but with the garage closed, there was no way to know if her car was here. Maybe she got sick or decided to take a half-day? Yesterday’s brunch had her out of sorts even after Uncle Hank and Aunt Margot left. She wouldn’t admit it, but I could see the wheels turning in her eyes. Her mind was chewing on something.

  I took my phone out of my backpack and called her cellphone, but there was no answer. I then tried her work phone, and it rang until it ended with a scripted company prompt to leave a voicemail. With a long breath, I slipped my phone into my pocket.

  My jaw clenched and eyes narrowed. I was going to have to go in.

  Perhaps I should have come up with a plan, but the need to defend my childhood home rose with such strength. It was as though a fire had been started within me, bursting to life not with the flick of a match but a quart of kerosene.

  My hand returned to the handle, and my thumb pressed down on the small nickel piece. The front door opened with ease and drifted on its hinges.

  My chest tensed as the scene before me slowly unraveled. Cabinet doors were splayed wide open, drawers spilled out in odd angles, and clothes were piled high on the couch. I took one step into the entry, careful not to make a sound. Several pieces of mail rested on the floor. The African soapstone bowl that normally held my mom’s keys and outgoing letters kissed the tiles, face down.

  A crash of wood meeting wood boomed from the master bedroom. If I had been a braver woman, I would have charged in and threatened the individual to leave my home at once. But I was scared stiff. My feet wouldn’t move, refusing to carry me any further way from the front door. My brain told me to go to a neighbor’s and call the police, but my home and my family were being violated by this perpetrator. I couldn’t run away now.

  “May the black and white damn it all!” My mother’s voice hissed from her room.

  “Mom?” I called out.

  “Zuri?” She replied.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in my room.”

  “Is everything alright?” My eyes swept across the chaotic state of the house once more. “Do I need to call the police?” My breath stifled. “Or an ambulance?”

  “No,” she answered.

  I took another step inside and closed the front door behind me, locking it.

  “They can’t help us,” she finished.

  “What happened?” I wove my way through the barrage of furniture, knickknacks, and clothes. Someone or something had turned the room on its head.

  “We’re leaving.”

  Leaving? There was no way I heard her right. My mother had struggled for years balancing raising me and working exhausting hours in order to afford this house. The brown brick structure was a shining trophy of all her hard work and painstaking effort. What could possibly force her to just up and leave, throwing it all away? Nothing. Nothing in the entire world was worth that.

  “What do you mean leaving?” I turned the corner, staring into her room. The place looked as though it had been ransacked, but instead of taking all the valuables, the thieves had snatched all of the necessities. “Mom, what is going on? Did someone break in? I’ve heard people who have had their homes burglarized often feel violated and desire to move. Did we get robbed?”

  She closed one of the drawers with a hurry. The clap ripped through my thoughts, pulling my attention to her. She sighed. My breath caught in my throat as I stared at her face. She appeared as though she had aged ten years overnight. Lines cascaded from the corners of her heavy eyes that drooped into puddles of puffy skin. Her complexion was patchy, darkly pigmented around her eyes and mouth. The small hairs around her hairline flared out in all different directions, except the very center where she had ran a hand through several times.

  “Nobody has broken in and stolen anything… yet.”

  “Mom, are you okay?” I could see with my own eyes she wasn’t. “You look like…” I paused, not knowing what word to use.

  “Like I’ve been through hell?”

  I swallowed. “Yes.”

  “We don’t have time for this.” She shook her head. “Grab one of your bags and start packing.”

  “But why? Did you get fired? Is that why you’re home so early?”

  Her jaw clenched for a small moment. “No, I didn’t get fired. I’m not in the mood to play twenty-one questions with you. Will you please just go to your room and start packing. I don’t know when they’ll show up, but I want to be far from here when they do!”

  My hands rested atop my hips. If she wanted me to follow along in her madness, she was going to have to give me some sort of reason or explanation. “I’ll pack as soon as you tell me who you think is coming to our home.”

  She groaned. “Zuri, we don’t have time for this.”

  “The longer you keep refusing to say anything, the longer I’m going to stand here.”

  “The reason,” she began through gritted teeth, “I’m avoiding an explanation is because the time we have right now needs to be spent getting everything in the car and getting out of here. Once, we’re on the road, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Tell me now. I deserve to know. Especially since you said the police wouldn’t be of any assistance.”

  My imagination ran wild with me. My mother was an HR manager at a pharmaceutical company. The only reason that could lead her to avoid the police was because she had gotten mixed up in something illegal. Which was so unlike her, it almost made me bust out laughing just thinking about.

  “The Sightless Sons.” Her breath stifled at the end.

  My eyes squinted. “The who?”

  “The unsavory paramilitary agency in the hands’ world, Uncle Hank and Aunt Margot’s world,” she clarified.

  My jaw loosened. “Why would they come after you? Y
ou don’t live amongst them anymore.”

  “Because your Uncle Hank told them where we were—well, he told Blacksaw. He might as well have been speaking to the chairman himself.” She pressed an open hand to her chest and leaned forward, bracing herself upon the dresser with her freehand.

  “Mom?” I took a step forward.

  “I’m okay.” Her words stopped me. “It’s just stress and panic. You know how it gets sometimes.”

  I barely knew anything about her life before I was born, but I knew it was difficult and dark and had left deep scars. Sore shoulders and neck, grinding teeth, aching jaw, and every now then, intense pain in the chest—all hallmarks of how stress, fear, and anxiety had shredded her. If the symptoms were flaring up again, this was serious. Whoever these Sightless Sons were, they had a hold over my mom unlike any I had ever seen.

  “Sit down and rest, at least.” She didn’t like me near when the pain manifested, so I did the best I could from where I stood.

  “No, there isn’t time. We need to pack and leave.”

  I watched her in silence for a few seconds more as she regained herself and her hand left her chest. She slumped on the bed. Her blue eyes laid wide open, staring at the ceiling, as her black hair fanned out around her. Her chest rose and fell as she paced her breathing.

  I cleared my throat. “Mom, you’re worrying over nothing. Don’t you think if the Sightless Sons were going to come, they would have already? Uncle Hank told them we lived in North Carolina weeks ago.”

  “Oh, Zuri, you’re going to give me a heart attack.” My mom sat up. “They’ll come. I’ve… done things. I may not be a priority, but they’ll come.”

  My stomach twisted watching how distraught the entire situation made my mom. She didn’t deserve this. “So, where will we go then? I finish school in two weeks and need to be in my dorm by August.”

  My mom laughed, and the sound made me uneasy. It was a mix of a mocking scoff and fearful cackle. “Oh, no, sweetie. No, no, no. Duke isn’t an option anymore. We need to pack and hit the road.”

  The air grew suffocating without warning. An unexplainable heaviness rested on my shoulders, nearly toppling me over as I struggled to process what my mom had just said. Going to Duke was all I had worked for these last four years. We had spent so much time visiting the campus, meeting for interviews, and bolstering my application. Freshman year I severed my entire social circle in order to focus on academics and extra-curriculars. Now she was telling me it was all a wash?

  This was impossible. I refused to believe this was happening. Why was she ripping our lives apart over a hunch that the boogeyman was coming to get us?

  “So, what?” I asked, tight-lipped. “We just throw everything away and move to Mexico like a pair of criminals?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic—and leaving the country is absolutely out of the question. They’ll know as soon as we step foot across the border. We’ll be flagged and hunted down. Travel out of the country is illegal and extremely dangerous.”

  It explained why she had refused to let me attend the senior class trip to Italy. “I at least want to say goodbye to Uncle Hank and Aunt Margot.” I doubted she would go for it, but if I could get to them, I might be able to get more answers and information than the scare tactics my mother was feeding me. I wasn’t going to give up Duke over an unfounded fear, nor did my mom deserve to have her entire life flushed, too.

  She rose from the bed and returned to her suitcase. “There’s no time for that. We pack tonight, I’ll need to go into office tomorrow and tie any loose ends, and then we’re out of here. I’ll pick you up from school.”

  “Alright,” I answered, but I didn’t have any intentions of following through. I was forging plans of my own.

  Chapter Three

  I stared at the block phone before me as it rested on the wood-panel tabletop. Its black and grey hardshell was a testament to its status as a technological relic. The screen was barely bigger than a quarter, and its black, rubbery buttons filled the bottom half. It was ugly, impossible to fit inside a pocket, and my lifeline.

  “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting for too long. Is everything alright?” Uncle Hank said as he sat down at the booth across from me. His dark bushy eyebrows wormed together with concern. “I came as soon as you called, but travel around here is a bit difficult for me.”

  I shook my head. “No, I haven’t been here for long.” I held up the phone. “I’m just relieved this thing worked and the message went through.”

  He smiled, revealing a wide row of teeth. “I’m surprised you still have that. I remember the day when your mother came and told me she was going to give it to you. You were only five years old.”

  It was only to be used in case of emergencies. “I know.” It was the key to circumventing my mother’s panicked plans.

  “Anyways, you still haven’t answered my question: is everything alright?” His blue eyes flicked to the empty space at my side. “Did something happen to your mom?”

  “Yes and no.” I slid the old phone to the side of the table. “Neither one of us is hurt or in the hospital, but my mom is, well… losing her mind.”

  I told him all the things I had seen and heard yesterday. It was difficult to relive. My mother’s face haunted me. Her worry and sadness hit me harder than the loss of my future. She was my rock and idol, the epitome of strength in my eyes, and to see her reduced to nothingness in the span of a single day crushed me.

  Uncle Hank sighed, shaking his head as I finished my story. “I know it may seem like an overreaction from your end, but if she thinks the Sightless Sons are tracking her down, I can understand why she’s doing what she’s doing.”

  His words pelted all of my expectations, drawing big holes in what I believed to be the truth. “I wasn’t… So, you think we should run, too?”

  “No, I don’t. She’s under the impression that Blacksaw has been reined in by the party, but that’s not true. She’s been out of the world for nearly twenty years now.”

  I sat forward. “She told me she left while I was still a baby. Was I not born there?”

  “No, I meant twenty lunar years,” Uncle Hank said. “The point is, Blacksaw hasn’t been captured by the party, yet. They’ll have to wait for Luella to roll over dead before they sink their talons into that school.”

  “Then, what’s the big deal? If you’re certain that the Sightless Sons aren’t coming after us, why won’t she believe you?”

  Uncle Hank’s gaze slipped down from my eyes and met the cold, hard table. Guilt washed over his face as his hand raked through his long, dark silvery hair. “Your mother has been through a lot, Zuri.”

  “I know,” I sighed. “She tells me all the time. But she never tells me what exactly happened.”

  He opened his mouth to speak but shut it. His manicured fingers played with his lips as hesitation silenced him.

  “What is it?” For a big man, Uncle Hank could be such a timid kitten. You had to push to get anything out of him that he believed could be the slightest bit controversial.

  “I don’t know if Zeineb never explained things to you because she wasn’t ready or if she simply didn’t want you to find out the truth about the family. But I’m beginning to think that remaining silent on the matter is causing more harm.”

  I was desperate for him to talk. All my life, this had been the big secret. I had tried many times to coax the truth out of my mom but she never let anything slip. Uncle Hank’s big announcement at Sunday brunch had foiled all her work. This was the closest I’d come to pulling back the curtain.

  He continued. “You are struggling to do as she wishes because she won’t explain where she’s coming from. And she won’t explain where she’s coming from because she doesn’t want you to know more than you already do.”

  “Exactly, she simply wants me to continue blindly following her, and I can’t do that anymore.”

  I couldn’t stand aside as she continued to suffer. I had spent years
watching my mother endure anxiety attacks and nervous breakdowns. I naively assumed it was work that stoked her stress, and she assured me that maintaining a safe and stable routine would keep her ailments at bay. What she proposed yesterday was the exact opposite of safe and stable, and the toll it took it was plain to see.

  “I want to help,” I said. “But I can only do so if you let me in.”

  He nodded. “I think it’s time.”

  My lungs pressed against my ribs as I drew in a long breath of air. Curiosity made my stomach flutter. My uncle had handed me the loose thread of a secret on Sunday, and now I was pulling hard, unraveling the entire thing.

  Uncle Hank cleared his throat. “So, I think the first thing you need to understand,” he began with a quake in his voice, “is that in our world—the world of the blackhands and whitehands—we live by a different set of rules and standards and culture. To put it simply, it can be aggressive towards individuals society deems unfavorable. Your mother is a flup. For as long as I can remember, there’s been a bit of hostility towards them, but about twenty-five years ago, things changed. The party began to actively pursue steps to further… segregate them.”

  He paused, steadying his breathing. Uncle Hank was upset. He was going behind my mother’s back, and that single act shattered him. Family was an important and respected facet of his life, but I hadn’t known just how far that loyalty ran until now.

  When he had gathered himself, he pressed on. “On Zeineb’s nineteenth birthday, she got her hands unlocked and we sent her off to Blacksaw. Within the first week, they knew, and she was subsequently sent back home. The chancellor of the university, Luella Day, agreed to keep her lips sealed about the matter, and Zeineb told her friends she was coming home in order to manage the household. Hate towards flups was growing, and it was too dangerous to come out at the time.” He took a sip from my water, wetting his lips. “She managed to carry on for years like this until she got pregnant and went in for her first medical exam. The doctor recognized she was flup right away. You see,”—he rubbed the back of his leather-covered hands—“the ink tends to have an iridescent sheen when you’re a hand but remains flat black or white if you’re a flup. It’s harder to tell with black ink, but she got caught.”