Buried under the snow, a hand. It crawled with fingertips as black as the hidden pavement. The man arising. The sun glaring on his home in the snow, turning it back into water. A car and then a crowd pass by and the man sits naked with his hand outstretched. Scars spiral up the muscles of his blue veined forearm--a tale he’d rather not tell and no one asks him anyway. There was a woman once, passing by she dropped a red kopeck in his hand and he thanked her. Such a strange piercing stare in her ice blue eyes bloodshot with last night’s memories still playing like a video tape across her retinas. Was he there? No, he was buried deep where no one could find him, and now his house was gone. He’d make another when the weather turned. Until then, he would sit with his hand outstretched and waiting. Maybe someone would take it.
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Steven Belledin
Flash Fiction by Lauren Dostal
Can he see? Can he see this helpless thing that I have become? I lay my arm on the table between us. I know what he wants. Not amputation but extraction. The table is cold. My arm burns hot where it swells under the light. Silently he leans forward, feeling, prodding. I scream with pain. "Oh God!" I have forgotten. The blade flashes in the light as it plunges deep into my skin. Shocked white, the walls raise up from inside my flesh. Droplets mark the paths of capillaries where they flow into the well he has created. He is searching for it. His grey bristle eyebrows cast a shadow over the pits of his eyes and I see through to his skull, to the bones we all share. I feel him tugging. Then just like a knife slicing through soft butter, it slides out. He holds it glinting in the light. A razor blade, the tiny letters etched upon its side read "drink me". He casts it back into a jar, and when I raise my eyes I see a thousand more lining the wall, filled to overflowing with extracted pasts. I meet his stare, and for once he smiles.
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