Colin Hinckley

One morning I woke up and my left hand was gone. Not severed, not cut; no blood in the sheets, no viscera to be seen. Just a smooth stump and then an absence of hand. My first thought, of course, was that I was experiencing a very vivid dream and that upon shaking my stump a few times, closing my eyes, and rolling over in bed, I would snap awake and my hand would reappear. But this was not the case. And my hand remains absent.

I did my best to cope with it. I pored over medical texts and ancient ritualistic tomes, plumbed the depths of the Internet and even ruminated over religious works, but no plausible explanation presented itself to me. I went to my doctor, Dr. Amleth, who seemed utterly stymied and gave me no helpful recourse, save the suggestion of getting a prosthetic, which I did after the recurring questions from acquaintances and strangers alike proved too much for my patience. The prosthetic was a simple, passable beige that more or less matched my skin color. When I was fitted for it, Amleth patted me on the shoulder and assured me he could hardly tell the difference. He smiled and I knew he was relieved to put the matter behind him. He had been my doctor for years and had always been supportive, but the sudden disappearance of my hand had shaken him. It was clear that he was not keen to ruminate over it. And so he foisted the prosthetic on me as a sort of panacea and he sent me on my way. The thing itself was useless in the sense that it was merely aesthetic, but invaluable in that it kept me from the incessant gaze and inquiries of those with a more persistent sense of voyeurism. And after some time, a state of normalcy returned.

It wasn’t until one evening several months later, as I was sitting in my living room reading, that I began to reconsider my circumstances. I sat curled in my overstuffed, maroon armchair, a book of drawings by Doréor sitting in my lap, when a peculiar sound started emanating from my bedroom. I looked up from the illustration of Betram de Born and frowned toward my doorway. It was a low, pulsating thrumming, similar perhaps to the sound of a didgeridoo, but deeper and certainly more disconcerting. The sound put an alarming ache in the pit of my stomach and for several minutes, I did not move. My hand remained poised over the corner of the page, about to turn; and after a few moments, I realized the stump beneath my latex and plastic replacement was tingling unpleasantly. When I became aware of the sensation, I broke my stasis and undid the clasps holding the prosthetic in place and looked down at the spot where my left hand once was. It looked the same as ever, but the tingling sensation remained. I rubbed it vigorously with my right hand, but it did no good. I looked back in the direction of my room and, gathering my resolve, stood up and began to walk deeper into the pulse.

To read the rest of "The Absent Hand," buy the collection "Muffled Scream vol. 1 - Corner of the Eye."

Something draws Sam from his book, and he turns to the porthole. He gazes over the black sky, powdered with distant points of light and sees a small red dot in roughly the direction of Proxima Centauri. For a moment, he thinks it’s Mars. There are no other celestial bodies he can think of that emit a red light visible from this close to the Earth. But Mars is behind them, invisible from this side of the station. He presses the intercom button and clears his throat.

“Monk, you near a window?” He clears the channel and listens to static, waiting. After a moment, from the crackling:

“Yuh, why?”

“Could you take peek near Proxima Centauri, tell me what you see?” Again, static. Then, he hears the cluck of Monk’s tongue.

“The red fella?” he asks.

“Yeah, what do you think that is?”

To read the rest of "Red Shift," buy the collection Shattered Space from Tacitus Publishing.

Near the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, a viper rests on a rock, bathing in the cold Russian sun. It flits its tongue lackadaisically. It is a Vipera Kaznakovi, more commonly known as a Caucasus Viper. But with its minimal intelligence, it knows itself by another name. To translate into English, the closest approximation would be “Lo.” Though his intelligence is minimal, it exceeds any other snake or reptile by a staggering amount. He is aware of himself and aware of his intelligence. Lo is disquieted by his awareness. He is vaguely aware that his intellect supersedes that of anything or anyone he has ever known.

He lifts his head to the sky. A sensation ripples through his long, slender body. He does not know it, but he is experiencing longing. The sky is perfectly blue and seems to Lo impossibly infinite and grotesque. He coils himself tighter, disturbed, bewildered. He holds a distant memory of himself flitting through the undergrowth, chasing a small rodent, blissfully oblivious of anything but a hunger that pulsed through his body.

To read the rest of "Lo" click here