Hands

Sometimes, it feels as though there is nothing but hands. As though they are all I have ever known. When they cloud my vision, fill my eyesight, purposely.
They were tea stained, in the beginning. A type of brown that you could just tell was not mere melanin, but more of a habit; I could almost see the bags being relieved of their liquid, the sugar added, could almost feel the warmth in my throat and mouth. I would imagine the hands became this way because of the vast hours spent staining paintings, making them look appropriately aged; not to deceive the viewer into believing that they were antique, but rather adding a certain finesse to the beauty of Black-Eyed Susans, or blue jays on a snow-laden branch.
They were beautiful, at first, the hands and the visions they brought.
After the tea stained fingers came those tainted by berries, the palms purple and deep red, bringing with them the scent of summer and the wafting scent of pies and jam, and the sting of thorns in bare feet, feet which I imagined were as equally shaded as the hands above them.
But a good thing cannot always last. The hands became paler, whiter, not the white of Caucasian flesh but that of the belly of a fish, a color I associated with death and terror, the nails growing into cat-like points that would lean toward me, threatening, beckoning, and I would lean forward, hypnotized, and they would tear at me. I knew they would. It was fate, almost a prophecy, but the scars would heal seconds later, the blood would dry clear as glue, and I was left sweating and cold, sometimes feeling my heart awaken from death.
There were paws, once. Great cougar paws, like a furred hand of God thrashing through the grass, through the air, and the black claws slicing through flesh like nothing, like nothing, and screaming is never an option with the scarred paws of a great beast pressing on your trachea, nor when you are in a crowded bus station waiting for the 52 downtown, and especially not when both are happening at once.
The later ones did not always have the pallor of a corpse or the claws of a monster; it is not always might and strength that steal the breath from lungs. Some made me vomit at first sight because of the detail that was taken in creating such malformed pieces: one in particular, I remember, was the hand of what appeared to be an elderly woman at first glance, merely mildly gnarled and the wrist arthritic, with blue-gray veins running beneath the surface. But the longer I looked, it seemed that some being was sculpting it before my eyes, forcing the veins up and up through the skin, turning them darker and darker blue, then finally the shiny black of obsidian; I saw the knuckles swell and bunch and redden as though humiliated and flushing; the fingernails turned ragged at the ends, the cuticles ripped from their beds, the fingertips stained a mix of phlegm yellow, nicotine brown and crimson, flattening; the palm cracked horridly, mild chapping turning to painful red cracks, which turned to layers of dermis bursting through the crevices, mingling with pus and blood; the arthritis nearly breaking the wrist, the pain causing it to writhe and bend into such positions never though imaginable by the owner of that wretched, wretched hand….
But the horrors of that day I could go on about forever, the way I vomited in the middle of an exam, how my fever spiked so suddenly no none could understand where the extra 6 degrees had come from, the hacking, raking cough I acquired the moment I was put under with sleeping pills, leading to blood in the esophagus and somehow, a fit of sneezing so hard it led to a deviated septum.
No one, no doctors or specialists or any sort of middle aged breeder with a degree could understand my symptoms, no one, no psychologists or therapists would listen or could understand, but I knew. I would describe the hands, draw them, practically wallpapered my hospital room with them; added the horrific detail to the things that came for me when no one was watching. I shaded the blacks of the rot under the nails, carefully lined them in ink and used the thinnest brushes to add the spatters of blood that framed each and every sketch.
"They aren't coming for you, love," they would tell me, soothing, and put a lozenge in my mouth for the cough which had raked my throat bloody. "They aren't real, pet," they'd say, and stick another needle in my pockmarked arm.
I was told it was an infection, the thing that caused my visions, my cough, my fever. That with the proper amount of antibiotics, bed rest, plenty of liquids, and an apparently long overdue chat with a long-term therapist, I would be back to myself, whole again.
But I knew. I knew the whole time, as they told me the lies they memorized from behind their white masks, that there was no infection.
I knew that the hands, those damned, damned hands, had come for me and only me, with a mission. The vomiting: the bubbling, seething hand of an ancient god, tickling my uvula. The fever: a thousand hands chasing me, slapping me, making my face burn and flush. The cough: fists racing up my windpipe, their calloused edges scraping my throat. And the nose: a cougar's paw, bloody and rough, beating me until I begged for death.
I know that I am impure, truly. Only the mind of one who is truly deranged could fathom such horrors as I have.  In old times, white was the shade of true evil; then truly, these ancient hands, these things of pagan origin of some sort, have seen the true colors within me and come to drive the force out, and make me black as the pure night from whence they came. I would have touched the fish-white palms of the dead man, washed the thistles and briars from angriest cougar's paw, would have even kissed the seeping fingers of the oldest hand.
Because I loved them in my own strange way, the hands; in the ice realm of the mental health ward, they became my anchors, a constant, like friends, petting my cheek, braiding the mussed hairs that remained on my scalp after they had torn them out for me.  They would leave traces of themselves, scrapes on ears and dried bits of pus upon waking. I longed for them, loved the warmth their presence brought me. I worshipped them, examined them intimately, kissing the crevices and imprints that absorbed my evil and returned to me only good.
I know that I am not long for this place. The hands visited me, rubbing their callouses together, the rustling turning to whispers in a language only we can understand. They explained to me, as I gently probed their cracks and bruises, that I am soon to be clean. I am nearly all black, and those that watch us all sent them as harbingers of great news: soon, I will be free. I have but one more task, and divinity will be reached, and there will be nothing but hands.
I have slipped a dinner knife into the spine of the Bible I am forced to read by those who call themselves my guardians.
I do not recognize them.
On the Anointed Day, I will rid myself of these hands, from the elbow down, and offer them up to those who watch over us. And then- then the visions will cease, and I will be free.