”...not being able to be specific.”, I meant. Whoops.
Short Story / Giving a Finger
The enemy's spies who have come to spy on us
must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away and
comfortably housed. Thus they will become converted
spies and available for our service.
~Sun Tzu, from “The Art of War.”
I am, regrettably, a nail biter. I don’t remember when I started. It’s been that long. I clipped my nails, to my memory, exactly once. I had just gotten braces, and for a week back in 7th grade, I was bleeding gums, not fingertips.
Oral fixations have this tendency to overcome adversity. We tried everything. Habanero fingernail polish. Gloves. Hypnosis. Sleep deprivation. None of it works. Even so, I am committed to quitting. Cold turkey. In fact, I haven’t had a single chew since the pain started. I’ve called for a truce. A ceasefire. The threat of biological warfare has brought me to my knees.
“Are you allergic to any medicines?”
“No.”
“Have you had unprotected sex? Shared a needle?”
“No. No.”
“Here’s a prescription for Augmentin. It’s an antibiotic that covers a broad spectrum of contagions. If you develop a rash, stop taking the pills immediately. If the swelling doesn’t subside by Monday, we’ll have you in to see the hand surgeon.”
I ask the doctor if we can lance it. They weren’t set up for that. No, he tells me, they don’t have any leeches. He doesn’t know if I’m making a joke. Neither do I, so I cough and ask him the worst-case scenario.
“Call this number if you start to get chills. If you notice any streaks up your arm, get yourself to a hospital,” the doctor tells me. “As long as the bacteria isn’t resistant, you won’t have to worry about worst-cases. Needless to say, keep your other fingers out of your mouth.”
The morning routine is slightly abridged. I skip brushing my teeth. I wipe my ass with my left hand. Everything else is coffee, cereal, and crosswords. That is, before the run in with the police officer.
Walking to the fridge, I call a friend. He’s in the medical field. Lets call him an EMT.
“Has the swelling spread?” he asks.
“A little bit, in my palm I think.”
“Do you see any streaks up your arm?”
“No…none of that. Except, my armpit is starting to get tender. I might have tweaked it at the gym. Can you tweak an armpit?”
“Do you have a straight razor? You’re going to need to get the pus out.”
I drag the tip of my pencil just above that swollen cuticle. I don’t know how it feels. Not normal. Not right. Not all that painful though. Not on the surface anyway. It’s starting to throb and I think of all those white blood cells jostling for a better seat.
The EMT tells me to stop with the hypochondriac routine. He tells me where to get a good razor [home depot], how to sterilize the blade [fire, rubbing alcohol], the right way to wash my hands [you’re on your own for this one]. I wonder if I should stop thinking I’m sick, or if I should run to the store for 100 proof vodka. I feel like I’m getting conflicting information here. I decide on the course of non-action. Let’s call it the Quaker approach to infection.
“I might hold off another day. It’s only been forty hours since I started the antibiotics.”
“That should be fine,” he tells me. “Give it another day.”
Our phone call ends.
I feel a little lightheaded. But I might have stood up too quickly. I drain the corners from the orange juice container and toss it in the trash. I realize my phone has a camera, and I can send pictures. The audio makes a sound like it’s a camera from the 1980’s, because cameras should sound like cameras. I send the EMT the picture.
It’s been ninety seconds. Vibrations, south. I reach into my pocket with the bad hand. On impact, I feel like I slammed my pinky in a car door. I drop the phone and it answers the call from the ground.
“I change my mind.” That’s how the EMT starts. No hello.
“Sorry, I didn’t catch that. Was juggling the phone.”
“That looks pretty nasty.”
Compared to what, I think.
“The infection has probably spread. Your lymph nodes are reacting to the pathogen. That’s why your armpit aches. Go to the Emergency Room. Do you have a fever? You probably shouldn’t drive yourself.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I don’t know, Officer. Considering the circumstances, I think I handled that pretty well.”
He looks over his shoulder at oncoming traffic, looks back at my driver’s license. “Mr. Mc - Cough, that maneuver was… interesting, to say the least.”
“I tried to stop. You saw the brake lights.” I told myself in the mirrored glasses. “She came out of nowhere.”
“Have you been drinking?”
The reflection in the glasses showed me everything but straight ahead. I told him no.
“On your cell phone?”
“Not when this happened, no.”
“What is it that you do for a living, Mr. Mc….?” He gives up on mispronouncing my name.
“I don’t mean to sound disrespectful. But could you make up your mind quickly. To answer your question. This moment, what I do for a living, is drive to the hospital. You can meet me there if you’d like any more time.” I show him my left hand as a control group. I show him what should have been its mirror image, in my right.
“Whoa man, that finger looks nasty.”
Compared to the control group.
“You should see the other guy,” I answer.
“Ha. Funny.” He says after a moment. “I’m going to follow you there.”
And so I earned a police escort. This, after he witnessed my critical thinking and fast twitch reflexes at work. Let me show you what he saw. There were six lanes of traffic, three going in my direction. I was to make a left a mile up the road. In the appropriate lane. The two right ones were jammed, waiting on the light. But not my lane. It was a free and easy going, as the technologically feminine voice on my GPS told me, all the way to the hospital. The speed limit on the road was 35 M.P.H. I wasn’t in much of a rush.
A middle-aged woman in a champagne colored tank in the far right parking lot of a lane, thinking over her options. She’s in a line of stopped cars. There’s a line of stopped cars between us as well. Wait out this light, this jam, she thinks. But only four or five cars were getting through at a time. Judging by the number of cars ahead of her, the length of each green light, corolla borealis maybe, she calculated how long it would be before she could continue on with her life. She decided on a deliberate and cross-traffic U-turn.
“I’ll nudge my nose into the middle northbound lane to block the cars coming my direction,” she must have thought, “Wait for an opening, a window, in the oncoming traffic, and bam, I won’t have to sit with my thoughts anymore.”
We’ve all been there. We’ve all got places to be. If there is unexpected construction on the highway at one A.M, I am not above driving over the grass median to backtrack. I am not above rolling stop signs. I am not above right on red. This lady, sitting high and upright, was above plenty.
I couldn’t see her or her vehicle, not yet. The Septa bus blocked the sight lines. Common driving sense tells you, if you can’t see where cars would be coming from, you have to assume they are coming. Common sense exits the Range Rover. She was worrying on picking up the candy, or grabbing a last second tinker bell costume, on her way to autism charity work. Maybe she needed cider, some pumpkin spice… maybe she had the pie dough resting, didn’t want the yeast to glutton itself to death. Maybe she was drunk.
Back to that window. She inched out. Saw it closing. Changed her mind. Stopped. Changed her mind back. But she looked right, not left. At the break in riverflow traffic, not at me. Went. Stopped dead, looking now. Middle aged. Offwhite turtleneck. Vest. Gray hair dyed immature strawberry. See the brake lights I spoke about. See me picturing the letter T – made of cars –becoming a crucifix.
Two choices. Broadside the turtleneck? Clean up in the center aisle. Or take my chances with the window. Brake or hit the accelerator. Hand over hand over hand, ten and two rotates counterclockwise. Tires lose their grip, so I relax the angle. Halfway between hydroplane and flipped the eff over. Knuckles stereotypically white flush with color. Well, most of them. In the previously far shoulder, I face the direction the Range Rover intended. The window closed behind me. My hands shake from the adrenalin. The finger that should be hitting delete or depressing the shift key, instead, is leaking autumn humors into the lap of my jeans. A police officer taps on my window.
My temperature is up and the nurse is offering me painkillers. Yes, please. She asks what I do for a living. She’s light-skinned with big freckles through all the tones of tan. I like her. Even as she stabs my arm, I wonder how old she is. She says something about finding a vein. Is she married? Takes another poke lower down my arm. Has a kid in high school. Finds it. Her daughter dated this kid I coached. I read her nametag and forget doing so. I like her. She doesn’t hurt at all.
The nurse takes a step back. Now, Dr. Mara tends to my finger. Sweet Dr. Mara. Her head seems a little large for her body, but she’s gorgeous. I won’t remember any particulars other than that. These drugs are great. Morphine goggles.
She asks if I work where my hands are always wet. Tinea manuum. Who I’ve touched. Herpetic whitlow. Did I have a pet? Staphlyococcus Aureus. She’s putting together a patient history. Deductive reasoning. Embarrassed, almost, I tell her I bite my nails. Well used to. I just quit.
I babble on like I’m drunk, like I’ve been slipped a mickey, like I can’t feel any pain. “When I come back, we’re going to drain that finger,” says Dr. Mara.
“Wait, wait” I say, and she turns, and I take a moment before I know what I’m going to say. “I forget.”
The human hand is not designed for efficient circulation. It’s built to grab and manipulate. Push and pull and touch and build. This dexterity has its tradeoffs. That’s why the hands are the first things to go cold in the wintertime. High on nerves. Low on capillaries. As a counterpoint, look at the circulation in your head. The brain takes something like 40% of the oxygenated blood from the lungs. First dibs. Picture a small cut below your left eye. How it pours. How the iron oxide fills your nostrils so you taste rust before anything red reaches your lips. How the blood clings to those tiny hairs on the cheek, reluctant to fall. Picture that same cut just below your fingernail. Picture yourself thinking nothing of it.
But modern medicine teaches us this is wrong. Stop everything. Disinfect. Pictorial directives on how to wash your hands. Antibacterial soap. Flu shots. Gingko Biloba. Hydrogen Peroxide. Innoculating your kid with his best friend’s chicken pox. The invisible guiding our actions. Cell phone reception. Gravity. St. John’s Wort. Compound Interest. Love. Montezuma’s revenge. M.R.S.A. Mumps. Run and hide. The scarlet letter stood for adultery. See it stand for A.I.D.S. Google search “walls of Jericho.” Find What: Trumpet. Replace With: Vibrio cholerae. Wiki Samson. Read how he slew an entire army with his bare hands. Disregard the parts about his hair. Samson was a walking small pox blanket. A carrier who didn’t show signs of the disease. Viruses. Tiny parasites. Faith in the invisible. Faith in the minute. Airborne toxic event. Divine and invisible wind.
So my hand becomes infected. So much depends on a red right pinky. Swollen, its some Dali representation of the phallic macabre. Then its white, the pus has encapsulated. Think a pimple. Think an individual cell of bubble wrapping. That’s encapsulation. The human body’s trench warfare solution to bacterial imperialism. We can’t push you out, but we’ll hold you fast. Keep the infection localized. Until something breaks. Until someone drops the mustard gas.
You know your trench has failed when the fever starts. The lymph nodes swell. Red streaks creep up one extremity and down the next. Like poison ivy. But in rows. Like sunburn through Venetian blinds. That’s an antibiotic resistant infection. Exactly. Burning. Look for shade.
And there’s the thirst. Your body is an automobile. The faster you drive it, the more you need to gas it up. Running a temperature of 101 for a few hours, you’re sweating like you’re in a spinning class. That’s your body, revving and revving and revving. Pistons going a thousand miles a minute, even though the wheels aren’t turning. For a real high, try some ice-cold orange juice when your thermometer reaches 101.5. You’ll never taste anything better. It’s like nitrous oxide, for the boost you feel. You’ll almost feel better, for a minute or two. Then, you get off the phone with the EMT, before you hit 102 Fahrenheit. Before you almost hit the Range Rover. Before you almost get a reckless driving ticket. Before you get the morphine. Before they start cutting into your hand. Before you know if the fever is ever going down.
Cutting. Bloodletting is how Thomas Jefferson dealt with infection. Modern medicine calls it Phlebotomy. Or that’s what the Internet says modern medicine calls it. Two burning pinpricks later and my hand is numb like I’m scraping the windshield of frost. The morphine doing its thing, and still I feel every stroke from Sweet Mara’s disinfected steel. Too much college I guess. Tolerance has a way of overcoming intentions.
I turn my head. My toes shoot out past the end of the bed. I steel my nerves in the grip of the railing to my left, but still she’s at it.
“I thought we’d be able to just go above the cuticle. But it looks like we’re going to have to go under the nail as well.”
“Doctor…”
“Yes?”
“Will I ever hand model again.”
This time she knows I’m kidding and if I remember how she looks I’ll tell you how her teeth gleamed when she laughed.
I ask for something to bear down on when she goes at me again.
“Wait a second. You felt all that?”
I look at the blood and bile soaked gauze on the sheet on my lap and tell her no, not all of it. But enough that I want something to bite into. Something that’s not the inside of my cheek. “We’re not at the limit for the local anesthetic yet, I could give you more.”
“God bless opiate receptors,” I say. Mara looks at me cross-eyed. Asks me what I do for a living.
“I did a project on endorphins in 7th grade.”
She digs a cut between my fingertip and the nail, and this time I watch. More gauze. Less pain. All that TV must have desensitized me.
But I’m okay now, and the nutritionist (hospital waitress dressed in organ grinder reds) asks if I’ve filled out my breakfast menu. The Salisbury steak is still on the tray, as was the roast beef before it, and the scallion quiche before that. The pudding bowl, I’ve licked clean for five straight meals. They make me pee in a Tupperware container designed for the purpose. They read god knows what in the color and quantity.
“Do you have a pen?” I ask her, but I’m hoping she doesn’t look in the waters and see a brandy tinted version of herself before she drowns. “I want to fill out the menu.”
She hands me a mini golf nub of a pencil. I circle oatmeal. I circle banana. I circle orange juice but then cross it out and circle milk. I am just now realizing I have a choice in the food that I’ll not be able to eat. It’s not that I am not hungry. I have standards. I’ll pass on the government stroganoff and the Salisbury ration. Stick to staples. Grains, dairy, potassium. Not exactly a man’s first choice for his last meal. More like a man that will never bite into hospital quiche again. Oatmeal tastes bad no matter where you eat it.
Sweet Dr. Mara turns into nurses with names like Dottie and Midge. Then they become a doctor that small talks about “his boy scout troop” without mentioning “his kid.” Weird, right? Parents should attend every meeting with their sons. But it’s terrible that this healer - this life long volunteer - has a stigma attached to his passions. It only takes one pedophile to ruin it for the rest of the bunch. It only takes one amoeba to ruin a Mexican vacation. That doesn’t make all amoebas bad. But we’re still going to use the bottled water to rinse after brushing.
Dr. Amoeba has his hand gloved in latex, and he’s trailed by two med students. One, stereotypically, Asian. I don’t know if I should call them doctor or not. Dr. Ameoba has his hand in my armpit, and he’s showing them how to prod me as hard as they can without rupturing their own protective hand wear. I think about making a joke about condoms. But Chlamydia is no laughing matter, and the nutritionist is about to leave.
“Hey,” I tell her, “You forgot your pencil.”
“You keep it,” the nutritionist says, in a friendly tone but it comes too quickly. Then I think about quarantines and plagues and containment. Then I try to remember the last person to shake my hand. The last person to contact me without barriers of gauze and rubber and plastic. I can’t recall. What I’m thinking though, is about that sheet the Hasids use to have sex with, the one with the glory hole in the middle. Never mind the Internet tells me this is an urban myth. And I look at the I.V. pumping me full of anticoagulants, antibiotics, and antiperspirants for all I know, and then I make the connection from the one to the other. I think about breaking the pencil but its too small and I can’t get any leverage so I just drop it to the floor.
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carolarocks reviewed Version 1 -
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Kind of confusing at times, but it fits the story and character and we, the reader, eventually figure parts out. Some are still in the shadow. I think you should give some clues about what goes on at the beginning but not to explicit.
I like your style, though i wish you’d use more commas in certain points. Oh, and somewhere around page eight i got bored, but after i passed it, it got better.
I loved the ending, i wasn’t sure what to expect but what you created fits. It just does.
Good Luck!
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jelissa reviewed Version 1 -
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This story just didn’t sit right with me. There wasn’t really anything to draw you in or to relate to the character. In addition things just seemed to be implied. You’re good at adding detail, like when you talk about the woman driver who was probably thinking about Halloween things, but the stage wasn’t set and it threw me for a loop. I had to reread it a few times before I got that it was Halloween.
TnD reviewed Version 1 -
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-That is, => This sentence seems rather out of place in the story.
-Let[‘]s => This sentence also seems rather out of place. Is there really a reason to be so secretive?
-The bracketed comments are also unnecessary. It detracts from the story.
-100 => one-hundred
-drain the corners => GREAT line.
-Officer => Thought the ‘friend’ was an EMT?
-oncoming traffic, => EH?! The character suddenly goes from their house, to getting pulled over? How? When? Why? There was no transition for this, which could’ve been as easy as, “After the conversation, I decided to take my chances and drive to the hospital…’ or something remotely more imaginative than that.
-I’m starting to get the feeling of the movie Memento, but the transitions aren’t as cut-and-paste. The spacing and differing conversations distract from that idea. For example, he earns a police escort, THEN gets in the accident?
-she thinks. => First-person narrator knows what another character is thinking?
-the eff over. => Either put the word in there, or just have ‘flipped over.’
-But modern… => This paragraph, while interesting, doesn’t really give anything to the story. It seems as though the author is trying to pass information along to the reader, in order to make a point.
-101 => Personal preference is to write it out. Either ‘one-oh-one’ or ‘a hundred and one’ As for the 101.5, you could just say, “half a degree more”
-again[?]”
-looks[,] I’ll
-nutritionist => He remembers what she looks like, but not what the nurse looks like? Also, her description is distracting being in parentheses.
-They read god… => “God knows what they read in…
-Again, he’s noticing the really small things (stereotypical Asian resident), but doesn’t remember other things?
-tone[,] but
-quarantines[,] plagues and => No need for the first ‘and’
-The ending felt like you just didn’t want to add anything else. I get the idea of what you were going for, but it just caught me off guard. The story seems dis-jointed in places, while the rest of it flows well. I think you may want to go through this again, trying to organize it better. Overall, I enjoyed it.
Thanks for sharing and good luck.
Vato reviewed Version 1 -
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Very creative, and very readible. Normally, I try to find things to help the author with clarity, or grammer. But this is the first one I’ve read that I wouldn’t make changes. The only thing that read weird was the sentence, “The morphine doing it’s thing, and I still feel every stoke from Dr. Mara’s disinfected steel.” Should an “is” be in the first phrase? If not, the phrase may serve the story better by being attached to the previous sentence. Your call.
Vato
B_HDouglas reviewed Version 1 -
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“Giving a Finger” is really good. You have devised sayings of your own, out of common things? Eg. “bacterial imperialism”, which are important in writing. Clever descriptions make for a very intricate story, coming from experience, and not too concerned with the practicality of the medical field, or things like worry. You give meaning beyond compare, to a dreadful situation. You turned a negative circumstance into a journey, thus one step above what ‘college did to desensitize you’ in the sight of blood. It all sounds true, I even believe Dr. Mara was good looking?
I was lost, like you it seemed, during the trip to the hospital, with the Range Rover, and window, and U Turn? It worked, though, since it seemed symbolic. It became fantasy like, like “what am I doing here, I’m sick, and what the heck is this person doing in my lane?” I would shorten that part, get to point. Also, I suggest identifying the problem earlier, but it works either way.
rhizome23 reviewed Version 1 -
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The tone reminded me of a light hearted “Diet Burrroughs”, and I don’t mean that as an insult at all. I’m guessing the intent was to present a metaphor about compulsive “self destructive” behavior leading to social quarantine and isolation. If that’s the case, I see where you were going with this but would encourage you to extend it. I have to admit that I didn’t see the point of the traffic scene outside of offering a reason for the rupturing of the infection and also didn’t understand the stylistic point of the sudden non linear presentation. I found the digressions more interesting than the actual story, to be honest. That said, it is by no means bad and you have a natural sense of dialogue and humor. I hope you find some of these comments useful and encouraging. I apologize for being able to be more specific.
Owl_Light reviewed Version 1 -
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excellent transition to the accident. made me sit up and pay attention. also made me have some expectation of a story but the significance of the pencil stub dropping on to the floor in the final sentence eluded me.
Nice unpretentious writing style which is very easy to follow.
Questions which need answering to improve your story.
Was the infection caused by the fingernail biting?
Is the narrator male or female?
The narrator does not change in any way during this story. It is important that the narrator changes in some way, eg changes their emotions or their aspirations or their health. Narrator starts off neutral with poorly finger and finishes neutral. Perhaps if you give them a mood or some aspect which changes then your story would have more impact. ie describe their growing fearfulness more.
FrakKevin reviewed Version 1 -
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like I’m scraping the windshield of frost.—PERFECT way to describe the feeling, really creative line. I instantly knew how his hand felt. I liked this even though there was A LOT of medical talk. I enjoyed the description of the characters. I did get lost around the car accident part, but other than that this was a comedy story. I didnt spot any errors or have anything bad to say about this. I thought it was good
oknapp reviewed Version 1 -
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he enemy’s spies who have come to spy on us. “Spies” and “spy” ruins the structure. How about, the enemy spies who come to observe or scrutinize us
”Oral fixations have this tendency to overcome adversity.” Woo. this is a large claim. Tell the reader how biting fingernails can do this. Writers really have to be careful when they make statements like these. They are open ended and are arguable. I would take this out.
We tried everything. Who is we? Please stay in one voice. You have addressed “we” and “i” you need to stay in first or third person.
This story is making me queasy.
No way would and EMT tell you to get a straight razor i have taken these first responder classes countless times and my daughter is an RN Take this out.
You have a wonderful way with words.Your descriptions are out of this world.
Why would you waste you talent on a piece like this. My nails are hurting just reading this. If this is the reaction you wanted then you got it. Nail biting often suggests deep psychological problems,especially to this extent. It is akin to cutting the skin. What i want to know is where the spy bit comes in at? You have thus far not addressed it. If it doesn’t belong take it out.
When a writer writes he must, first, consider his audience. Who will this interest? Secondly, what is the value of my prose? I won’t waste more of your credits because they are hard to come by. Look you are a proficient writer. Take this talent and write something worthy of it. Sandi
timongarretson reviewed Version 1 -
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If this were a true story it strikes me as being in a Reader’s Digest.
It is very solid and the story flows very well. Has a good pace.
I very much like the reference to the 7th grade at the start and the call back towards the end. It was a really strong way to make the story feel it goes full circle.
It didn’t seem like there was a very clear and strong conflict.
Unless I didn’t catch onto something it seems like the main character didn’t lose a finger but from what I got from the title and the “Art of War” passage I thought I being lead to believe his finger was going to have be removed. Take that as a neutral comment, just my perception.
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