There is a finger, a human finger in the schoolyard grass, and it has no body.
It is picked up by a girl. A quiet girl who cares a lot and does her caring quietly. This girl is Little Jessie Wylan, and she stows the finger in her knapsack, then brings it home with her. When she goes to retrieve the memento from her bag, however, it isn’t a finger that she finds. It’s a hand.
Eddie the Exterminator is a god-fearing man. When a familiar call about ceiling mice leads to his discovery of a human arm in the attic of the Wylan Residence, he bends to his higher orders; police, in this case.
Inspector Madeline Rampling is known as Maddy to her colleagues. To herself, she swears quietly, surveying the arm in the attic. To appear incompetent to her colleagues is her greatest fear. “You said it terminated at the elbow,” she says to the Exterminator. (She hadn’t brought a big enough bag.) “It had,” says Eddie. Maddy notes his wide, religious eyes.
She finds a bigger bag, and in the back of her squad car, the arm outgrows it.
In a sterile lab, Yusuf Tiryaki of Forensics has the arm laid upon a table, and presses scalpel to flesh. His thoughts are of baseball. While he is so distracted, the arm, unannounced, twitches. The fingers, less one, close to a fist. Foul balls are replaced with the white of panic.
Yusuf drops the scalpel. The arm rolls off the table. Yusuf bolts for the door, trips, and on the ground makes guttural sounds as the arm skitters on finger-legs up Yusuf’s chest and Yusuf is flailing and the arm is holding tight and the arm deftly plucks Yusuf’s ID card from his chest pocket and is off down the hall.
An hour later, Captain Daniels listens to a story. Little Jessie Wylan begins it, Eddie and the Inspector Maddy pick up where he leaves off, and when the story is finished the Captain of Police folds his hands behind his back and stalks to his window. He watches the building across the street. Inside it, Yusuf of Forensics claims a monster is loose.
Daniels is a logical man. And yet, four testimonies paint a compelling, illogical picture.
Daniels makes a call.
*
Cops infiltrate Forensics. Guns are held muzzle up beside doorways, threats echo, and packs of police near their target but don’t know it.
Outside, Eddie the Exterminator preaches of a Second Coming, drawing listeners. Little Jessie Wylan peers worriedly through binoculars and is asked what she sees. Yusuf of Forensics tries not to think of his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Thinks of them. Shudders.
Captain Daniels prowls the sidewalk, refusing to pass judgement too early, eyes inward, while Inspector Maddy Rampling’s eyes face outwards. She watches the multiplying crowd. She employs her caution tape.
*
On the lowest floor of Forensics, a shoulder grows a chest. When booted footsteps near, the chest braves movement, wiggling up a vent. On the rooftop of Forensics the torso and arm keep low, and against a low wall a trio of appendages — glutes, genitals, thighs — are cultivated. As the calves begin to knit, the Flesh grabs hold of a fire escape. Body is lowered tentatively to dirty stairs.
Then an officer shouts.
Eyes turn.
It has been sighted!
Pandemonium. Facts ripple, opinion constructively interferes. Harmless! Evil! Monster! Jesus! Tape stretches, rips.
The question is this: is this It a monster?
Someone rushes the stairs, drags the Truncated Form down with them. Just what Madeline worried would happen happens. She pushes through the roiling crowd, sees the Organism cower on stumps of leg, then fall. She’d sworn an oath to protect, and she’d meant it, but where was the limit?
Then a gun fires, bringing stillness. The Limbs And That Attached sit slumped against a wall, faced by a firing squad, backed by riot police. “Will the Creature-Thing not,” Captain Daniels shouts, “answer our questions for us? Is its resolution not sharpening?
“Look!”
He points, and the people turn. Huddled on the ground, the Anatomy sprouts heels.
“Let’s see,” says the Captain, “what comes.”
*
Little Jessie and the Inspector and the Others, they watch. Submerged inside the throng.
The throng, in turn, is submerged inside of them. The throng contains an arcane heat. What is an oath or an urge to protect or a god compared to such immediacy? Unity has no dissent. And whose hands are whose?
The crowd is not still. Watching never is.
*
On pavement, toes flesh themselves out. Feet step into the world, bright and shiny. A forearm shores, an elbow patches, a bicep caps. The consensus of the town is that sufficient information could produce a decision. Keen eyes watch shoulders intricately knit, watch clavicles begin a crowning act…
Then, a gasp from the chorus; the top of the chest-crater smoothes into a flat and featureless plain. There’s no cavity, no neck. There’s nothing higher left to build.
The Person sits back against the wall, utterly relaxed, utterly fulfilled. Tired from the journey. But whole.
Alas, the measure of all things, once said a man, is Man.
The headless crowd does not debate for long.
__________
Nicholas Schorn’s fiction is forthcoming in Crow & Cross Keys. They are a Clarion and a Tin House alum, an ex-engineer, a current barista, and a future corpse. You can find them on instagram @nicholas.schorn and Bluesky @schorn.bsky.social