Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Things That Wait in My Hand
Seven small things of a gone man stay in Dora Kersey's hand because setting them down would mean explaining them, and the coat they came from keeps her palm warm about it.
- perspective: close-third
If she sets them down, she will have to explain the setting down, and there is no explanation that fits a kitchen table. To set them down is to admit they are things; and they are not things; they are what her right hand is for. So she does not set them down. That is the whole of the discipline and it takes the whole of her.
In the morning she counts them over into her palm the way you count coin into a purse you do not mean to close. The tram token, rubbed blank on both faces. The pencil stub, sharpened at both ends, as he liked them; anything of his she keeps his way. Two kitchen matches. One bone shirt button. A twist of wax paper that held pins once and holds its fold now, folded round nothing, tidy about it. The cinema ticket gone the colour of weak tea: the Vogue, Row J, from the last picture they sat through together. That is six, and the seventh is the counting itself, which she performs even when the six are already in her hand, because a hand that has stopped counting is a hand that has put something down.
Ernest Kersey went out at half past three on the morning of the second of November to walk to the point and watch the light behave, and the town's records show him going; none of them show him arriving. No ferry list has him. No ward, no register, no boat-book. She stopped asking the town after the second winter, because asking makes the leaving official, and she was not the one to make it official. The making of it official belongs to offices, and the offices have strangely let the matter alone, which she has decided to find restful.
His grey raincoat hangs on the back of the kitchen chair, belt buckled, buttons done to the second from the top, the way he wore it in the house of an evening when the sea had got into him. Each morning at ten she goes to it and lays her right palm flat over the right-hand pocket, and the pocket is warm. Not radiator-warm; the fire is two foot off and throws left, and the chair is left of the fire, and she has stood in the draught from the door to be sure of the difference. It is hand-warm. It is kept-warm. It is the warmth of a pocket that has lately had a hand and a purpose in it.
The explanations she rehearses in order, morning by morning, the way you say the hours. Wool holds warmth, and that wool held his forty years, so it had warmth by the yard laid down. The fire is two foot off and the chair is in its throw. Her own palm brought the blood and left it there, the way a visitor leaves a shilling under the cup. Rehearsed in order, the three hold for a morning apiece, and a morning apiece is as much as a morning has ever needed of them.
Sometimes, of an afternoon, whichever pocket she leaves is cool and the far one warms, as though the warmth had crossed the wool to keep up with her hand. And at doorways she passes the six across from left hand to right and back again, wrist to wrist, riders changing horses, and the coat, which she passes nearest to, warms at her going by — she has stopped timing that against the season, because the seasons were not asked and would not swear to it.
The pockets, she decided in the third winter, are warm about it. That is the phrase and she has kept it. They do not hold the arrangement against her. They take the traffic of the six going out and coming home without complaint, without a seam showing, without the least fraying at either corner; a coat that is kept is a kept thing, and keeps. While she holds the things, the week stays jointed: the kettle finds its handle, the stairs are seven and known, the letters that come are for her name and not the harder one.
Once, at the turn of the small hours, she woke with her palm flat on the banister rail, where it does not go, and the rail warm under it for the length of her hand and no further. She has settled the banister as the house. The house is old and holds its heat badly; which is to say it holds it. She came down the dark stairs anyway, rail by rail, and stood in the kitchen till her own hand was the cold one, and the coat warmed the air between them without being asked to, and she counted the six, and the six were six.
The question she now carries, and it is heavier than all six and does not wear out with carrying, is this: while the coat hangs on its chair and the warmth keeps to her hand, who is keeping the far side of the wool — the man gone out at half past three to watch the light behave, the coat itself, or the pocket, which has always answered before; and if the far side ever plainly answered her, would she be able, after all these mornings, to go on not setting them down?