“Son of a goddamn bitch!”
From my perspective it all happened in slow motion. The nail was tiny, my thumb was large and I really suck at aiming a hammer. I should’ve known better. When my wife asked me to hang up our new family portrait I should’ve said no. At the very least I should’ve used a drill and a screw instead. Maybe one of those stick on Command Strips even. I had always been so uncoordinated and accident prone and anything that had to do with tools was a precarious situation for me.
“Is everything ok down there honey?” My wife, Sarah, called from upstairs with a note of concern in her voice. It wasn’t in my typical fashion to blurt out random obscenities when performing household tasks, but then again I very rarely performed household tasks so take that with a grain of salt. It didn’t help that the walls in this house were so paper thin. I could never hide anything from her.
“Fine honey,” this was an absolute lie as I’m sure she could infer from the audible pain in my voice. “Everything’s fine! Almost finished hanging the picture!”
I held my thumb tightly in my other hand. I was too afraid to look at it. Fuck me. Why had I swung so hard? I slowly loosened the death grip I had on the thing and peaked at the damage. It was already turning a shade of purple no body part should ever be. A crack ran parallel up my thumbnail and a small bead of blood was protruding out of it. “Yeah I’m definitely losing that nail,” I whispered to myself.
I could hear the familiar “tap tap tap” of our Pomeranian, Betsy, walking down the hallway and into the den where I was keeled over in pain. She always had a knack for knowing when either my wife or I was in distress and this whole thumb debacle was no different.
“Betsy I’m fine! Shoo!” I whispered to her while trying ever so desperately to save myself the embarrassment of having my wife discover that I’m as useless at hanging up a picture as I am at any number of domestic handy man chores. Betsy looked at me with her head tilted to the side and started to make a low growling sound before letting out several loud “yelps!”. I knew the jig was up at that point. I looked over to see Sarah standing in the doorway with her arms crossed and her brow furrowed. Her lips were pursed in a “what did you do this time?” expression.
“It’s nothing! Really it’s nothing! I just hit my thumb with the hammer and now it really, really hurts, but it’s fine. S-see?” I held my thumb up to her and she made a wincing noise and turned her head away from me in revulsion. “You know I hate looking at that sort of stuff! Is it broken? Do you think you should go to the hospital?” I considered this for a moment before dismissing the idea. What were they going to do? Bandage me up and give me some Tylenol? That’s nothing I couldn’t do for myself here at home and save $350.
“No no of course not! I’m fine. I’ll just take a couple of aspirin and put a Band-Aid on it and I’ll be right as rain in no time!” I could tell my half hearted smile wasn’t doing a very good job of convincing her, but she relented.
“Well okay, if you say so. I’m going to start cooking dinner. Oh and don’t worry about the picture. You just rest that thumb of yours!” She gave me a sly wink and I thought for a moment that maybe I was being overly dramatic. It was only a smashed thumb for Christ’s sake. But it just hurt so goddamn bad. I had never hit myself with a hammer before, but surely it wasn’t supposed to hurt this bad.
After dinner I offered to help with the dishes, but thank God Sarah insisted that I go upstairs and get some rest. I had taken four extra strength Tylenol and it didn’t so much as touch the pain I was experiencing in my left thumb.
“C’mon Betsy let’s go to bed girl.” She gave me a contented “yelp!” and followed me upstairs.
Up to that point in my life that was the worst and most fitful night of sleep I had ever had. The throbbing of my thumb permeated into my subconscious. I had strange fever dreams. Some were as benign as my hand turning into one giant thumb. Others were more malevolent. I had one where I repeatedly smashed myself in the head with a hammer. I alternated between the face and the claw and continued to pummel myself over and over again until the pain of my head superseded the pain of my thumb and I finally had relief.
I awoke in the middle of the night dripping in sweat. Betsy bolted upright at the foot of our bed. Her head was tilted in concern. “It’s okay girl go back to sleep,” I stammered. I stumbled into the bathroom. I was still half dazed from my nightmares. I flipped on the light and to my absolute horror noticed that the gauze I had wrapped my thumb in was completely soaked in blood. Steadily and nervously I peeled back the bandage while doing everything in my power as to not alert Sarah of my agony. She was such a light sleeper that I typically couldn’t get up to go pee in the middle of the night without her noticing.
The thumb had at least doubled in size since I’d last looked at it, but that was far from the most disturbing thing I noticed. The small crack in the nail from earlier was now a great fissure that was parting it into two equal halves. The nail was a darker shade of purple now with hues of sickly greens and yellows. I turned my hand to inspect the palm side of my thumb. A jagged and sinewy gash ran from the tip all the way down to the soft fleshy area at the base. It was weeping blood and pus and a clear-ish bile that smelled absolutely rancid. I vomited into the sink and almost blacked out from the sheer force of my stomach emptying its contents.
I ran the affected area underneath the running water of the sink while simultaneously ignoring the mess I had made in the basin. I let the water get as hot as I could stand and let it cleanse the sticky mess that covered my infected digit. The thumb began twitching and writhing in a pattern that was beyond my control. I applied a new bandage with more layers of gauze than the previous one and splinted the thumb to the rest of my hand with tape. Underneath all of the layers I could still feel it subtlety moving.
I opened the medicine cabinet and found an almost untouched bottle of hydrocodone that Sarah was prescribed earlier in the year for a tooth infection. I opened the lid and didn’t bother to count how many I dumped into my hand. I ran downstairs and grabbed a bottle of whisky to wash down the pills with. I stumbled to the couch in a daze, praying that I would fall asleep quickly. Betsy curled up into my lap before I plunged off the ledge into a dreamless sleep.
In the morning my head ached and my mouth was dry and metallic tasting, but by some miracle my thumb didn’t hurt anymore. For a brief moment I thought the worst was over. I wish I could’ve lived in that moment forever because that’s when I noticed all the blood that I was covered in. The bandage that I had applied to my hand in the middle of the night was shredded and had been discarded off the the side. Betsy was on the floor and her once snow-white fur caked and matted with red and brown gore. My left hand was attached firmly to her neck in a choking gesture.
Through the sounds of my sobs and wails and the squelching of Betsy’s ragged flesh I attempted to free her from the grip that my thumb had on her. It made a ripping sound as it detached from her lifeless body. A tuft of white fur was lodged into the gash. I carefully removed it and was horrified to find several rows of sharp teeth within the open wound. They jutted out at odd and asymmetrical angles. The teeth were attached to engorged flaps that convulsed open and shut rhythmically like a Venus flytrap from hell. In a move that was beyond my control the hand reflexively moved to my leg and the thumb bit down hard.
I scrambled out of the den. I ran past the happy picture of Sarah, Betsy and I that lay un-hung on the floor and made my way into the kitchen. I rummaged noisily through every drawer until I found the battery powered turkey carver. My left hand was of no use in my search as the teeth of my lamprey-mouthed thumb were firmly implanted into my upper thigh. They were tearing and gnawing through muscle and tendons and ripping deeper and deeper.
I placed the blade of the carver shakily in between the webbing of my pointer finger and thumb. I took three deep breaths and flipped the power button to “on”. With a low humming whir sound the tool came to life. The blade reverberated back and forth through the mottled skin of my diseased hand. Rust colored blood splattered onto the kitchen cabinets. The teeth of the thumb finally released from my thigh at that point. As I cut deeper the flaps of its mouth grew more and more violent, like the wings of a rabid bat flying around in the sunlight. A sound emerged from it that was not unlike a vinyl record being played backwards. I screamed in agony as I forced the electric blade deeper into my flesh. With a wet “pop” noise the thumb finally detached from my hand. Thick streams of blood ran down my arm and dripped into a puddle on the linoleum floor. I began feeling woozy as I hurriedly wrapped the stump with a dish towel and sealed it into place with packaging tape. The thumb was half heartedly twitching on the floor a few feet away from me. That’s the last thing I remember seeing before I lost consciousness.
I don’t know how long I was out for. Rays of morning sun were beginning to poke through the blinds of the kitchen windows. It was almost peaceful save for all the blood that now covered almost the entirety of the room. I strained my head to look down at my haphazardly field dressed wound. It was still bleeding, but not as much anymore thank God. The bite on my thigh also appeared to have stopped bleeding, but there was something shiny and white protruding out of it. I chose to ignore the possibility that my leg might be growing teeth now and instead tilted my head in the direction of my detached thumb. To my absolute terror it was no longer on the floor next to me. A trail of slime and blood ran from the thumb’s previous location to the French doors that opened into the living room. Panic took over as my thoughts raced to Sarah. “Sarah?!” I screamed. “Saraaaah??!” My screams turned to sobs and hiccuping wails.
Dazedly and shakily I stood up and on unsure footing hobbled my way in the direction the trail was leading. To my delight and horror it led to the open front door and disappeared into the field on the side of the house. “That means Sarah’s okay!” I said to myself. Holding my left hand close to chest I made my way up the stairs as quickly as possible. I paused at the closed door that led into our bedroom. I put my right hand on the knob, but before I turned it a terrible and intrusive thought entered my brain:
Why had Sarah never come down to investigate all the noise I had made this morning?