Digits (1768 words)
It was that fucking guy with the long fingers. Him and his freak brother.
Those two always gave Jack the creeps. One of them, with the fingers of his left hand cut off at the middle joints, his little stubs like pigs-in-a-blanket, like a little baby hand blown up to man-size; the other's right hand like spider legs, with his brother's amputations dangling there, attached by gnarled scars.
Fucking weirdos.
And there they were now, just watching him, staring at him with those dead eyes of theirs. Like ink wells; Jack's reflection dipping deep, deep.
Jack sank back into the plush red cushion and fingered the cold gold buttons in the lounge chair's stitching.
"You want to leave, then?" asked Mr. Hicks. He leaned forward and puckered his lips, his ass bumping into the arm rest of his cedar chair. The floor wheezed beneath it with the sad drawl of a scrape.
"I want," Jack began, clearing his throat, "I want my uh, my..." he trailed off, thoughts wobbling.
"You want your finger back," said Hicks.
Mr. Charles Alrick Hicks. With his dress shirt two sizes too small, his neck rawed red from rubbing the collar; him, sitting there, clean-shaven, hair brushed and shaped immaculately -- what a good old boy, thought Jack. What a goddamn good old, shit eating American bureaucrat. Jack cradled the gauze on his right hand where his pinky used to be. His knuckle tingled.
"Yeah."
Hicks sighed. "You know, Jack, you got a good thing going here."
Jack was silent.
"I ain't shitting you. You do, what? You do almost nothing here. You sit around like the rest of the shit brains -- no offense to you two," Hicks laughed, turning to the brothers. "... And you reap the benefits that I," he laughed again, "bestow upon you. You do nothing. You sit back and put your mind in some other place. You imagine, Jack, that I am taking advantage of you. I know. I've heard it before. But who's the one cashing the check?"
The long-fingered brother yawned.
Jack could feel his eyes dampen, but he didn't know why. He looked at the dirt-colored wallpaper peeling off the office walls, the two lamps on the far end of the room, behind Hicks (only one of them worked), spilling out dirt-colored light. He looked at the rug in the middle of the room: mauve or red or burgundy, tough to tell beneath the wear and the stains. In one corner was a clump of something black: gum, or tar.
The two brothers kept staring at him. He'd never talked to them before, only seen them around. Not walking. They were, the two of them, so tall and lanky and languid in their motions that it was unfair to say they walked. They floated. Both of them, always together. Silent. Watching.
They sat now on two wooden chairs, different seats but somehow resembling a bench with them side by side. Even now Jack thought they looked out of place. Off the ground, hovering, in some way, chemically or pathologically, far off.
"I do," Jack finally answered. Charles Hicks nodded at him, sad in way, as if feeling sorry for a mentally handicapped child.
"Yes," Hicks started. "It's you. I work for what I have. I have worked for it: my whole life! And I still do. I don't sit around and take advantage of the --" he cupped his hand in the air, percolating the word, "-- generosity of others."
Generosity! though Jack, and he wanted to say it, wanted to spit it back in Hicks' face, but instead he puked up a kind of choked gurgle.
"What?" asked Hicks. "Do you disagree?" He patted the bulging front of his shirt, and straightened his tie. "Let me ask you this: what do you give back? What do you provide for your community? For the world?"
Jack had no answer for this at all. He squeezed his eyes and tried to think, could feel his ribs tightening on his soft insides, but his mind, his mind was all blank.
"You give nothing!" Hicks chuckled, his hands raised, pleading, as if it was the most obvious thing. "That's why you're here! That's why you keep coming back!"
"Maybe I don't. But I'd like to." Jack mumbled, unsure of what point he was trying to make.
Hicks nodded at him, and his eyes nodded too.
"Of course. Of course you would."
Jack looked again at the brothers, and they looked back, but farther than Jack, through him and beyond. They weren't listening, he could tell; they were there, but not there, in another world, like how girls would get in the red room during their first few days at Hicks' place, after mixing crystal and smack. Sometimes after smoking those cigarettes the regulars gave them, which, Jack knew now, had heroin mixed with the tobacco.
Sometimes they got there without any drugs at all, after watching someone get cut.
That's how the brothers were now. Jack thought, maybe that's how they've always been. He couldn't remember. His own thoughts were all haze.
"You know something? You're not the first," Hicks wagged his finger. "How could you be? And you won't be the last. But I'll tell you something else." He leaned over the desk, to get closer to Jack, "You'll be back. Everyone comes back. You know why? Guess."
Jack wanted to say, fuck you. It's my own fucking finger you fat shit. It's not only my property -- it's ME. What he said instead was, "I know why."
Hicks smiled at him and relaxed.
"Sometimes," he started, noisily reaching for something in his desk, "I like to keep souvenirs. Not everyone wants their uh, pieces and parts back." He set something down on his desk, hard, with his hand still wrapped around it.
"But you, you aren't as," (unfolding his hand), "liberal."
On the desk stood a small jar, the bottom filled with ice. On the glass were a few hardered streaks of blood, thinned, Jack guessed, by water from the melting ice. He recognized his pinky, leaning inside it like a stick for a bug.
Hicks rattled the jar.
"These things cost, Jack. Not everything can be a charity."
"But I don't have --"
"I know the drill," Hicks waved in dismissal. "Don't give me that bull. Get a job. This is what I mean! Relying on me, the man, whatever. Look at this," he held up the jar. "Look at how -- small! Insignificant the thing is. And tell me how much I paid you, just to have this cut."
Jack leapt for the jar; almost instantly, the arm of the stub-fingered brother swung like a whip against his chest. He collapsed back into his chair, winded, with the tall man looming over him.
"You see?" asked Hicks. "I told you when we first met, I told you to be sure you wanted to do this. We had a deal."
"I didn't... fucking... have a choice." Jack sputtered out.
"Everyone has a choice, Jack."
"It was... do this... or go hungry. Do this or die," Jack protested, catching his breath.
"I did it. I survived! I did fine without taking advantage of -- and excuse the irony here, I do have a sense of humor -- the bigger man."
Jack wheezed deep. The stub-fingered brother sat back down without turning; his eyes, like skewers, on Jack. Jack watched him and winced.
"I'll pay you," Jack said. "But you have to help me first. You have to get my finger put back on before," (he thinks of meat once he forgot -- he wished he didn't! what a waste, that food -- at the bottom of his fridge), "it goes bad."
"No," Hicks said, humorlessly. "Money first. I pay you first. You should do the same. It's only fair."
"But I can't!"
"Then I can't. We had a deal, a contract. Sorry."
Jack bit his lip, his eyes pinging like a typewriter, searching for something -- what was it -- something he read, heard, saw. And then:
"I'll go to the press."
"What?"
"I'll tell them what you do. Who you are!"
"Jack --"
"I saw it in the paper, you running for mayor."
Hicks assessed this man before him, who he'd thought only moments ago to be the mere shell of a man. A man suit, a skin sack slipped over a gibbering, vaguely man-shaped automaton. A kind of resentment, or respect, flinched in his heart.
"Sounds to me like killing the golden goose."
Jack didn't know what that meant, but he got the idea.
"And not just for you, but for everyone."
"Well?" Jack asked, not entirely sure what he was asking for.
"Well what?" said Hicks. "It's up to you. I'm not going to kidnap you, keep you here. I'm not going to chop you up and keep the parts. If you feel that strongly about it, go. It's in your hands."
Jack looked to the brothers, both inert.
"I'm a reasonable man, Jack."
"All I want is my pinky back."
Hicks shook his head. "I can't."
"Why not?"
"That's not the way I work." Hicks sighed. "You know the rules, Jack. You have until the ice is gone."
Jack stared at the jar and saw his finger in it shift over the melting ice, a run of water down the inside of the glass meeting another and pooling slightly at the bottom.
He thought of all the people who had given themselves up to Hicks, given up parts of themselves to humor him; he thought of the checks they received, small and large, depending on what they lost. This man, this whole, fat, man, with more money than God, sitting in a dingy office in near-dark, the only evidence in the whole place of a life outside, of a brighter world, a place where people could give without taking so much away. Hidden where he looked so obvious.
And he thought of the people who hadn't given themselves up yet, struggling to survive, and wondered then if their lives now weren't much the same.
"How about for a toe?" Jack asked. "You can have my little toe. Will that do? Like a trade, so I can have more time?"
Mr. Hicks smiled.
Dropbox
I'd like an MRU critique if you don't mind, Cyan. I think I am a decent writer, but not very good as a storyteller, and I find myself "breaking the rules" more often than I'd like. One of the words I abuse is "as;" everything is always happening
as something else is, and it makes sense to me as a conceptual thing, but I know it doesn't work as a sentence in a story.
