The hands didn’t care. The hands were decided.
On the corner of Christopher Street and Bleecker was an office building that had not bothered to tear down its out-of-code fire escape from its tenement days, a rusty ladder with short platforms beneath each window. Back when Victor bought the building someone had noted that a good shot might barely make the narrow angle from the top of the fire escape into the back office bathroom window. Victor’s answer had been to board up the window; if you can’t see, you can’t shoot, he said. This had worked for so long that everyone seemed to have forgotten the reason the window was boarded in the first place; at least, the second to top slat had fallen to one side for months and no one had thought to repair it. The angle was nearly impossible. I had to hang from the top rung of the fire escape and wait for the precise moment when Victor finished his business, washed his hands, and leaned forward to check his hair in the mirror. When his head lined up with the missing slat, I’d throw. He’d be dead before he saw me.
It took longer to climb with one arm, and everything hurt by the time I got to the top. When I heard him in there, I’d have to climb down three rungs, hook my feet into the rusty bars, and throw. I waited. A half hour, an hour, a moon gone from fat and red against the silhouette of the West Side docks to high and bright above my head. I wondered if Dev had started his shift at the bar, and what he would think of me when he saw what I’d done. Would it count as a good deed in his ledger, just as my hands demanded it be? Or would it be yet another sin? My heart sure thought so—it turned to lead at the thought of another fucking corpse brought down to the floor by my butcher’s blade, my idiot precision.
The bathroom door opened. Victor was speaking to someone, but I was too far away to make out the words, just his unmistakable cadence. I climbed down three rungs and locked my legs firmly against the metal. I’d be doing the world a favor to rid it of his open-ended questions. He took his sweet time on the pot. His long, wet farts echoed in the air between us. Around my growing terror I managed to think, well, at least I’m not close enough to smell it. Victor stood. I unwrapped my good arm from the ladder and hung there, supported by nothing more than good stomach muscles and practice. He washed his hands in front of the mirror. He moved in and out of sight, but not long enough for even my hands to land the throw. For a delirious moment, I thought he’d just leave. I thought I’d missed my chance. But he paused and leaned forward. He opened his mouth and I realized—he was flicking his nail against his silver teeth. I couldn’t imagine why, but I shuddered anyway.
I lifted my favorite three-inch knife and readied the throw.
It was a tricky shot, but easy enough for me, with all my uncanny force behind it. A second passed. Two seconds. My hands chanted, Ready, now, ready, now. I smelled a hot wind, burning flesh, algae rotting on a distant sea. It was their breath against my ear, their fury, their thirst to make things right after all the wrong I had done.
But I couldn’t, I couldn’t, not even Victor.
For years, you have wasted us, betrayed us and twisted our purpose.
I drew back my arm.
Ready, now, ready—
Victor looked up; the hands howled; I dropped the knife.
I scrambled back down the fire escape. Jumped rungs, slipped against the next, swung my left arm up blindly, banged my right arm so hard that I whimpered. Feet safe on the alley floor, thank the Lord. I bent down to retrieve the knife that had fallen and clattered like gunfire on the cobbles. A block away, Victor was screaming. No words, just needling rage. His men would search this alley in a second. Carefully, I removed my sling and my holster, shoved them under a light coat I’d stashed behind a dumpster and walked onto Christopher Street, away from the Pelican. Behind me, men were running.
I didn’t think Victor had seen me, but he’d certainly seen something. Those stolen hands of his, those shiny teeth, what did they tell him about betrayal? How soon would he know what I had been unable to do?
My guard was gone by the time I got back to my apartment building. I wondered if Victor had recalled all of his men on duty. I wondered how long before he heard that I hadn’t even tried to get an alibi. You should get out of town, Phyllis, I thought, I did think it, but instead I went back up to my apartment and fell asleep on the chaise lounge, beside a silent telephone.
The dream came back, rushing in like water from a broken faucet. Me in that white dress, two hands in the holster instead of knives, and Victor in front of me shining like a chrome hubcap. “You killed those men,” said a voice that used to belong to someone, but had doubled and tripled and repeated into a chorus who were the hands, pointing at me.
I woke up wrists aching, thirsty, blinking in a bright shaft of light from a high, gibbous moon. The light was snuffed and then resumed;
