“Hey, mister!” Rose shouted through the commotion she had no doubt created. But he didn’t seem to care to break from all his ticking about to look back at the girl. By a flash of sun off three brass teeth in the front of the fella’s mouth, I had to look away quickly. In that brief time, I gleaned his hand. Its three and a half fingers. Rose’s mama had told about the men who would come with the three and a half fingers and the notebooks filled with formulas for poisons and bombs and all manner of hell on earth. She had told of the submarines nestled in the Caribbean Sea and their torpedoes.
Rose shouted again, “Hey, mister!”
He turned back this time, weary as I’d ever seen a man who knew he had been eclipsed into exile.
#MOTHERMAYHEM
JEI D. MARCADE
Elodie Kang was in the shower when the skin of her right hand sloughed off.
She thought at first that she’d dropped her washcloth. One moment, she was working conditioner into her hair, and the next, she heard a wet slap against the bottom of the tub.
Elodie squinted at the bare bones that protruded from the smooth nub of her wrist. There was no pain. Though they had been stripped of flesh and muscle, the ends of each phalange remained as snugly joined as ever, and curled obediently when she clenched her fist.
“Eomma,” she shouted. Panic lent a sharp edge to her voice.
A rush of footsteps on the stairs. Elodie’s mother barreled into the bathroom. She had been in the middle of lunch. Belatedly, Elodie grabbed for the towel and wrapped it around herself without stepping from under the showerhead.
“What? What happened?” Mrs. Kang cried in Korean. Her eyes flew to Elodie’s hand, and the alarm faded from her features. “Finally. Thank God. Why are you just standing there? Turn off the water. Are you just going to let that clog the drain?”
Mrs. Kang reached past her daughter to scoop the soggy clump of subcutaneous tissue from the bottom of the tub with her chopsticks.
Elodie recoiled. “Eomma! That’s so gross!”
Her mother made a dismissive sound as she slung it into the trash. “It’s just skin. Now finish up and get dressed. I want to take pictures of your new hand to show Halmeoni.”
Elodie had trouble sleeping. Not just because she had to get used to her bones snagging on the bedsheets or tangling in her hair.
The world made too much noise. Her bedroom walls and window panes might as well have been paper. Every slam of a car door or bark of a neighbor’s dog sparked against her nerves.
She tried counting down from a thousand. She tried reciting her French vocabulary list. She listened to a true crime podcast about serial killers while she lay in bed with her eyes closed, and barely woke up in time for the bus.
You weren’t allowed at school barehanded. If you didn’t have gloves at home, you could pick a pair out from the bin in the main office, but those were bulky and unfashionable, and smelled like wet dog.
Elodie’s grandmother had sent her a whole pack three years ago, delicately patchworked from silk hanbok scraps. The vibrant colors made Elodie self-conscious, and of course Kamryn noticed immediately.
“El-o-die,” they squealed so loudly that Elodie winced. They turned her wrist to admire the elaborate embroidery at the cuff. “You got your hand? Why didn’t you text me?”
Elodie felt like everyone in the hall was staring. She pulled away and mumbled a vague excuse, but Kamryn had stopped listening.
“Have you seen the Mother Mayhem challenge yet? The group chat’s been blowing up about it all morning.”
She hadn’t. She’d turned off the notifications a while ago, unable to keep up.
Kamryn shoved a phone in Elodie’s face. The video was dark, grainy, the focus trained on somebody’s skeleton hand as it dangled off the edge of their bed in an unlit room.
It felt oddly transgressive to see a stranger’s hand ungloved. As though she had glimpsed someone naked. Elodie tried to imagine filming herself like that, uploading it for the world to watch, and her cheeks burned.
A boy’s voice murmured, “Mother Mayhem, grant me a boon.” The pale, twig-like fingers closed.
The view distorted, jagged edges of static lancing across the frame.
When the boy opened his hand, a spiral shell lay cupped in the cage of his metacarpals.
“It’s just a camera trick,” Elodie said, but her voice was uncertain even to her own ears.
“It’s not,” Kamryn insisted. Anyway, now you can try it.”
Last year, in the boys’ locker room, some of the varsity football players had held down a couple of the JV kids, bone to skin. One fought free and ran for the assistant coach, but it was already too late.
Usually, it took a while for the effect to kick in, but with so many of them, only a few seconds of direct contact had made the other kid pass out. And then he’d dropped into a coma.
Someone from the student council had passed around a get-well card for him in homeroom, which Elodie had dutifully signed. The other guys were expelled. There had been a huge deal about it in the local papers, though it didn’t make the national news; things like that happened too often for most of the major networks to care.
The kid woke up a couple months later, but never returned to school. Word was that he’d come back funny, that he saw things that weren’t there.
Word was that he’d started the Mother Mayhem challenge.
Here are the rules: at the stroke of midnight, reach your skeleton hand into wherever the dark seems deepest. Common candidates are under the bed, in your closet—classic childhood monster haunts. Then you say the words, close your hand, and hold your breath until 12:01.
(There are variations. You must be the only person awake in your house. You must have a full-length mirror behind you. You must be wearing the same clothes,
