the girl with hands like an alien zygote

There is a girl I know, local girl, with hands like an alien zygote. Her fingers red and unusual, like suckered gripping tendrils to wrap unmoving around humanities weakest points, depositing eggs in an act of aggressive reproduction. They flit nervously – the hands – from task to task, the tendons pulsing beneath the cellophane-thin skin like a bizarre musical instrument, like an alien zygote. Perhaps their rigor-mortis hue is explained by a poor circulation, a baby strangled by her own umbilical cord with lasting life-effects, or perhaps it is the product of something far more extraterrestrial? When they approach me in purple – brandishing paperwork or cigarette lighters – I feel nervous, even afraid.

Addicted to coffee she prowls the aisles of the city’s leading department stores emitting a deep, rich aroma, crushed by the weight of her hands alien properties. They pass me and I shiver impulsively, unavoidably imagining them in a sexual context, running down the xylophonic rack of her ribs, circling her imperceptible aureole, the cold palms clamped remorseless over my thighs as we buck together in abandon of the horror of it all, my sweat drying cold in the muffled light of afternoon.

Her body had entered the public domain. The inexplicable tightness of her vaginal tract means that she has taken myriad lovers, but each of them would always eventually reveal some terrible fear of the very hands that aroused them, screaming out at the girls gestures, the image of John Hurt – comatose and fallen prey to so personal an invasion, a helpless vessel of the alien infant’s unorthodox methods – simply too much to bear, overshadowing even the might of a crooked orgasm.

Her yearning for love was matched only by her crushing self-doubt. Not a glove in the world could hide the hands that hung at her sides with all the calculation of an alien zygote, the fingers of disproportionate lengths, the palms mottled like an injury. At home she wept to see them, compulsively scrubbing at their oddity with soap and scouring pads, somehow hoping to wash their truth away, to immerse them in a secular baptism of regularity by consensus, of humanity. By morning they were always still there, more alien than ever in demonstrative rebellion of the previous nights exorcistic purging.

What did she do with her days, this girl? Did she walk or run, laugh or scream, did her hands glow through the din of modernity with their red red blood vessels, their stringy physiology? Where were her friends and where lay her family? She intrigued me from my melancholy, she fuelled my fantasies.

She moved encircled by loneliness. She bought drinks for one, an isolated organism defeated by the dance floor. She made her meals with the minimum of preparation, the cheap ingredients held together by nothing but the crockery. She wrote conversational responses to her own tepid questions on pieces of scrap paper, which she hid around the house; when she unearthed them days or even weeks later it felt spontaneous, like an unexpected chat with a person she almost knew.

Eventually she secured a job as a hand puppeteer for a children’s television show. She always played the alien characters, using her nasal and slightly fractured voice to good effect. The director said that the best thing about her was that she didn’t require any puppets to play her characters, because her creepy sausage-coloured fingers already looked so much like the antennae or tendrils of an alien zygote, a hideous extraterrestrial symbiosis with arachnid characteristics somehow formed on the ends of her arms. This made significant savings to the shows budget. The palms dotted with crude make up, her hands took on a life of their own, interacting with the camera with incredible proficiency. She drew massive audiences for her performances, but it was due more to the kind of morbid curiosity that attracts us to accidents than it was for the validity of her representations. The public demanded her abnormality, even idolised it in their revulsion, at once fascinated and disgusted by such deformity to the point of reverence.

When she had first started the job the sound engineer had told her that his name was Adrian and, uninvited, described himself as a man of bizarre sexual passions. She didn’t ask what this meant, and they ended up on a makeshift bed in an unused room somewhere in the studio. After their sex, he had thrown up on her. It came through his fingers, as though he had tried weakly to stop it, and he did look disgusted. She couldn’t be sure if it was a routine part of his penchant for bizarre lovemaking, or if it was a response to the hands that looked so much like an alien zygote.

The coffee on her breath had more than a tinge of decay. “When oh when shall I ever be happy?” she thought. “Or, even, less sad?” She applied the alien make up to her hands herself, and slipped into character: Emperor Filament – Beast of the Moons.

It was a life, of sorts.