Weeping, Martin eyed his fingers as they tap-danced across his desk. His half-finished homework was a pile of mess. His tears now blotted the ink. His evil hands — they simply would not stop. Gliding and wriggling and twirling like stick marionettes dancing to an imaginary tune, his fingers paraded across the surface of the soaked notebook paper. Helplessly, he watched them move.
How did you do it, Gramps? I’m not so sure if this is your fault, but I hate you. I hate you very much. I didn’t know how you managed to do it, but I’d beat you this time. You can’t make me cut off my hands! Dad says I’m gonna grow up to be a doctor. I’m not going to end up dead and drunk like you and get buried in a stupid tie. You can’t make me cut off my hands.
Turning under his sheets, he thought of his cousin Jimmy, who was born with an enucleated left eye. It made that eye socket look like a fleshy hollow and deformed the left side of his face. Last summer, Martin had made fun of him behind his back. Now, he would have traded places with Jimmy anytime.
How did it start? Think, think, think. Maybe, if he could figure it out, he could make everything go back to normal again. The hands began doing what they’re not supposed to do after Gramps said his crazy little farewell statement, right?
Gramps just said it, and that was it.
Words.
Just words.
Like a curse.
How does one break a curse?
Martin cried and became angry at the unfairness of it all. He was only nine years old. Chief was safe inside the bottom drawer, but what about him?
He finally fell asleep an hour past midnight. Everything else in the room took on the ever familiar mottled color of darkness. In his dreams, he was in the kitchen. He was about to cut off his left hand when it tried to grab Lauren. He wondered how he could get rid of the other hand when the left one was already severed. In the living room, Lauren sang and hopped with Winnie the Pooh, whose jar of honey spilled forth to lure the ants.
How does one break a curse?
Later, in class, as Mr. Rocero droned on the different parts of a flower, Martin sheafed through his thoughts, looking for loopholes. Perhaps, he was looking at it the wrong way.
“Petal, sepal, pistil, stamen—”
Perhaps, he was not supposed to break it.
“This, here, is called the ovary—”
Maybe, he only needed to pass it on somehow. To give it to someone else?
Martin smiled his nine-year-old smile. Maybe, that was it, but how?
“No, Billy, that’s just your tummy. You don’t have an ovary.”
Laughter. The big guys at the back snickered. They would forever remember Billy Agaton as the boy with the ovary.
Martin joined in, but his laughter sounded forced. It was better than nothing.
He felt the dreaded, ever familiar tingling when he reached the end of the block where his two-story home stood. At his sides, his fingers began to quiver daintily as though they were hovering over piano keys and could not decide which particular note to strike.
He did not know when it happened exactly, but he was no longer afraid. Instead, he just felt angry. “I hope you won’t ever rot, Gramps,” he said under his breath. He had never felt this angry before. His chest hitched, and he was out of breath. He stared at the glistening dragon kite tangled in the branches of the tree on the neighbor’s front yard. He concentrated on the image so that his tears would not come out.
“I never did anything to you,” he whispered, as he realized the only answer to a curse was making a curse of one’s own.
Martin blinked his tears away. His hands stopped moving, and they suddenly felt like they were his again. He would never understand how he did it, but he knew he had won.
And somewhere, an old man named Desmond Strang opened his eyes inside the coffin where he was stretched out. He saw nothing but darkness. He was unable to move, yet he felt everything that reached out for him inside the cramped space six feet under the grass.
Jude and the Moonman
It wasn’t our fault. You should understand that by now. But I don’t expect you to understand the reason we did what we thought we had to do that summer of 1999, because people don’t understand order as much as we do.
At first, there were only three of us: Mel Arlington, Judith Legold, and me. By the end of the semester, just before summer vacation, Billy Gambale, a fourth-grader who once helped Mel push my bicycle out of the ditch, joined our little group. I could never forget that day. It was humid, and the whole world was the Mighty Godzilla out to get us. The burly Bartman and his ferocious pack were chasing me and Mel riding double with me on my bike. I lost control of the handlebars when we reached the embankment, so we landed in the ditch near Mr. Carasco’s farm. The Bartman and his gang were laughing their heads off as they walked away from us. Mel and I cursed silently. Easing our way out of the filthy mud bath, we understood that we had no choice but to endure the treatment, because that was how the world worked. There was an infinite allowance for pain because the course of natural hierarchy — the taut demarcation line that separated predator from prey — had to be sustained. We knew that. We respected that.
“Want some help?” the freckled Billy Gambale called out from the embankment.
According to Judith, Billy spent most of his life playing inside the video arcade at Kingshoppe because he didn’t have any friends. He flushed when we looked up at him, probably suddenly realizing that it would be a lot easier for him if we ignored him.
“Come on down if you want to,” Mel said, laughing and splashing mud on me. “You’re Billy, right?”
“Yeah.”
He brightened instantly. I could swear I’d never seen happiness as profuse as that which shone from Billy Gambale’s eyes. That afternoon at Judith’s house, Billy joined us to watch Flame of Recca, a Japanese animated series. We ate chocolate cookies and drank all of the milk in the fridge. There were now four of us in the spacious living room of the Legolds, and the thought of us being friends for a lifetime suddenly dawned on me. I felt proud.
It was on the twenty-fifth of June when we first ventured into the vacant lot beside the Lares House to play baseball. It was Billy’s turn to pitch.
Judith swung for the fences.
Crack.
I followed the ball’s course across the sky although the sun hurt my eyes. For some reason, I felt like a real man whenever I did that. It landed somewhere in the middle of the thick vegetation fifteen feet away from us.
Mel turned fast and went for the ball. He’d told us earlier that he only managed to snatch the ball from his older brother’s bedroom because his brother had his head clamped with headphones. “The volume was turned up so high you’d hear the sound from the next room,” Mel said. “I think he’ll need a hearing aid when he gets older. Maybe two.”
Mel was approaching the bushes when Judith screamed. I’d never heard her scream before; she was as tough as any kid I’d ever met in my life.