Give Us a Hand and Candied Girl
Give Us a Hand
When Boss says the quarterly results are in and the stocks are plunging, it's all hands on deck now, we make a show of hands we want to demonstrate how much impact we can offer for the company, how dexterous we are, how committed we are, and we hand over our hands to pick and stow packages for customers. We break carpal bones, twist ligaments, tear muscles off our hands, we detach hands from wrists, we rip the right hand the left hand away, we hacksaw them out, blood sprays everywhere on our torsos, our faces, our hair, we taste the metallic sting of blood on our tongue. We suck long-acting morphine tablets to tamper our handless body pain, hell it's hands down the best handy work we've ever accomplished, watching mindless hands pick and stow packages to deliver to the ever-growing list of consumers.
Boss says his hands are tied, he can't help if inflation goes haywire when we beg for a raise and ask for better health coverage for severed hands: our family, our children need our hands too. Boss is annoyed. He's counting our severed hands' fingers, thumbs, middle fingers, the ring fingers, the pinkies, shaking his head, cursing missing digits from injured hands, tossing weakened hands and broken fingers in a large trash bin. Boss grumbles how he has to get his hands dirty, rants about our useless bodies without hands, you're all fired he howls, how dare you bite the hand that feeds you! He washes his plumpy and doughy hands of us, slams the triple locked gate behind our handless bodies escorted by security guards with hand grenades.
Outside we trip we tumble we fall we hop back to our families we can't hold our scared children when they see our maimed bodies, can't hug our despairing wives with our bloody wrists; friends we know like the back of our missing hand stare at us homeless handless bums we ask them to give us a hand help us set up GoFundUs. We bump against other dismembered bodies our mothers scramble to find our lost hands in garbage trucks; our fathers throw their hands up. We pile on each other's handless bodies with rotting dead hands watching the world get out of hand.
***
Candied Girl
After "I Was Stone", by Nadine Tralala (Germany) 2024
With your gnarled fingers, you pull out a blob from the hot miasma of melted sugar, you blow breaths of life through a straw inside the amniotic glucose and fructose shell; you mold my amorphous shape into a body, a head, and four limbs; with a fine tweezer and the patience of centuries of tradition, you dot my eyes, sculpt my nose, my lips, frame my face with curls and adorn my hair with white roses; you paint me neon pink with sweet beet juice and acrylics to entice little girls for a lick of me, a candied girl.
You line me up next to your other confections: a blue pony, a majestic phoenix, scarlet and green and sparkles of gold flakes, a Dragon Li cat, a Shar Pei who sticks his tongue at the meandering tourists and locals. My body, carved for human consumption, my lips chiseled in an eternal smile. My eyes can see but can't wink, my nose can smell but can't itch, my ears can hear but can't scratch; my arms outstretched like a dancer begging to be held. Passers-by gape at my out-worldly neon-ness.
The pony, the cat, the dog, the phoenix quickly disappear on children's hands and coins tinkle on your palm. "She looks like a ghost with those marshmallow eyebrows" says someone in the crowd. A little girl approaches. My never-ending smile beckons to her I'm here for your sweet embrace. "She's worthless," her Ah Ma says, snatches the little girl's hand, "She's just sugar and chemicals, good to look at, bad for your teeth! Come, before the storm arrives!"
You shrug, your knotty hands spinning more cats, dogs, and ponies, and you whistle dim tsong tsong, little bug lullaby, never looking at me in the eye. You'll never birth another me. And suddenly, a raindrop falls from the sky, melts my eyebrows, another drop dissolves my tiny fingers, then a steady drizzle whips in. I catch the glimpse of alarm in your eyes, my lips still smiling, before I melt into phosphorescent paint slipping through your fingers.
Author Bio
Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared in The Pinch, Fractured Lit., Pithead Chapel, Atticus Review,and anthologized in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Bath Flash Fiction. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and second prize-winner in the SmokeLong Grand Micro Competition 2024. Her stories can be found at www.christinehchen.com.