Licenciada

Her Mother’s Hands

by B.D.. Knox

   Frankie sat in the kitchen, listening to her mother rattle on, as always. She looked down at her hands, they always seemed to have a life of their own and it frightened her. They were always crawling into places they didn’t belong, always touching things that they shouldn’t and always hurting her, pinching her, digging their sharp little nails into herflesh.
   She watched as her mother spoke to her, not hearing what she said but watching her mother’s hands as they moved, using a sharp chef’s knife to cut the meat for stew that was to be dinner. The hands rose and fell, the knife glinted with the sun light coming in through the  kitchen window. Rich red stained the blade, as the blood from the meat ran along it’s edge and dripped on to thecutting board, poling and running over the edge to the counter top.
   Frankie looked at her own hands again, they lay silently in her lap for a change. They looked just like her mother’s hands but younger and much more vicious. Her mother’s hands could hurt, too, a slap to the face, a punch in the stomach occasionally but Frankie knew that her own hands could do far worse.
   "Frankie! Pay attentionwhen I speak to you! You doing that staring thing again, you have to snap out of this! You don’t want to go back to that nut house again, do you?"
  "No, mother."
  "Then stop acting like this, are you taking your medication when I give it to you?"
  "Yes, mother." Frankie lied, she was hiding the pills in a drawer in her room. Saving them up for a rainy day .......... or a sunny one for thatmatter.
  As her mother's voice droned on, Frankie still stared at her hands. They seemed to be speaking to each other, the fingers tangled together, caressing each other, her fingers and hands were friends. She, herself, had no friends as her mother loved to point out to her daily. Frankie thought about just exactly how she felt about her mother dispite what she told her doctor when she saw him.Looking back down at her hands, she watched as they started to move, like snakes, towards the back of her mother’s apron. She jerked them back as she noticed her mother turning around to look at her again.
  "Are you listening to me, Frankie? I said that I’m having a friend, Mrs. Luth from thye senior center, over for dinner tonight, so you take your food to your room and stay there till I sayyou can come back out! Is that clear?"
  "Yes, mother, it’s very clear. It's crystal clear ....... "
  Frankie's voice faded off as her hands started to reach for the back of mother’s apron strings again. Frankie had no idea what they were going to do, she just sat and watched, an innocent by-stander at the mercy of her hands. She watched her mother’s hands, they, too, seemed to live on theirown. Mother kept talking, her hands kept doing there work like good little soldiers.
   Mother turned to look at Frankie. Frankie was mesmerized by the look of her own hands as they moved towards her mother. Mother dropped the knife and backed away from Frankie. Her hands went up to her face in surprise. The last time Frankie touched her, she sent Frankie packing, in a straight jacket for a nicevacation at Mescatonic Asylum. It took almost as long as Frankie's visit for her own brusies to go away.
  "Frankie! What are you doing? Don’t you dare touch me! You know what will happen! I swear I'll call Dr. West right now!"
  "Sorry, Mother. I didn’t mean to do it, you know how my hands are, they just "do" things."
  "Talk like that will get you right back to the hospital again, do you wantme to call Dr. West?"
  "Don’t threaten me, mother, I don’t care anymore anyway."
  "Look at your hands! You’ve been scrubbing them again! Why, they are beet red and bleeding! Let me see your palms!"
   Frankie’s hands turned themselves over to show the palms, deep gouges in them, an ugly red with blood drying at the edges. Suddenly, the hands balled up into fists and struck out, hitting...