Healing Hands
by Matt Ayers
“Over here, Ms. MacArthur. Lie down on your stomach.” I point the wretched woman to the treatment table in the corner of the room.
The kyphotic old bat screws up her neck to shine her malevolent gaze on me. “I will absolutely not do that! I have already told you, lying on my stomach hurts my back. Lying on my side hurts my back. Lying on my back hurts my back. Hell, even standing hurts my back. I am paying you to make me feel better, not worse! You’re a lousy physical therapist. More like a physical terrorist!” She chuckles at her own joke.
“Physical terrorist. Clever.” If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that phrase, I would have enough money to afford the extravagant handgun I desperately wish to point at my temple. “I know it’s uncomfortable, but please, a little pain is unavoidable in these situations.”
She lurches onto the treatment table. “What does PT stand for? Pain and torture?” That phrase, too. I could hire French carnivals to entertain attendees of my post-suicide funeral. Clown jugglers on unicycles would circle around my lowered corpse, tossing flaming bowling pins at one another, while friends and family huddle to debate whether I was this deranged my entire life or if something more recent led to my psychological break.
“I’m going to lift up your shirt a little bit so I can gain access to your lumbar spine.” I know the warning is useless in preventing the next words out of her mouth, but hope often prevails.
“You want to look up my shirt, you degenerate? Why don’t you pull my pants down and take me on parade?! I’d be better off seeing the medicine man—YEEEOUCH!”
Oh no. My fingers slip, straight into her decrepit, crotchety spine. “It’s all part of the process, Ms. MacArthur. I told you that a little pain was unavoidable.”
She twists her head out of the face rest like an owl, an impressive feat considering how little rotation her neck possesses. That spine is fueled by undiluted hatred, allowing her to make up the extra distance and convey the animosity she would wreak upon me if her bones didn’t possess the tensile strength of a Twix bar. “I swear to—YEEEEOOUCH!”
I have no regrets. “Please, ma’am. Sudden movements like that will only provoke more symptoms. Why don’t you relax to the gentle sounds of nature while I perform some manipulations on your vertebrae?” I reach to the stereo and press play.
“EVERYONE’S WATCHING, TO SEE WHAT YOU WILL DOOOOOO! EVERYONE’S LOOKING, AT YOOOUUUUU!” sings Loverboy.
She raises her head again, more cautiously this time. “These aren’t the sounds of nat—”
I shove her head back into the face rest against a protest of mumbled curses. “Shhhh, shhhh. The weekend’s almost here. Let me work for it.”
My hands strum against her back muscles, feeling the tautness of the erector spinae. This demonic old hag has been suffering for far too long. It’s time I end her suffering—permanently.
I sneak a look around the clinic. The other therapists are busy with their own, less contemptible patients, while the receptionist at the front is introducing a first-time visitor to fifteen minutes of brain-addling paperwork. Now is my chance.
I close my eyes and imagine the red, restorative thread enmeshed into the tapestry of my soul. Its ends are frayed and cling to my metaphysical fingers as I weave it from my spiritual core into Belinda MacArthur’s back. With mystical precision I sew together the damaged disc, stuffing its extruded contents back into their rightful container. The crimson strand leaps through ligaments and bounds about tendons, repairing every fiber it can get its greedy tendrils on. The job done, I cut the thread and reel my magic in.
“How does that feel?” I ask. Again, I know what she’s going to say.
“There—there’s no more pain. I can’t believe it,” she says, swinging her legs off the table and leaping onto the ground like a woman fifty years her junior. She wiggles her legs experimentally, then gyrates her hips like an over-caffeinated belly dancer. “This is incredible! How long does this last? Is this a scam? Are you cheating me? Do I have to come here every day for the rest of my life?”
God no, if that was the case I wouldn’t have done a thing to you. “God no, if that was the case I wouldn’t have done a thing to you. Your back has a fresh start on life, so go live it. Now.” I deliver a quick kick to her bottom and the woman practically skips out of the strip mall, giggling as if she’d repeated more trite wordplay about my profession.
My next patient will be so much better. A delight, even. Small kid, nine, little leaguer. Poor guy won’t be able to play for at least six months. Not that I won’t pull the red thread trick again; I will, but not today. The rule is that I can only heal one person per day. I don’t know why and I don’t know how, but I’m thankful for it. Well, thankful now.
At my last job, it didn’t work out so well.
Since miracles are a limited resource, I used to spend them only on patients I liked, the ones who didn’t turn my mind to extravagant firearms. The looks on their faces melted my heart into puddles. Unfortunately, those looks walked out the door and then I had to stare at the ugly mugs of patients like Ms. MacArthur. When everyone you interact with is a howling terror, it makes things tense in the workplace—so tense that my boss couldn’t take the atmosphere and turned to a life of accelerants, matches, and insurance claims. A similar thing happened at the job before that. And the job before that.
Since I refuse to have my office reduced to a pile of cinders, and I so enjoy the smiling patients, this is the life I’ve chosen. I’ll heal the good ones eventually, I promise, but first I have to get through the nasty ones. It’s a shame that every time I get rid of one of these shambling bruisers, two more take their place.
“How’s it going, slugger?” I ask nine-year-old Frankie as he dashes through the entrance to high-five me with his uninjured arm.
“Really good! Except my arm kinda hurts.” His inflamed elbow wriggles in front of me, like a tentative offering to a benevolent god. I kneel, palpating around the joint as Frankie winces. Not good.
“Does it hurt more than last time, the same, or less?”
Frankie sneaks a look under his armpit, watching his father strut through the clinic doorway. “Um…it’s less,” he mumbles.
Dammit. God dammit. The elbow’s swollen up larger and it’s his asshat of a father’s fault. Poor kid is too afraid of his old man to manage the truth. With patients like Ms. MacArthur, you only have to deal with a bad attitude; with nut-job sports dads, it’s so much worse.
“Kid’s looking pretty good, isn’t he?” Andy Bocelli beams like an orangutan that’s just discovered a sharp-enough rock to bludgeon his zookeepers with.
“I told you he wasn’t supposed to play baseball anymore,” I say, standing as tall as I can against the simian’s frame. “He shouldn’t be playing with that elbow for two months.” It’s all I can do not to crack the buffoon in his teeth. Nimrods like him are so obsessed with vicarious trophies and accomplishments that they forget their children are living, breathing, feeling humans.
“He didn’t play a lick of baseball, I swear. Isn’t that right, son?”
Frankie’s face goes parallel to the floor. “You didn’t make me play any baseball.”
I can’t believe I have to put up with this. The kid is scared to death of his dad. I know why I’m getting this upset: Frankie isn’t the only kid to have to deal with bad parenting.
For the first eight years of my life, I was raised only by my dad, an unhinged demon-aficionado who was determined to bring hell to earth by any means. He even forced his weird rituals on me. It wasn’t until my first sleepover that I realized something was wrong—no other children had to slumber in the center of a sheep’s blood pentagram under the steady drip of a scalding, ebony candle. I was so embarrassed—why did I have to be the only seven-year-old at the slumber party with a virgin ewe and seven distinct ritual knives?
Thankfully, my bum of a dad skipped town and I was taken into the foster system, where I was taught not to slaughter farm animals inside the house. By that time, I had noticed the red thread and preoccupied my thoughts with healing, rather than with my missing father.
And I know, comparing an overzealous baseball dad to a Satan-worshiping lout is like comparing apples and apples—exactly the same.
I take a step closer to Andy. “It’s strange then, how his elbow is doing so much worse when the only activity it’s had is the home exercise program. Wouldn’t you agree that’s unusual, Mr. Bocelli?”
His knuckles blanch as they curl into a fist. “Seems fine to me. Kids bounce back from anything. We’re only here because my wife insisted on it. We don’t have to be here.”
“But I—” Frankie recoils after a stern look from his father.
I take a step back and my intestines spasm, protesting against the decision. I can always call home and try to catch Frankie’s mom on the phone, but I can’t do a thing if his dad runs out on me. As much as I’d love to push this oaf’s buttons, I can do more for Frankie if I nod my head and work on that elbow.
“Come on,” I say to Frankie, and only Frankie. “Head over to a table and let me mess around with that elbow of yours.” Unfortunately, Andy follows. I was hoping he’d take his usual seat in the front of the clinic and get lost in a magazine. Or just get lost.
Frankie, sitting in a chair with his arm rested on a treatment table, tries not to jerk away as I do soft-tissue work on the injury. “I know you said not to play for two months, but what if I play just once this weekend?” he asks, wincing. “It’s a really big tournament. I wouldn’t play at all after that.”
And that’s what kills me. Even if he is being manipulated by his troglodyte father, Frankie genuinely loves playing baseball. He loves it enough not to argue when his dad screams at him to get back on the field, to push through the pain. At this rate he’ll need surgery and I doubt he’d be able to play competitively again. As much as I hate doing this, I’ll have to use the red thread on him next time. Which means I’ll have to spend yet another session treating Harris Anton, the shrill-voiced, politically belligerent, diabetic ogre with patches of dark chocolate covering his wardrobe like spots on a cow. I’ve already healed that blowhard’s sprained ankle and now he’s back for more. Sigh.
“Come by on Friday. I’ll see if I can work a little magic and get you on those bases.”
Frankie almost falls out of his seat with glee while his father huffs satisfactorily, as if it was his doing that I gave in and decided to break the laws of the universe.
And then the worst thing imaginable happens. I thought she was gone, that I would never have to see her again, but her familiar voice pierces my eardrum. “PHYSICAL TERRORIST!”
No. No no no no no. It can’t be.
I face the front door. It can be.
Ms. MacArthur hobbles in as if her ribs are coated in iron, the extra weight threatening to submerge her torso into the carpet. Her fingernails drag along the floor as her stunted legs wobble forward. She looks so much worse than when she left, worse than before I healed her. I can’t tell if her skin has gone scarlet from rage or inflammation. Either way, the elderly fireball trudges along and then rams her shoulder into my belly.
“I knew it was too good to be true! I knew this was a scam! What have you done to me?” she asks, clawing her warped form up my shirt. I can feel the warmth from her fingertips radiating through my clothing, scalding the flesh beneath.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! You should be cured!” I try to wrestle myself away, but for a broken-down old maid, she has the strength of an Olympian.
Then Andy attacks, strong-arming me and spinning me to the left, dragging Ms. MacArthur along for the ride. “Is this true?” he asks, spitting like a skunk spraying stink. “Are you taking advantage of this old woman? Are you taking advantage of me? Is my little boy going to look as grody as this torn-up witch?”
Poor Frankie pulls on his father’s leg, resisting the urge to cry as he tries to channel power through his overworked elbow. “Let him go, Dad. He didn’t do anything bad! He’s going to help me!”
“Just like he helped me?” asks Ms. MacArthur. Except she isn’t quite Ms. MacArthur. Her voice has deepened, probably a result of her neck elongating to three times its normal length; her hair has become overgrown into a tangle of gray, oozing crude oil; her teeth are now serrated like the peaks of mountains; and hellish spikes curl out her forehead like callused, protruding pimples; inexplicably, she’s transformed from an impish woman to a womanish imp. “You smell like a tart fawn. I want to suckle the brains out your earlobes.”
“What is wrong with you?!” I shout.
Then the flesh under Andy Bocelli’s grip sizzles. I whip my head just in time to see scales erupt from his fingers and cascade down his arm. “I’ll make you swallow every tiny bone in your hands and feet before I gut you,” he threatens, squeezing my arm until it snaps.
“AAARRRGH!” I fall onto my knees, nauseated and ready to vomit.
Another therapist, Brendan, wanders into the scene, stupefied by the nightmare playing before him. “What is going on—” Brendan cannot complete his sentence because his tongue and head are suddenly in two very separate places. As Monster Andy waves his fleshy prize in triumph, Monster Ms. MacArthur leaps onto the ceiling and chases the remaining therapists like a spider scuttling towards a helpless meal.
“We’ll only be gone for a moment, just have to get rid of these distractions. Then I’ll taste your brain stem!” she cackles.
I wobble to my feet. “Come on, Frankie. We should leave while your dad and Ms. MacArthur are preoccupied by the gruesome murders of my coworkers.”
But Frankie shakes his head, terrified of what his father’s become. “I don’t think we can leave. More monsters are here to kill us.” He points to the entrance. A cataclysmic version of every patient I’ve ever red-stringed to health comes into the office, grinning with triumph. They wave their leather wings and bladed forearms, begging me to struggle.
“Shit!” I yell, before realizing I’m standing right next to a child. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t curse in front of you.”
“It’s okay, my dad does it all the time,” says Frankie, staring in awe at my former patients. “Do you think my dad won’t kill me because I’m his son, or is he too evil now?”
“You’ll be fine,” I lie. “The army of the damned marching towards us probably has no interest in innocent, virginal children. But just in case, let’s try the back exit.” I shouldn’t have said it out loud. I jinxed us. We’re five feet from the emergency exit when the wall caves in and the tremendous fat rolls of Harris Anton, the diabetic behemoth, flap towards us. His limbs have degraded into pustule-covered tentacles and the only remainder of his face is his mouth, turned vertical with a few extra rows of teeth.
“Where are you going?” he asks, saliva waterfalling out the cracks in his smile. “It’s not a party if the buffet walks out the door.”
Frankie trembles. “I only wanted to play baseball. I didn’t know physical therapy was going to be like this.”
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And then a flash of black bursts out of the kid’s mouth, narrowly missing my face as it rockets towards heaven. I drop Frankie and he rolls, all the while shooting out the ebony light like a turbo-charged cannon. The beam decimates everything in its path, slicing the ceiling and wall into white plaster ribbons.
“Hey, buddy, you doing okay over there?” I ask hopefully.
No answer. Just more mouth cannon.
I back away, then reach my leg out and give him a gentle kick. “Buddy?”
He turns slightly, changing the direction of his demon beam. His body is like a toppled statue, frozen in the form I last touched him. His hair and clothing stick to skin, drawn flat by some magnetic force. Besides the luminescent death shining from his oral cavity, he is lifeless and cloud white, a recreation carved out of marble more than the scared child I carried into the exam room.
Oh God. I’m doing this. Everyone I’ve healed, and now everyone I touch, turns into monsters. This has to do with my gift, the red thread. The thread is like a seed I’m embedding into each patient and now the seeds are blossoming. Then what about Andy and Frankie? Did I give them thread by accident? Is the thread going haywire?
I close my eyes and tap into my inner spool, searching for wayward strands. The building lights up with the crimson glow of my handiwork. It’s in all my past patients, it’s in Frankie, and it’s in the monster about to smash down the door.
I panic and grab the only weapon in the room: Frankie the Laser God. There’s only enough time to point Frankie to the door before the chimera creature barrels in, but the kid’s devil mouth does all the work, planting an empty hole through the doorway and into the chest of my assailant—who happens to be Frankie’s dad. Poetic justice?
Andy reels back and collapses, but other demonic beasts trample over him. I swipe Frankie in a wide path, cutting through the new arrivals, but their numbers are too great and one lucky son of a bitch impales my gun-child with a finger the length of a katana. The finger shudders an inch away from my stomach, its progress halted as the horror’s hand lodges into Frankie. I can only watch as the hellion jerks the kid’s remains out of my grip and chews through them like kabob on a skewer. “Mmmm, cannibalism,” says the finger-blade monster through his full mouth.
I back into the corner, instinctively searching for another child I can turn into sin-powered artillery—not that I would purposely turn a child into a laser god, it’s just that my first instincts are of self-preservation.
I could be a better person.
Ms. MacArthur’s serpentine neck weaves through the crowd of abominations, stretching so far that her body can’t be seen. Four fangs emerge from her face, two from her chin and two from her eyeballs. “When this is all over,” she booms in a granny octave, “we will have our pounds of flesh. When this is all over.” Then she strikes, contorting her face shut to snap her venomous pincers into my neck.
***
When I awake, they’ve all got a hold of some piece of me. Also, I’m naked, so when I say they’ve all got a hold of some piece of me…gross. My entire body feels like the rag in a Molotov cocktail: limp, aflame, and ready to explode at any moment. They don’t bother to tie me down to the treatment table; they must know that the heat of their flesh is enough. The only word I can muster is, “Why?”
“You did this to us, transformed us with your thread,” says Belinda MacArthur, her eyeball and chin fangs flickering as she speaks. “I know what I’m doing to you is wrong, but this has nothing to do with morals or feelings. In fact, most of these idiots like you.”
“You rock, dude!” shouts a multi-limbed devil, his appendages dangling like the boughs of a weeping willow. I recognize him as a CrossFit bro with a penchant for plantar fasciitis. “Sorry to kill you and stuff!”
“Apology not accepted, Jeffrey!” I shout back, regretting the effort of it immediately.
“Even I don’t want to do this,” says Ms. MacArthur, “and I think you’re worse than my bouts of shingles. But there’s this urge, physical terrorist. That thing you put into me, the stuff that changed me, I want to put it back in you, fill you to the brim until it squirms out your pores, stuff you like a sagging scarecrow.”
I concentrate on the red thread to verify. The sensation of flames wreaking havoc on my skin is the feeling of my own thread being forced back into me and onto the spool. An odd flicker of hope occurs. I clench everything in my gut to utter the next sentences: “And then—then will you leave me alone? Will you be humans and leave me alone?”
“We’ve almost given it all back—and yet, I still want to kill you,” says Ms. MacArthur, her eyes unfocused with the joy of inflicting pain. “So I wouldn’t put too much faith in your safety.”
She’s right. I feel like I’ve eaten three-too-many plates of spaghetti and meatballs, but on a spiritual level. I’ve almost got all the thread back and my guts are straining to punch a hole through my abdomen in order to find release.
“GGGAAAAAAGGGHHH!” I scream, as the spool pulsates and turns and gathers and grows. At the bottom of my vision, fingers pierce out my belly and open a gaping wound. I nearly pass out as the face of a wild goat extends up from the injury. The infernal beast rises, reaching six-fingered hands out to free the remainder of its black form. My patients scooch back in a wide circle to give him room.
The creature that crawled out my abdomen takes its first jagged, hoofed steps before stretching out, then suddenly flinches and massages its hamstring. “Eternal damnation! I knew I should have warmed up before I contorted through a breach in dimensions that small.” The goat demon continues to rub the back of its leg, wincing periodically as its minions stare. I’m the first to break the silence.
“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!”
The goat jumps and releases a braying noise, noticing me for the first time. It cocks its head to the side. “Why are you yelling?”
“YOU JUST SHOVED YOUR ENTIRE BODY OUT OF MY STOMACH! OF COURSE I’M YELLING!”
Contempt and boredom cross the goat’s features. “Relax already. It’s not like this is the first time you’ve given birth before. I just came out of your stomach vagina instead of your crotch vagina.”
“I DON’T HAVE ANY VAGINAS!”
“Really? Are you some kind of circus freak? Well, you do now—oh, never mind, it’s all healed up. Guess you’re a weirdo again,” it says with a shrug.
“Like you have any right to call me—” The satanic farm animal places his furry hands over my mouth and I quickly realize I’m allergic to either livestock or evil.
The goat shakes its head. “I guess your father didn’t fill you in on the details. I’ll tell you real quick, because of contractual obligations. First off, I’m Ricky G., General of Hell’s Third Battalion. Pleasure to meet you. Your dad made a deal with Satan to turn you into a gateway from hell to earth in exchange for a time-traveling DeLorean like the one from Back to the Future, so he could escape the coming apocalypse. We kind of screwed him, though. The DeLorean did travel through time, but only backwards, by about 65 million years. He was eaten by a pterodactyl. But those weird rituals he taught you worked and after twenty years you successfully birthed me.”
I mumble against his palm.
“What was that?” he asks, releasing my mouth.
“That doesn’t mean you’re my son, does it?” I ask, praying to whatever is the opposite of this goat monster that we aren’t related.
But he nods, clopping his hooves against the floor in a dance of glee. “Yup! You’re my daddy! I would stay and chat, maybe throw the pigskin around, but I’m going to take over the world real quick. Would’ve done it sooner, but you kept giving me away to these losers. Thankfully, some of them were evil enough for me to control, so I forced them to return here and put me back in you. Speaking of which—minions, kill him,” he says, before limping away.
Ms. MacArthur and her merry band of marauders jump at the chance, but not before I yell, “Wait!”
Ricky G. raises a palm and his underlings lurch into one another. “What’s up, pop?”
“I see you’ve got a little bit of a limp there. I’m a physical therapist, maybe I could do something about that?”
Ricky G. strokes his goatee. “Really? You would do that for me? Even though I’m going to flay every mortal I run across?”
I nod my head like it’s in a paint mixer. “Of course, we’re family. Besides, I want to be on your good side if you’re conquering Earth.”
“That totally makes sense. Where do you want me?”
I creep off the table, still sore from the birthing process (seriously?). “Why don’t you lie down here, on your stomach.”
Ricky G. flops onto the table, destroying it underneath his colossal weight. He turns to me and places a finger on his pressed goat lips while making an apologetic face. “Oops.” Even the most fundamentalist of Christians wouldn’t blame me for wanting an abortion.
“That’s all right. I’ll just bend down and massage the tissue.” I kneel next to the demon and grasp his hamstring with my unbroken arm. Not only is he tight, but he’s full of red thread—yes! I siphon it inward like a vacuum cleaner on high.
“What are you doing?!” screams Ricky G., but by the time he notices, both his hooves are gone and his calves are unraveling. “Minions, stop him!”
But they don’t move. Their demonic body modifications disintegrate away. “Hooray, we’re free!” shouts Jeffrey.
“How could you do this to me, daddy?” asks my goat child.
I shake my head at the weeping, ever-shrinking torso on the ground, thinking of the lives lost today. “Before you go, I just want you to know: you were my least favorite child and I never loved you.”
“NOOOOOO!” roars Ricky G. as he blinks out of existence.
I stand up and watch my patients leave, discussing amongst themselves the strange turn of events that occurred today. Delightfully, I spy Frankie walking out of the private treatment room (and less delightfully, his father). The kid waves before his dad drags him away, flashing me the finger.
Ms. MacArthur is the only patient that stays, creaking towards me with that accusatory look.
“I’m not like the rest of these patsies, I know this is all your fault. You can parade around like you did something, like you saved us all, but you’re the reason I murdered all those other physical therapists in the first place. I bet you didn’t even graduate Physical Therapy school, I bet you slept your way to a diploma. But let’s face it, you’re one of the ugliest dopes I’ve ever set my eyes on, you could only sleep with the lonely, desperate professors, the ones with facial deformities…”
She continues to talk, but I don’t listen. Something else has all my attention. I can feel Ricky G. inside me, ready to create another birthing canal from my belly button. There’s too much thread in me! I have to get it out now!
“Ms. MacArthur,” I interrupt, “does your back still hurt?”
“Of course it still hurts, because you’re an incompetent ingr—”
I high-five her face, transmitting a huge chunk of red thread into her. “Probably won’t hurt anymore. Just do me a favor and stay the hell away from me.”
“Why you awful bastard, slapping a fragile woman in the…”
This time I’m not listening because she’s the worst. As long as I don’t have all my thread in me and stay away from Belinda MacArthur, no Ricky G. Simple enough.
I look around the remnants of the office. Half the walls are missing and there are way too many corpses here for comfort. But at least my only problem is a snappy geriatric and not a hellish goat monster. The devil you know, right?
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About the Author
Matt Ayers was born with an extra set of teeth in case he lost his first set. He did, indeed, lose his first set. He hopes he won’t lose the second, because then he will be out of teeth. Check up on his oral health here: twitter.com/MattAyers.
“Healing Hands” © 2013 Matt Ayers
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