The Sunday Scaries
Volume I, Number 5
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horror

The Splinter

Grandfather’s house was old, and she’d been warned not to run. There were hard wooden corners that could take your eye out, and here and there an exposed nail. Tetanus was a word that lurked in her imagination like a goblin. So it was her own fault that she got the splinter from the basement handrail. It hurt! She cried to mother and father but neither one could reach it with the tweezers. It was deep under the fleshy pad at the base of her thumb. The tweezing made it worse. She tried to make a fist, saying, don’t, don’t, but making the fist made it hurt even more.
          The doctor couldn’t get it out either. He couldn’t even find it. Maybe it had already worked its way out. She said no, no it hadn’t. It still hurt. Mother insisted on an x-ray, but nobody saw anything.
          Soon the tiny wound in her hand healed and the pain receded almost all the way. When she was twelve years old grandfather died and the palm of her hand swelled up and went red and ached for three days. When Richard Bradley broke her heart at the homecoming dance she cried all night and felt like there was something inside her hand that was crying also. Her mother died of breast cancer and the thing in her hand started struggling to move. She thought it wanted to relocate to her breast, out of sympathy or malignancy she didn’t know.
          At thirty she had a miscarriage. The wound in her hand started bleeding. She told Steven she had accidentally stabbed herself with one of her own fingernails. She knew he thought it was intentional self-harm and she let him believe that. Some years later, it began reacting to the television news. A bad election result, and the splinter in her might start trembling in excitement. A war in Eastern Europe, and her hand puffed up and a colorless fluid began expressing from beneath her nails. She made a tourniquet, tight as she could with one hand, and chopped her hand off with a meat cleaver, but right away she knew it wasn’t enough.
          By the time they let her out of the ward she could feel her phantom hand just as sensibly as ever. Sometimes it was at the end of her arm, sometimes it was ten feet across the room, but the splinter, whatever it was, remained her constant companion for the rest of her short life.
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