The Captain's Hand
It was made of smooth, tooled wood with amazing hinges at the joints of the fingers. It was a hand. Even the fingernails were delineated. When I first saw it, the fingers were half-clenched. It was beautiful. And it was hideous.
As I gazed at it resting on black velvet in it’s glass case in the seafarers museum, a chill ran over me.
I could only think of the captain.
Like the legendary Captain Ahab, he had lost part of his body in a battle with a whale at sea.
His "hand" was hand-crafted in Sweden by an artisan some years later.
It never worked very well. It was supposed to be controlled by nerves in what was left of his arm. But it didn’t. When he wanted to put it forth to grasp another’s hand, it frequently shot up the middle finger in what was thought to be an obscene gesture.
Needless to say, the captain had few friends.
His life became more restricted, more lonely, and he retreated to a small cabin near the sea on a remote coast.
He slowly became more remote himself, refusing to answer letters from family and friends of his former life. He eventually was thought to have died, passed into the beyond.
Yet he lived on.
Until. Yes, until. A long forgotten, nay, long ignored former love of his came to find him in his self-imposed exile. She had searched for years and finally learned the location of his self-imposed exile. And eventually she came.
But she was too late.
All she found was his artificial hand, floating in the surf, just offshore from his tiny cabin on the rocky crest of land.
It was slightly clenched, as if frozen and no longer defiant.
She took it and cleaned it and kept it.
In a small glass box, lined with black velvet.
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This is the fifth in a series of writing tests based on photo prompts put forth by Willow. You can read other entrants' offerings at Magpie Tales.
A son of Arizona, former U.S. Interior Secretary Stuart Udall, died yesterday at the age of 90.
