“The Study of Arms and Hands”
By Jane Westendorf


Isaiah Marowick had a very distinctive face. His skin seemed to sag like melted plastic and his nose was like clay squished and pushed this way and that. Beneath his scarce brows and hooded lids were brown eyes, darkened and squinted with bitterness. No lips surrounded his thin mouth; it looked as if it had been sliced through his skin. Brittle chestnut hair grew determinedly from his mottled scalp and fell in every direction. This was the face of a horrid man and horrid Isaiah Marowick was.
Rylan sat across from his Uncle Isaiah trying for the hundredth time not to stare. Yet the curious hideousness of his uncle’s face was too tempting for the child and his green eyes flickered from his plate to the ruined face.
“What?” his uncle snapped. His voice was like metal grating over gravel.
Rylan looked down, swallowing any answer, alone at his end of the long table.
His uncle huffed and shifted in his chair, rearranging the position of his prosthetic arms. The metal claws on the end of them caught the light, reflecting it oddly. Rylan glanced at them.
“Keep staring, boy, and you’ll go to bed hungry.”
Rylan returned his gaze to the empty plate before him.
A long empty silence stretched between them, awkward for the young boy and normal for the old man. Muted sounds came from the kitchen every now and then before Isaiah’s manservant, Joseph, emerged carrying their dinner. He served Rylan first and then Isaiah. Rylan averted his eyes as Joseph attached a fork to his uncle’s right hook and a knife to his left. Then Joseph sat beside him, eating his own food quietly, ready to detach any utensil should Isaiah want it gone.
Rylan chewed his food slowly, looking around the grand dining room and trying to imagine the rooms above it. He wasn’t allowed upstairs. What should he want with upstairs anyway? The first level of the grand manor his uncle lived in was by far large enough to keep him entertained for a lifetime. Or so Uncle Isaiah said. Rylan wasn’t so sure. Upstairs was a mystery waiting to be unraveled. Only when he was sitting so far away from his uncle, a vast length of varnished wood between them, did Rylan dare to entertain any plans of venturing upstairs.
At length Rylan asked with a timid voice, “May I be excused, Uncle?”
Isaiah grunted.
The boy slipped from the table, carrying his plate to the kitchen. He placed it in the sink and was about to leave through the hallway door when he heard voices from the dining room. He hesitated, taking a tentative step towards the swinging door where the voices were seeping into the kitchen.
“His mother’s dead-“
Rylan flinched.
“So he’ll stay here. The rest of the family won’t take him in and they won’t have anything to do with me, too hideous for family gatherings I am.”
Rylan took this as his cue to leave for Joseph began trying to console his uncle, insisting that he wasn’t ugly and scarred. Rylan knew from the past week that he’d spent here that soon Isaiah would start shouting, hooking his claws into those ugly wooden chairs and hurling them across the room. It never failed but Joseph always tried to convince him.
The boy left the kitchen, wandering the corridors of the manor for quite sometime, managing to keep himself far enough away from the dining room that his uncle’s shouts could not be heard. Eventually he stopped in the room Joseph had told him he could stay in. The walls were papered with a horrendous pumpkin colour, the bedspread a nauseous yellow and red and the furniture all kinds of clashing grains and colours. It wasn’t that his uncle had purposely given him a repulsive room; the entire house was decorated in a similarly offensive fashion. In fact, Uncle Isaiah didn’t seem to own anything more beautiful than an old rusted lamp. Even his clothes were old and smelled musty. An ugly home to house an ugly face, an ugly face to house an ugly soul.
Rylan sat on the bed for a while, tracing his fingers along the garish red pattern before he heard a distant shattering sound and the prompt slamming of a door. He frowned, getting off his bed and opening his bedroom door so slowly that it creaked in protest. He slid between the door and its frame and snuck out into the corridor, craning his neck to see the front hall. Eventually his small steps brought him to the carpeted foyer where Joseph knelt sweeping up a broken vase. Rylan glanced at the front door.
“He’s gone,” Joseph said, not turning around. “Off on one of his drinking spells.”
The boy didn’t respond. Instead he turned and walked back down the corridor. When he reached for the brass doorknob of his room, he glanced back at the small figure of Joseph, still bent over the broken vase. Then he took a few steps further down the corridor and turned a corner, facing the dusty staircase he had imagined climbing for an entire week now. He chewed his bottom lip, indecision creased within the wrinkle between his eyebrows.
Upstairs is forbidden, his uncle had said. But his uncle wasn’t here now.
Rylan took a difficult step, then another. Slowly his strides became less heavy as he neared the stairs until finally he felt his feet lighten with the sense of adventure and rebellion. A smile of triumph grew on his face as he took the steps two at a time.
He reached the landing with a sense of accomplishment, starting to turn around to go back down. After all, his uncle had said not to go upstairs, and now he was. Wasn’t that disobedience satisfying enough? Then something caught his eye.
A door was slightly ajar, soft candlelight falling in a long rectangle down the carpet that reached from the doorway to the landing.
Rylan gulped as he inched towards it. Without thinking he reached a small hand out and pushed the door open, stepping inside with nervous butterflies churning his stomach.
The room was dimly lit by a handful of candles scattered about, some melting onto dressers, side tables, shelves and even the head of a stone bust. The walls were a rich mahogany, a few tapestries adorning them. Along the far wall was a great collection of books stacked in looming bookshelves, many of them on music theory. A few sofas were crowded along the other wall, seemingly shoved aside though they were a soft red colour that complimented the walls perfectly. Above the sofas was a glass case. Inside it were dusty war medals, some old pictures and an antique rifle, the kind one has to stuff gunpowder in by hand. An empty birdcage stood beside Rylan, shrouded in shadows and a torn velvet blanket.
Rylan noticed none of this. His eyes were fixed on one thing. In the center of the room stood a grand piano. The boy walked towards it, inhaling sharply as he reached out and stroked the smooth wood. His fingers trailed down to the perfect ivory keys. Licking his lips with anticipation he pressed one down, delighting in the clear note that rang throughout the room. He didn’t press another though, he withdrew his hand, somehow knowing that another note would ruin the moment. Then for some reason he thought he had missed something. He turned to his right, his eyes straying to the glass cabinet mounted on the wall. He took another step towards it and inspected the quiet medals and loud rifle. Behind the rifle, barely visible, was a black and white portrait of a soldier and a woman. A handsome young man, his eyes bright with his own future and his hair combed back neatly. Beside him was the perfect oval face of a woman, smiling softly, her eyes not looking at the camera but at the man beside her.
The puzzle of his uncle was slowly beginning to straighten out in Rylan’s mind. Yet the mysterious piano didn’t fit in. His uncle hated the world, hated anything beautiful within it. Surely the piano was the most beautiful thing Rylan had ever seen so why did Uncle Isaiah have it hidden in his own private room?
Rylan turned around to look at the piano again, contemplating the complexity of his uncle. Then his eyes were drawn upwards, to the wall behind the piano. His breath caught in his throat. A simple gilt frame hung there, shimmering in the candlelight. Rylan didn’t notice the frame; his eyes were drawn to the yellowed parchment within it. Not a painting, but a simple sketch.
Elegant charcoal lines curved around a masculine forearm that formed into a hand with long fingers, pianist like fingers. An unfinished hand lay cupped within the first one, the wrist fading away into undefined lines, like someone had lost interest in it and moved on to the hand that was above it. This hand held Rylan’s attention. A slender, feminine wrist gave way to smooth skin and womanly fingers that curled around something. A pinch of fabric maybe, or the tip of a feather quill, Rylan couldn’t be sure. All he knew for certain was that it was beautiful, held within its simple frame. The old parchment and aged charcoal created an unfinished vision of understated splendor.
His uncle had once been handsome, beautiful even, as Rylan now knew from the portrait in the cabinet. He had once had hands, long, fine hands that must have danced over those ivory keys creating a symphony of magical notes. He had once had a love. And now, he had none of these things. Even the most simple of them, the ones he had been born with, his very own hands, had been robbed from him.
Rylan crept from the room and down the stairs, back to his room. Sitting on the scarlet stained mustard bedspread, Rylan’s terrified awe for his uncle turned into something different. Not pity or mercy, nothing of the degrading sort but a sense of understanding.
The next night while the three of them sat at the long table, separated by yards of lacquered wood, Rylan put down his fork.
“Uncle?”
Isaiah grunted.
“Will you teach me to play the piano, please?”
A moment of silence enveloped the room before Rylan dared to look up at his uncle. What he found there was something strange. His uncle’s face was changing, rearranging itself over and over again as he looked at the claws he had for hands and the fake sheaths he had for forearms. Then he looked up and met the gaze of the small boy across the table and Isaiah Marowick’s pencil lips drew back in an unfamiliar expression, a smile.
His nephew smiled back.

Lefellow

February 13, 2011 at 12:50 PM PST

You ought to be a scriptwriter. Amazing writing.

Idler on the Roof

January 25, 2011 at 7:54 PM PST

Another good one from Jane West. Thanks.