severed ovenbird He demands to see a doctor. He holds out his right hand which only retains the thumb and index finger. The other three digits have been sawn off at an angle so that his flesh dips towards the place his pinky would have been. The wound is old, with thick scar tissue twisting through the stumpy hummocks. The doctor emerges from his office, white coat, clipboard, a distracted look on his face. He sighs when he sees the man, an exhausted sigh, a dismissive sigh. “There’s nothing more I can do for you,” the doctor says without looking up from his files. The man fidgets, runs the fingers of his left hand over the remains of his right. He opens his mouth, struggling to find the right words. He wants to plead his case but can’t string together an argument that will reach the doctor’s heavily armoured heart. Before he can say anything at all the doctor interjects, “I’ve told you before that there’s nothing I can do for hauntings. Phantom pain is one thing, but hauntings are out of my scope.” The man cradles his hand, his eyes wide with a private agony. He begs silently, but the doctor turns away. The man’s hand wasn’t always haunted. It had its yearnings, sure, but doesn’t every hand sometimes reach for things it shouldn’t touch? All fingers possess the desire to grasp after beauty, and they can be misguided and greedy and cruel. But this is different. When the hand was deprived of its three fingers a void opened that was quickly filled by a sinister presence…a MIND. The man expected his truncated nervous system to send him ghostly signals, but he did not expect thoughts to take shape there, in the space where his body used to extend out into the world. He is subjected to a relentless wanting, an ache so deep that it keeps him awake at night. Nothing relieves it. Not food or drugs or sex or music. Not meditation or exercise. Not screaming or hot showers or cutting into the hardened skin. There is a hungry ghost where his fingers once were and medical science can’t explain it. He’s been told that it’s all in his head, but no combination of medications has done anything to alleviate his distress. He leaves the doctor’s office and goes home, stuffing all that want deep into his pocket, letting it knock around with the loose change and parking tickets. Even still, he feels the stirring desperation. Everything is just out of reach. In his galley kitchen he boils a pot of water and when the surface is liquid fire he plunges the remains of his right hand deep into the scalding perturbation. Want flares forth in vicious sparks. The ghosts only burrow deeper and recite poems that stir up madness. The air shimmers with Neruda’s Song of Despair: “Deserted like the wharves at dawn. Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.” There is no relief. Not now, not ever. “It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!” 251122 what's it to you? who go blather from