Half-Hour Fiction

[Call it a writing exercise...]

Miles had just about finished digging up the fifteen-foot by thirty-five-foot shallow trench the plans for the driveway called for when he came across something he hadn't expected. A hand, to be exact. And while finding a hand buried in his front yard was certainly enough to give a man pause, the hand had two definitive characteristics that sent Miles for a spin.

The first: the hand, a left, sticking up nearly perpendicular to the ground, its fingers dirt-caked and curled with rigormortis, was definitely attached to something else further beneath the surface. Something that was most likely an arm, and God knew what beyond that.

The second: it was wearing his wedding ring.

Miles glanced at his own hand , forgotten for the moment and tightly gripping the shovel, and confirmed that he was still wearing the silver, oddly twisted band that his wife had forged and shaped herself during her apprenticeship to a metalsmith who kept a shop in downtown Portland. Seeing the ring on his finger, he raised his eyes to its facsimile on the dead body part stuck where his driveway was supposed to be, looking as though it was either seeking assistance ("Hey Mister! Give a fella a HAND?") or gesturing for a halt to the forthcoming construction.

If it was the latter the hand wished to convey, it had certainly succeeded.

...

"Damn," said Dave, kneeling a safe distance away from the dead left hand, still clad in his bathrobe and slippers and clutching his newspaper, his Sunday brunch with the Courier having been interruped by the appearance of his neighbor on his front porch. "Have you touched it yet?"

"Of course not." Miles was on the verge of losing his own breakfast, having noticed a few minutes ago that, beneath the dark particles of Oregon dirt, the knuckle of the little finger of the object (was a hand a member or a limb, or neither? He wasn't sure) bore the same scar of a childhood encounter with a barbed-wire fence as his own.

"Damn," Dave said again. He began to reach out himself, as if to return the post-mortem offer for a handshake, then thought better of it. "Is it real?"

"I'm thinking it is." He was sure of it, in fact.

"How'd it end up in your yard?"

"I don't know," said Miles. He hesitated for a moment. "But I do believe it's mine."

...

Dave had brought out the lawn chair from Miles' garage and sat and watched carefully as Miles carefully dug a deeper circle roughly six feet in diameter around the protrusion in his yard, gently probing with the shovel before transferring the dirt in neat piles just beyond the circumference.

"You know," Dave said thoughtfully, "I'll bet it IS yours. It's on your land, after all, right? You own, right? No mortgage."

Miles kept digging, ignoring both his neighbor's misinterpretation of his earlier statement and his more subtle pry into his personal finances. But Dave was right: he did own, having paid the cash for the land and the house from the somber windfall that had resulted from his wife's untimely demise.

His excavation had resulted in a shallow cone of soil that peaked with the dead hand, and as he gingerly scraped the dirt away from it, he revealed something else that made him finally drop the shovel and sink to a seat on the soft turned ground.

The damn thing was wearing his watch.