I found this plastic severed hand at a garage sale a few months ago. I think I paid a quarter for it and even before we were back in the car I had already got my money’s worth. I tapped Susan on the shoulder with it multiple times, walked around with with it hanging out of my sleeve and tried shaking people’s hands, and approached several people while holding it and asked them if they needed a hand with anything. Twenty-five cents well spent.

The next day, I hid the hand underneath Susan’s pillow in an attempt to scare her. In turn, she hid the hand in my clean clothes pile. I hid the hand in her car. She hid it in the microwave. The hand has been hidden many places and every time one of us finds it, we laugh. A couple of weeks ago, I opened my CPAP travel bag, stuck my hand inside to pull out a power supply, and jumped when I felt a bunch of cold, plastic fingers in the bottom of the bag.

The closer we get to Halloween the more times I expect to find the hand. That’s not what scares me. What scares me is, I have no idea where the hand is in the moment, and am sure I’ll find it any moment…