In His Arm

It began with a small sensation on the back of his hand. Not quite like an itch, but kind of. Just a sensation. Like there was something he needed to address. But in his hand.

He ignored it at first. Perhaps he was too busy, or too stressed to take it seriously. He worked with his hands, they always had small nicks or bruises, one more irritating sensation wasn't going to slow him down.

But as day followed day, the sensation in his hand seemed to spread. It didn't intensify, but he began to feel it in his fingertips, and up towards his wrist.

He first really took notice of it while sitting in his home listening to the radio. He turned the program on every weekday evening at seven after dinner and listened to the old time music while he drank his tea. It was soothing. It reminded him of when he was a younger man.

But this day he couldn't seem to relax. On the table next to him sat the tall glass he had poured the chamomile tea into. He leaned back and closed his eyes, but he felt preoccupied.

That was when he realized he was rubbing his hand.

It was his right hand. His good one. Now that he thought about it, he realized that it had been bothering him for days now, he'd just been ignoring it. But after that afternoon, he couldn't stop thinking about it.

The next day, on the way to the grocery, he stared at his hand on the steering wheel as he drove. Now that he was paying attention, the sensation seemed so obvious that he couldn't understand why he couldn't just see the cause. It seemed like something so interruptive should leave some kind of mark. But the hand looked fine, it just didn't feel fine.

And it continued to spread. By dinner that night, he was feeling the sensation all the way up into his forearm. Like a tree growing roots through his bones. It still didn't hurt, but he was beginning to take it seriously. He decided to see the doctor the next morning.

That night he dreamt he was drowning in quicksand. His legs were trapped, and no matter how he pulled they seemed to become increasingly confined. He began to struggle, tossing and turning, and with each motion he was further constricted.

He sat up in bed terrified and realized that he had become entangled in the thin cotton bed linen he had pulled over himself when he went to bed three hours earlier. It had been too warm for a blanket, but during the night his sweat had made the bedsheets stick to his flesh and his tossing and turning had only wrapped them tighter around his torso.

He slowed his breathing and tried to distract himself from the terror of the dream. Slowly he realized that the sensation in his arm had spread up to his shoulder. He looked down at his hand, expecting it to be black now with the cancer that seemed to writhe beneath his skin, but still the pink flesh that was revealed to him seemed healthy.

He tried to lay back down and return to sleep, promising himself a visit to the doctor's in the morning, but it was no use. He couldn't ignore the sensation any longer. It was driving him mad.

He thought briefly about getting the old knife he kept beneath his bed and cutting into his arm, just to see if there was something under the skin. He actually reached under the bed and felt the blade with the fingers of his left hand, but he quickly abandoned the thought. It wouldn't be sharp enough and he didn't think he had the stomach to cut his own arm open laying in his bed.

But he couldn't stand it much longer either, and he began to fear what might happen if the sensation spread much further. What if it spread to his face? His brain? He wasn't a man of science, but this thing had him frightened. He staggered to the closet and dragged on some clothes before heading downstairs to put on his jacket and drive to the hospital.

On the way out the door he could feel the sensation reaching up past his shoulder. It seemed to be extending fingers into his neck towards his head. His panic nearly unmanned him as he fumbled for the key to start the old truck.

The hospital wasn't far, but the sensation began to spread faster as he drove. To his mind, it seemed like whatever was happening to him knew he was getting help, and was flying toward some conclusion in an effort to prevent that. It seemed to crawl up the side of his neck, dragging itself by its fingernails just below the surface of his skin. In his terror he began to drive faster and faster, racing against the agonizing advance of the sensation. He ignored stop signs and speed limits as he pushed the old truck towards the hospital.

But he knew he wasn't going to make it. Somehow, without knowing why, he understood that this was a struggle for his life, and that he didn't have a chance. Perhaps if he'd gone to the doctor when he first felt it in his hand. Perhaps if he'd gone in before bed that night. But now it was too late. The thing in his arm was going to win, there simply wasn't time left.

He thought about the old time music he listened to every weekday at seven. It reminded him of when he was younger. He wished he were younger now. Perhaps a younger man could have fought off this thing. Perhaps a younger man would have acted quicker. Perhaps a younger man would still have years left to live before dying here in the road tonight.

He felt it now, in his face. It was slowly oozing up the side of his jaw, towards his right eye. It didn't seem to be spreading down into his chest or back. It had a destination. It was headed not for his heart, but for his brain. He had no idea why, but he was filled with dread at the thought of what might happen when it got there. What he might become. He couldn't live like that. Whatever it was, he couldn't let it take him over.

The sound of the front left quarter panel striking the metal guard rail along the side of the bridge sounded like someone dragging broken bottles across a chalk board. It buckled at first and tried to push the truck back onto the road, as though the bridge itself couldn't fathom why he might want to leave it. But he kept the wheel turned hard into the rail and it quickly broke away. His front left tire went over the edge of the bridge and out over the empty space below just as the sensation reached into his eye.

He saw such things. Things he had never imagined in his simple life. It showed him what it was, and he understood now. How it had come to be inside him. What it meant to accomplish. It showed him the things that could be achieved. It took seven seconds for his truck to crash against the icy water running in the river below the bridge, and in those seven seconds he saw everything.

The impact drove his body first into the steering wheel, and then immediately past it and through the windshield beyond. Hard against the water below, the windshield was heavily reinforced, and the impact destroyed most of the structure of his head and upper torso instantly. No longer conscious of his experience, he was spared the terror and agony of that incredible impact, and as the truck drove him deeper into the cold dark water, and the parts of his body that continued to function long after being rendered irrelevant shut down from hypothermia and blood loss, the sensation which had begun in his hand faded away. Some parts of his brain were still receiving signals from his spine and efforting to understand them, but that was just the final electrical discharges of a collapsing biochemical system. There was nothing left to interpret those signals. No one left to act upon them.

People would fail to understand what would drive a seemingly sensible, middle aged man to get dressed and drive off a bridge in the middle of the night. They would assume drugs or alcohol, but none would be present. Eventually they would decide he must have simply fallen asleep, or become distracted. Perhaps he just lost control.

He might have, had he not take that last action. Perhaps he even did as that first tire slipped off the road. Certainly by the time he hit the water.

But he had been in control when he pulled the wheel into the guard rail.

It had been a conscious, deliberate act by a man who was admittedly desperate and afraid, but still in control.