The Invisible Hand by Lindsay Sproul

I was taking a walk with the girl I was going to marry, when suddenly my legs stopped working. I drank a bunch of tequila after dinner, and figured that was why. We were on a shady street at night, where all of the garbage barrels at the end of the driveways were full to the brim with raccoons.

“I can’t walk, I don’t think,” I said. It was already happening. My legs were curling into themselves, and I was drooping slowly down.

“Oh,” she said calmly. “Just use the Invisible Hand.”

“What’s that?” I asked. I was still sinking down, very, very slowly, but she didn’t try to help me.

“The Invisible Hand,” she said, like I was crazy. “Everyone in New York knows about it.”

We had both lived in New York at the same time, but we never knew each other there. Instead, we met several years later in Florida, which we both agreed was the worst place in the world. For one thing, it was crawling with raccoons, and lizards that bit off each other’s tails and flung them into the mangroves. We always asked each other what in God’s name we were doing there, but we figured we’d gone there pretty much to meet each other.

“Well,” I said, “what is it?” I was getting desperate. I really couldn’t walk.

“You have to call it,” she said. “Everyone has their own.”

I didn’t really know how to call it, but I tried. She was right; it came. It shoved itself underneath my armpit and pulled me up, with a kind of strength that was no-nonsense and a little bit threatening, but also sort of comforting. It smelled, too. It was this smell that I’d always been faintly aware of, and now felt drugged by.

We continued our walk, with it holding me up.

“Wait,” I said. “Why is it called the Invisible Hand if it’s the only thing you can see? And, it’s actually an arm?” What I meant was, the rest of its body was not there, only the arm. It was the arm of a middle-aged milkmaid from two centuries back, maybe from somewhere like Ireland or Wales.

She did not answer me. “Just don’t use it too much,” she said. “It’s very addictive. Melissa O’Grady used hers too much to help her cook dinner, and one night, it poisoned her.”

I did not know Melissa O’Grady. I realized, with a sense of terror but also of excitement, that we’d had two completely separate lives until recently.

“Hers was a boy,” she continued. “With a tattoo of a python coiled around its meaty forearm.”

“So it does other things?” I asked.

“Everyone has their own,” she said. “Aren’t you listening?”

The birds perched on the telephone wires sounded like people pretending to be birds. “This feels like a dream,” I said.

“It’s not.”

“Where is yours?”

She wasn’t looking at me, but at one of the garbage barrels, where a raccoon had escaped with an entire hamburger bun in its mouth. It ran toward us, then turned away sharply, into the forest.

“Mine was a girl, but a young one,” she said. “In New York, I used to use it to fall asleep. I couldn’t sleep without it. It held me all night long.”

“Every night?”

“Until it tried to suffocate me,” she said, shrugging. “After that, I had to get rid of it. I missed it sometimes. That is, until you came along.”

I pushed my face into the arm and it felt good. I wanted to keep it.

“You can’t,” she said. “But, you have to meet it before you can get married. It’s a rule.”

We finished our walk. When we got back to the house, I wanted the arm to come inside with me. I really wasn’t feeling too well. There were lots of things to think about, honestly. For one thing, we didn’t really have jobs. We’d just finished school, and had no idea what to do except be with each other. Then there was the problem of Florida, which we wanted to leave, but leaving costs money.

It didn’t seem fair that I’d only just met the Invisible Hand, I’d had so little time with it, but I knew what I had to do. Really, this is kind of a love story.

I told it to go away. Strangely, I already knew how to do that. You just made the same call you made to bring it to you, except backwards, and it left. After that, it was just the two of us. We sat down on the couch, and she touched me for the first time since before the walk. The raccoons outside were screaming at each other, flinging zip-lock bags all over our driveway.

“What do we do now?” I asked her. My legs were pretty much working again.

“We get to be together. Come on,” she said, walking into the kitchen. “You need to eat something.” Even though it was nighttime, she started making breakfast. I watched her crack eggs into the frying pan, then bend over and squint at the dial, adjusting it. I loved it when she did that. She looked like a scientist.

Lindsay Sproul, originally from Massachusetts, is an assistant professor at Loyola University New Orleans. Her short fiction has appeared in such journals as Epoch, Witness and Glimmer Train, and she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and Columbia University. Her first novel is forthcoming from Putnam/Penguin Random House.