He dreams of them sometimes, five pairs of hands, reaching for him, swiping at his eyes, wrapping around his midsection. Fifty squirming, grasping fingers, sticky with candy already eaten and always demanding the next piece. “More, Daddy, more,” their voices cry from unseen mouths. Always in the dream it is the hands, detached somehow from their bodies, imbued with twitching motions and will and want of their own. Child-scaled limbs, dismembered, somehow horribly alive.
In the morning, he is awakened by one of those hands, small, warm, urgent as it scrabbles over his blanket, pulling back the corner, exposing his skin to the morning chill.
“I’m hungry, Daddy. I want breakfast.”
He squints at the clock, too groggy to register time from the light filtering through the lace curtains over his bed. Six. Technically morning. He looks over at his wife, the twisted arrangement of her limbs. The baby is entangled in the opening of her nightgown, playing at her breast with fingers too small to be controlled in their motions, doll-like cheeks flushed with the hourly repast of a nighttime’s nursing.
“Okay, Jonathan,” he tells the two-year-old, “I’m coming. Go wait for me in the kitchen.” He is rewarded with the toddler’s momentary withdrawal from his bed, the receding slap of vinyl footed pajamas tracking his progress towards the kitchen. Ignoring the pull of his bladder, he shuffles his own bare feet down the tread of the hallway carpet, twitching involuntarily at the transition to the cold tiles of the kitchen floor.
“I’m hungry, Daddy,” his son repeats. “Cheerios.”
“How do you...
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