“I know the place like the back of my hand.” It’s a saying we all know and use that suggests that there’s very little in the world that we’re more familiar with than the backs of our own hands. I always believed that old saying, until the day I noticed something very UNfamiliar about the back of my left hand.

I had been working at my computer when I glanced down at my hands and noticed four tiny holes in the back of my hand; they looked like very large pores. What bothered me was the placement of the pores. They were evenly spaced just below the knuckles of each of my fingers. I got up and went into the bathroom to look at them in better light. That’s when I noticed identical holes on my RIGHT hand.

The edges of the tiny holes were extremely neat. They weren’t bleeding, and the skin around them looked healthy. My hands weren’t hurting in any way, the holes weren’t itchy and since there didn’t seem to be anything else wrong, I decided to ignore them.

At least, I tried to ignore them. I really did. But everything thing I did with my hands that day brought my gaze back to those tiny little holes. When I picked up my knitting, I saw the holes. When I washed the dishes, I saw the holes, and wondered if water was getting into them. When I was cooking, I saw them and started to worry about the raw chicken somehow INFECTING them. I started to wash my hands obsessively.

It was really hard to sleep that night. I morbidly started picturing bugs crawling into the holes to make nests in my skin. I was feeling nauseous at the thought. I got up to go into the bathroom to cover them with bandaids in the hope I could sleep a little easier. That’s when I noticed that the holes had grown a little larger.

”Oh God,” I moaned, and sat down dizzily on the toilet seat. I looked closely at the holes. I could see into my hands. Pink skin gave way to raw flesh. Shuddering, I covered the holes with bandages and swore to go to the clinic first thing in the morning when it opened.

Nightmares about the holes kept me tossing and turning for the rest of the night, and every time I woke, sweating and shaking, I’d pray for the morning to come.
When the sun finally rose, I stumbled blearily out of bed. I didn’t want to look at my hands, but my morbid curiosity got the better of me. I peeled off the bandages and looked at the holes. What I saw then made the world go grey, and I fainted dead away. When I came to, some time later, I looked again to verify what I thought I had seen. There they were; each of the holes had grown to the size of a kernel of barley. In each of the eight holes was a seed, spring green in colour and slightly teardrop-shaped.

Clenching back vomit, I stumbled to the bathroom and rooted about in my medicine cabinet for a pair of tweezers to remove these alien things from my hands. They came out easily enough, although my hands were shaking uncontrollably as I pulled them out of my flesh. I felt the need to destroy the seeds, to utterly obliterate them. I crushed each of them between the tips of my tweezers, and rinsed them down the sink drain with scalding hot water from the tap. I washed my hands with globs of liquid soap in the same scalding water, burning and blistering my skin in the process.

I knew I wasn’t able to drive in my current state, so I painfully dialed for an ambulance to take me to the hospital. I must have sounded deranged on the phone, stuttering and telling a story that made utterly no sense. The EMCs came to my door and took a look at the state of my hands, burned and wounded, and made the obvious decision that I had been harming myself. They bundled me into the ambulance and took me straight to the mental health ward of the hospital.

“What did you use to make these holes?” the nurse asked me. The strong EMCs had strapped me down to a gurney to keep me immobile because I kept digging at the holes in my hands, looking for more seeds.

“I DIDN’T,” I screamed, struggling with the urge to scratch at my hands.

“But you burned them,” she stated.

“YES, I did, to kill the seeds!” I replied frantically. It is no wonder they took me to a quiet room and kept me strapped down to the bed while waiting for the psychiatrist to arrive.

Bound down as I was, I couldn’t look at my hands. I was desperate to see if the holes had gotten larger, if the seeds had come back. I howled to be freed, and flailed against my straps. By the time the doctor arrived, I was exhausted, sweating and trembling all over.

“Please,” I begged him, “please can I just look at my hands?”

“I don’t think that’s a wise idea,” he replied, not even GLANCING at my maimed hands. He was far more concerned with the state of my mind than what might be happening to my hands. He asked me the same questions the nurse had asked. As I became more and more frantic to free myself, he finally gave up and gave me an injection to calm me. In the time he was with me, he never once looked at my hands. I fell unconscious before he even left the room.

When I woke up the next morning, I carefully craned my neck to look down at my hands. They were flaming with pain from the scalding. To my extreme distress, I saw the nurse had carefully wrapped them both in gauze. Then my eyes widened with horror as I saw a scrap of colour against the sterile white of the gauze; tiny tendrils of spring-green were pushing out between the professionally-wrapped gauze, stretching towards the light from the bedside window!

I screamed for the nurse, as I was unable to press the call button and yanked against my bonds with such strength that I was sure I’d pull myself free. She came running into my room, with a syringe in hand, ready to tranquilize me again. I stopped dead in mid-panic to stare with horrified fascination at the tiny holes in the back of her hand.