Hand Snatcher

So I submitted a story to a contest and lost (the story that won was awesome! Go ahead to writersdigest.com if you'd like to read the winner of the "Your Story Contest")


Here's my submission. I had fun with it, for sure!


"Hand Snatcher"
by Simply Carrot


Jessie was running late for her job interview.

After weeks of calls, rejections, and disappointments, the law office of Peter and Brian Sterns were offering an interview for a receptionist position. Granted, as a recent Biology undergraduate student this was not exactly where her dreams were waiting, but she had a wedding to pay for.

That was, of course, the excuse she would give her soon to be husband for using his car to speed nearly forty-five minutes away to Herndon, Virginia, for the slim chance of stability.

Jessie brushed through Chantilly, fifteen minutes away with ten minutes to get there.  Katy Perry’s “Friday Night” was the background theme to her steadily escalating panic. She screamed at the beat up minivan in front of her to learn how to drive before swerving out of the lane and pressing on the gas.

She was going eighty-five in a forty-five mile per hour zone when the tell-tale lights of a driver’s nightmare popped up in her rearview mirror.  She resisted slamming on her breaks right there. Gradually, she eased on the breaks and moved to the side of the road whispering, “Please go past, please go past.”

It was not her day.

Both cars came to a full stop and she waited the achingly slow seconds it took for the police officer to emerge from his portable cage of doom and broken dreams. Jessie took multiple deep breaths in and out, wishing a bitter farewell to any chances of receiving this receptionist gig.

Three taps on the window brought Jessie face to face with a pair of thick sunglasses and a sweaty chin.

“License and Registration, ma’am,” the dribbling chin asked in a polite, southern bark. Trembling fingers fiddled through Jessie’s wallet to procure the license and she looked around her seat for the registration.

“Sorry,” she said, her voice wobbling for a moment. “This is my fiancé’s car, I don’t know where it is.” Her searching became more frantic.

“Take your time,” he barked again. “That’s also what I could say for your driving!” The sweaty chinned pair of sunglasses laughed and slapped his knee. In any other situation, Jessie would probably walk away or sneer. Too frightened (and too seated) for either of those things, she continued her search.

The officer was still laughing, almost hoarse with it, when she opened the glove compartment and saw something she wasn’t expecting. Well, of course, that is easy to say. Not many people expect there to be a severed hand in their glove compartment.

But there it was, sitting in her fiancé’s glove compartment, with a wedding ring engulfed in black knuckle hair.

Staring at it in shock, Jessie’s mind slowly began to whir.

The officer was still laughing at his own, awful humor, and Jessie was in a car with a very hairy, apparently married hand.

Glancing back at the chortling police man, she did what one must. A burst of courage surged, and she took the hand and flung it to her back seat. To her luck, it landed face up on the back seat. Quickly, she threw her purse after it, successfully hiding it from view.

Apparently, the ruckus was enough to stir the man from his giggles. “Is everything alright in there ma’am?” the man kindly growled.

“Handy!” she responded, immediately.

“Handy?”

“Dandy! I mean, dandy!” Jessie recovered. Where the hand had been lay the registration.

“Here you go, sir,” she responded. The sweaty chin looked at her curiously and within a short amount of time, Jessie had a hefty fine for speeding, a hand in her backseat, and still no job.

…And possibly a hand-snatcher for a fiancé.

All in all, things could be better.