Hands Of A Witch

Two grotesque hands, old and wrinkled, wrap around a neck, squeezing tighter and tighter. Each finger stretches unnaturally apart and around, again and again, coiling down the body. Long sharp black fingernails scratch along the skin. The ribcage collapses, the air escapes in a deep horrified wheeze. The eyes drip blood then pour like running faucets. Every organ bursts, every bone breaks, every muscle rips, the body closes in on itself like a burst balloon. The impossibly long fingers loop in an ever tightening pattern. A strange pulsing occurs, each finger tip like the mouth of a leech, the blood, the bone, the liver and kidneys, stomach and intestines, sucked through the labyrinth passages up and around, towards the ever enlarging hands, floating in the air as they make a disgusting wet sloshing sound, seeming ready to burst.

The fingers release their victim, slowly then quickly winding back into the semblance and size of normal fingers, if only bulging with some sick meal still oozing into the still growing hands. The shriveled body drops lifeless to the floor, an expression remains on the flattened face of intense unimaginable pain. The two hands float strangely, like something from a cartoon, drifting through the open window and into the night.

Somewhere in the forest a dead witch sleeps, her body mutilated and torn apart, piece by piece. Lost are the legs, gone are the arms, eaten by wolves or taken as trophies. But the hands remained, one last curse on man, the nightmare duties given to them through the blood of babies and the hearts of men. Flying like bizarre bats through the trees, across vast fields of corn, into small villages where, drop by drop, bone by bone, the witch's hands return the life taken from her.