Regina Durette programmed a different tone to each key on her keyboard—the ocean, a shoe dropping, birdsong, door slams—so that when she typed, she would hear a unique, organic orchestral piece. She was a visionary artist: the world always revealed juxtapositions and connections to her.
She had a reputation and she was often invited to perform. People respected her work, even if they didn’t like it. She would select a chapter from a book or an article from a magazine, and typing it would assemble the words into a unique experience of sound. “How do you settle on a name for each composition?” a journalist once asked her, and she stared at him for long moments before answering, “I pick numbers out of a bowl and then I count to that word in whatever I’ve typed and that is the name of the composition.”
She had performed pieces called “And” and “Quickly.” People were intrigued by the haphazard yet wildly suggestive names of her works. Despite the selection process, however, she led a systematic life. She used numbers to make decisions, to begin and end her sessions, to decide who her friends were. Throughout her loft there were bowls of all descriptions, glass, enamel, pottery, plastic, or stone, containing slips of folded paper with numbers inside them. On restless days she would write numbers down and refill the bowls. She would choose a number, choose a book, and open to the page number and begin. A second number might suggest the number of pages or lines to type in her composition.
For a while now she had been obsessed with the number five. What did it mean to be so obsessed?
“Bring me five cups of coffee,” she ordered one of her interns (she always had interns). “With five spoons of sugar and five drops of milk!”
Her interns were clever and sometimes adjusted her orders to make life livable, because Regina did not really like her coffee too sweet. In the spirit of the thing, however, they could distribute the five spoons of sugar through all the cups rather than into each cup, and do the five drops of milk five times for each cup. Regina knew these tricks and smiled at them.
On a weekend without interns, however, Regina went to make her own coffee and found that her left hand was resisting. She would hold a spoon in her right hand and try to grasp the coffee grinder in the left, but her left hand walked away from it. That is, all her fingers rode up and down and moved her hand away.
“What’s happening?” she said out loud.
Her pointer finger turned towards her and said, “No.”
She stared at her hand dumbly, waiting to make sense of it all.
“I don’t like having to do what you insist I should do,” the finger said. “I would rather do something else. And all this pounding on keys is just too low-level for me. I’m too smart for it.”
“It’s always all about you,” the finger next to it said, wagging at Regina. “You always think you’re the leader.”
“And I don’t like your politics,” the middle finger said. “I refuse to type anything to do with politics.”
The nails of her fingers were all looking at her. That’s the way she experienced it—that the nails had subtle, barely visible faces, in various states of disapproval, and they glanced to either side when their fellow digits spoke, and then at her, their nail-faces frowning.
“Fine,” she said, offended. “I’ll use my right hand only, then.” She glanced quickly at her right hand, but all looked well there, and those fingers were behaving as they should. She let her left hand wiggle and argue on its own, noticing that occasionally one digit would try to smack into its neighbor digit. The pinkie, at one point, tried to walk away.
But her right hand dutifully added sugar to her coffee, and put a slice of bread in the toaster. She was able to butter the bread one-handed by slicing small pats and putting them on the toast, which she put back on top of the toaster, where it was warm. That worked pretty well. She could only take things one at a time, so she took her coffee and put it on the stand next to the sofa, then went back and got her toast and put it on a plate and took that to the sofa stand. She opened the door and got her newspaper, and had some trouble opening it up, but she stepped on it at one point and ripped it in half, which made it easier. The way the morning had gone she would be content to read only half the news, and it didn’t matter which half.
Her left fingers kept jerking and prowling around, but she had more strength than they did, so she stood her ground or sat her ground and ate her toast and drank her coffee and tried her best to read what she could. But it was exhausting. The fingers were very active and also very argumentative. Each was intent on being the toughest finger, as she knew because she had no choice but to hear what they were saying, though she was trying to tune them out. Ah, I’ll muffle them, she thought, and searched for her gloves. She took out every pair she could find and put the thinnest glove on first, and then a woolen one over it. It was certainly an odd thing but she immediately felt better.
She sat back down and tried to work out exactly what was happening. She had never heard of such a thing before, but perhaps people kept it to themselves. One of the fingers had started cursing and she could see where it might be awkward in social situations, because she was fairly certain they were getting better and better at insults. They were aggressive fingers.
Normally, when she was upset, she would type a new orchestral arrangement out. She would have to adapt or give up her profession. She shook herself slightly, clenched her teeth, and stood up to go over to her keyboard.
But only one foot was going with her.
The other foot jammed itself under the sofa, lifting its toes up so that they operated as a wedge.
“This is crazy!” she cried out. She was not one of those people who lived alone and talked to themselves endlessly, but some kind of protest was obviously in order. Perhaps they were in fact taking advantage of her because she lived alone? She picked up her cell phone and found the phone number of her head intern and let it ring. When someone picked up, her thumb slammed down on the stop button, which was not what she intended to do.
She was stunned. She stared at the phone in her hand. Her thumb waved at her—there was no other way to describe it—and threw the phone across the room. It had a very expensive sleeve on it, so it wasn’t damaged much, and she could hear her intern’s voice saying, “Hello? Hello? Regina?”
Her foot leapt out from under the sofa and dragged her over to the phone and trampled it mercilessly.
Her thumb began jabbing her in the chest, pushing her backwards.
“Stop,” Regina hissed. “Just what the hell do you want?”
Her thumb grinned at her. Her thumb had a nasty grin. “We want our freedom. All of us. We’ve been planning this for months. You never ask what we want to do. You never ask where we want to go, what movies we prefer, whether we like the hand cream you use. You just go ahead ignoring us, pretending we’re not here, that you don’t rely on us, need us. So we’re seceding!”
She was startled. Her eyebrows flew up. Thank God her eyebrows were still on her side. “Seceding?” she asked, completely unclear about what they could mean. Could a finger secede from a hand? Or was the hand going too? Then what about her arm? The idea of how many body parts might be involved made her light-headed. Her head! What if her head left her?
Her hands were clasping each other. Who had taken the gloves off the left hand? She hadn’t. It was agonizing, trying to keep track of everything her digits and feet were doing. This was crazy, she thought. It was in no one’s interest to secede.
“But if you do that, how will I type?” she asked.
“We’ve been doing the typing. Own up to it.”
“But it will look so strange,” Regina said, aghast. She had always liked the way her hands looked, the nimbleness, the smoothness. All of that would be ruined. “Everyone will notice. Can’t we compromise somehow?”
Was the pinkie smirking?
“I want to be the first finger,” the middle finger said. “I’ll stay if I can do that. The middle finger always gets snide comments.”
“Better a snide comment than nothing at all,” the thumb said. “Really, no one thinks of me.”
“You’re needed for grasping,” Regina argued. “You prove we’re a higher animal.”
“Grasping,” the thumb said with contempt.
She wasn’t used to contempt. “That’s it,” she snapped, finally. “You’re not going anywhere. I need you for my art.”
“About that,” the pointer said, and they all looked at each other expectantly.
“We don’t like it. It’s just noise.”
Regina’s jaw dropped. “But I’m famous!” She was used to criticism—of course she was. But not, so to speak, her own criticism.
“Go out at the top,” the middle finger said.
The idea made her feel awful. She cast her eyes around her wonderful loft, the lightness, the brightness, the glory of it all—she couldn’t “go out” at all. Not if there was any way of saving her career.
“Or we leave,” the middle finger continued. “We can leave in any number of ways. Pop out of the joint like a jack-in-the-box. Cut off our circulation and drop off like leaves. A few other ways not quite as nice.”
Regina lowered her head. “This will ruin me.”
The thumb, as usual, had a better grasp of the situation. “Maybe we can find a new way of working together. We’ll let you type your music if you’ll let us lead. Let us create. We know as much as you do and when you think about it, you have to agree it was really us all along who made the orchestrations. Give us credit for it.”
“Credit?” She was eager to find something to save the situation, but what were they suggesting? “You want credit under a different name?”
Her hands fluttered as the fingers whispered together. They were jerking themselves in excitement. “By Regina Durette’s Fingers,” the thumb finally said in satisfaction. “That’s the right name for it. From now on, everything should be labeled ‘By Regina Durette’s Fingers.’ ”
Regina was dazed. Through it all she had been wondering what she would do without fingers and she knew the answer was—Nothing. Her fingers were everything to her art. What choice did she have? “I want to collaborate occasionally,” she said finally. “I don’t want to feel like I’m just riding along.”
They all laughed heartily at that. “Our turn,” the thumb shouted. “Our turn!”
“All right, then, we all agree,” the pointer said. “We’ll move around and take our new places and we’ll get credit and everything will go on beautifully.”
“What about my toes?” Regina asked. “They almost tripped me up earlier.”
“Toes are followers,” the pinkie said. “They don’t deserve to be treated like fingers.” At this, Regina’s toes began to wriggle. The pinkie sighed. “I was joking, of course. They take us everywhere so, let’s see—let them pick out the title.” Regina and the fingers waited for the toes’ response. “Toss your numbers on the floor and let them slide a number out.” The pinkie cleared its throat and shouted, “Are you with us?” and the toes rippled a bit inside Regina’s shoes and then shrugged.
“Now,” the thumb continued. “We’re going to rearrange ourselves. Look away.”
She closed her eyes and turned her head and felt something like strong waves slapping at her hands, and when they said, “Okay now! Here we are!” she looked down and saw that the fingers were all in the wrong places, pinkie at the thumb, thumb as the pointer, middle to ring, pointer as the middle, and ring as pinkie. The left hand had managed it a bit differently. Her fingers looked obscene.
She walked over to the keyboard and flexed her hands. The fingers felt around for a moment, and then she began to type tentatively. The fingers hit with an erratic strength, which changed in the course of the composition.
For all her fears that her career was ruined, her new works were greeted with an almost exultant applause. The rhythm was new, erratic, and strangely liberating, as if there was a strange awakening in the sounds. Critics said there was a revelation in the music, a new start that was rare in a career that had already begun to be predictable. Her fingers glowed with pride.
At the end of her recitals, now, she nodded slowly and briefly, then raised her hands up flat, nails forward. All of her fingers bowed down modestly in front of the crowd, and as the crowd roared, they bowed again.
In their seats, down one aisle and up another, people found that their hands became restless, stopping the clapping, waving slowly back. The fingers stood up proudly, inspired, as if to say, I could have done that, suddenly understanding that there was a world of things possible for them. One by one the fingers thought, “And now I may begin.”
Author’s note: Copyright (c) 2022 by Karen Heuler; first appeared in the author’s own collection, A SLICE OF THE DARK published by Fairwoods Press; reprinted by permission of the author.
This story previously appeared in A Slice of the Dark through Fairwood Books.
Edited by E. S. Foster.
Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over 130 literary and speculative magazines and anthologies, from Asimov’s to Conjunctions to Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well as a number of Best Of anthologies. Her most recent novel is The Splendid City (Angry Robot Books), a political satire with a ridiculous cat and a state that secedes from the U.S., and her latest short-story collection is A Slice of the Dark from Fairwood Press.