a dream about hands

Not many were left and the few who were had to watch their back. People wore many faces and often changed their expressions dramatically from a wide smile to a brooding to a confused innocence. Sometimes the change was so quick that between each blink you had a different man stand in front of you in the same body. The colors where both bright as fresh paint and dull and raggy, all at once. It was never quite day and never quite night, the medieval light of northern winter lit the outside, and door and buildings contained different worlds. I was the last singer in the world of cannibals and they needed my hands for business. The hands where the best when they were soft and white and belonged to someone like a singer or a young woman, or both in my case, so that they could be easily liquefied and molded into belts. The unwanted hands were thrown down a deep well-spiral-stair case to the bottom of which no one has ever been. Runaway thoughts and memories fell down this well too, hiding from misuse. They approached me and asked if I could lend my hands for their business, being such a wonderful singer. I agreed, but first, I said, I must take a walk. And I ran as fast as I could toward the well and flew down the stairs and into the darkness, for I knew that with my hands they will take my soul. In the soul-less world, merchants did anything to acquire a soul, for it was worth millions and could power a machine for much longer than any other fuel. I shouted sweetly, trying to conceal my getaway, that I will be right back, I’m just taking a short walk, I shouted up into the darkness, and I felt that they had sent their hounds after me. So I just let my feet tumble and fell. After an eternity of this falling chase I reached the bottom floor, which opened up into a large storage space, blue-gray cement and metal, fluorescent lights and locked doors. I ran through the labyrinth of halls. I didn’t know where I was, touching the doors and running up and down back stairs and elevator shafts. Then I reached the door at the dead end of a hallway that had no handles on the outside, but I opened it, or it opened to me, and I was in, and I knew I made it. This was the ‘afterlife’ ward for singers. In the afterlife they must segregate the males from the females, just like in a hospital or a private religious school, so it was full of women. The whole place looked like a rehabilitation ward, although everyone seemed physically healthy. The hallways were lined with lockers. I was handed a key and a lock and I had to find my locker. Suddenly I was running again and knew that if I didn’t make it in time I wasn’t going to be safe, I wasn’t going to be able to stay here and I would have to go back outside, may be even up and out of the well. With the feeling of being late for the final exam I flew up stairwells and down halls, lined floor to ceiling with small lockers next to which single figures and small groups where calmly conversing and moving things in and out of their lockers. I found my number, quickly opened it and put the bundle of clothes I had in my hand on the bottom shelf. I think it was a cloth hat and a shirt. I also had a bottle of water. I made it in time and stood looking around and catching my breath. A group of women approached me and asked if I wanted to come along.It was time and they saw I was new and they could show me where to go, although it wasn’t too hard, because everyone was going there.  I decided to take the clothes and the water bottle along, just in case, and closed my locker. I was staying here, probably forever, and a deep melancholy overtook me – these were all singers! And I was a painter, I was only a singer up there cause I could sing some, but I was actually a painter and now, surrounded by all these women with their opera statures and singer eyes, I felt a deep longing. Then I realized that to be stuck in a madhouse full of painters for eternity wouldn’t be much better, the melancholy lifted a bit, although my mind was still trembling at the vanishing thoughts of my recent chase, the hounds, the cries, the well, the fluorescent lights, my hands. I had my hands now, everyone here had their hands, and carried notebooks and coffee cups in them. We sat down in a big room, what looked like a cafeteria and a lecture hall at once, and I think we were about to be explained something about our condition. Then I woke up.