So, even though my life was, in every way, the same empty farce, the same drudgery, the same loneliness it had always been, and Mack was Mack, cousin Doris was still the same, I was waking up each morning refreshed and even lively, with a spring in my step, a certain lust for life. It had to be my hand of glory. Sometimes, when I woke up, I would find myself standing already at my desk, the box open in front of me, my fingers outstretched, brushing the dry tendons, the ridges of skin pleached up at the joints. If I turned from it to face my day, I did it unwillingly, it’s true, but with a harder, more valiant core inside me all the same. The hand of glory picked me. I just couldn’t forget it. Some people noticed a change, I’m sure, but what did it matter to them whether or not I changed? At the end of the day, when it seemed as though I should feel defeated, I would open the box and brush the hand of glory with my fingers, and something like a dim foreshadowing of ecstasy would sometimes flicker up in me, as if my heart had turned to solid gold.

It was first thing New Year’s Day when I woke up feeling something in the bed with me. It was soft and chilled, down by my left foot. I reached down to grab it, see what it was, but somehow, I couldn’t find it, couldn’t feel anything down there but the weight of the sheet and the cover. Finally I had to turn in my narrow bed to snatch it, thinking that maybe a mouse or something had died in there with me, but my left hand was what my right hand was holding when I brought it back up from beside my feet.