My left hand had come off by itself, during the night, and floated down toward the foot of the bed, falling with me as I fell through sleep, but not attached to me anymore. It was cold and limp, and the thought of it, my numb own fingers brushing my foot as I slept, sent a crushing wave of nausea through me. I flung the thing away. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the stump at the end of my arm—I knew it would be raw, red tissue, inflamed and weeping, with the bones protruding like glistening white molars. Bile gushed in my throat, and I slid off the bed and checked the linen for signs of blood, but there was only a little damp spot, down by where my waist had been—such a small spot, it didn’t seem likely that the prodigious amount of blood I must have lost would have dried so quickly or left so little trace, and the fluid there didn’t smell like blood at all. It might have been saliva, I guess. Perhaps the stump dripped saliva?

I turned, and my eyes fell, of course, on the box. It sat in the center of my desk, even though I had put it away in its usual hiding place the night before. I didn’t need to think about it. For once in my pitiful life, I knew exactly what I was doing. It was necessary to do it in one decisive movement—right now. Even a moment’s delay would show a lack of faith, and I could lose it all. So I went directly to the box, opened it, pulled out my hand of glory, removing it from the box for the first time, and now I knew why I’d been so careful to keep it virgin, keep it in the box until now, so that its powers would not be in the least dispersed until it was ready, because this was something that had to happen, and that had always had to happen, and I pressed the severed end of the ragged, leathery wrist to the numb and raw stump of my left arm, hearing my left hand flop on the floor behind me in an impotent protest. My eyes were shut hard, streaming with tears. There was no pain, but I felt an explosion of fiery itching that made me bark and leap in place, strangling my sobs as best I could. The echoes of my voice in the silent room came back to me like the noises an animal might make in pain.