outcrop of bone below the thumb.
"No!" she shrieked, and yanked harder. "I refuse to die this way!
Do you hear me? I REFUSE TO DIE THIS WAY!"
The handcuff bit in deep, and for a moment Jessie was sickeningly sure that it would not move so much as another millimeter, that the next time it moved would be when some cigar-chomping cop unlocked it and took it off her dead body. She could not move it, no power on earth could move it, and neither the princes of heaven nor the potentates of hell would move it.
Then there was a sensation in the back of her wrist that felt like heat-lightning, and the handcuff jerked upward a little. It stopped, then began to move again. That hot, electrical tingle began to spread as it did, quickly becoming a dark burning which first spread all the way around her hand like a bracelet and then bit it like a battalion of hungry red ants.
The cuff was moving because the skin it rested on was moving, sliding the way a heavy object on a rug will slide if someone pulls the rug. The ragged, circular cut she had inscribed about her wrist widened, pulling wet strands of tendon across the gap and creating a red bracelet. The skin on the back of her hand began to wrinkle and bunch ahead of the cuff, and now what she thought of was how the coverlet had looked when she had pushed it down to the bottom of the bed with her pedaling feet.
I'm peeling my hand, she thought. Oh dear Jesus, I'm peeling it likean orange.
"Let go!" she screamed at the handcuff, suddenly infuriated beyond all reason. In that moment it became a live thing to her, some hateful clinging creature with many teeth, like a lamprey eel or a rabid weasel. "Oh, won't you ever let me go?"
The cuff had slid much further than it had on her previous attempts to slip out of it, but still it clung, stubbornly refusing to give her that last quarter (or perhaps it was now only an eighth) of an inch. The bleary, blood-greased circle of steel now lay across a hand partially stripped of skin, baring a shiny meshwork of tendons the color of fresh plums. The back of her hand looked like a turkey drumstick from which the crispy outer skin had been removed. The steady downward pressure she was exerting had yanked the wound across her inner wrist even wider, creating a blood-caked chasm. Jessie wondered if she might not yank her hand right off in this final effort to free herself. And now the handcuff, which had still been moving a little-at least she thought it had been-stopped again. And this time it stopped cold.
Of course it has, Jessie! Punkin screamed. Look at it! It's all crooked! If you could straighten it out again-
Jessie pistoned her arm forward, snapping the handcuff chain back onto her wrist. Then, before her arm could even think of cramping, she pulled downward again, using every bit of strength she had left. A red mist of pain engulfed her hand as the cuff tore across the raw meat between her wrist and the middle of her hand. All the skin which had been pulled away was puddled loosely here, on a diagonal running from the base of her pinky to the base of her thumb. For a moment this loose mass of skin held the cuff back, and then it rolled under the steel with a tiny squelch. That left only that last outcrop of bone, but that was enough to stop her progress. Jessie pulled harder. Nothing happened.
That's it, she thought. Everybody out of the pool.
Then, just as she was about to relax her aching arm, the cuff slid over the small protrusion which had held it for so long, flew off the ends of her fingers, and cracked against the bedpost. It all happened so fast that Jessie was at first unable to grasp that it had happened. Her hand no longer looked like the sort of equipment normally issued to human beings, but it was her hand, and it was free.
Free.
Jessie looked from the empty blood-smeared cuff to her mangled hand, her face slowly filling with comprehension. Looks like a birdthat flew into a factory machine and then got spit out the other end, she thought, but that cuff's not on it anymore. It's really not.
"Can't believe it," she croaked. "Can't. Fucking. Believe it."
Never mind, Jessie.