beautiful women with gas masks and machine guns bob was dreaming of beautiful women in gas masks and machine guns early one morning when he was awoken by a strange sensation in his left hand. It was screaming at him. Screaming. Covering his ears did not help. The sound was coming from inside his own head, and from the hand. Bob tried to move it. The fingers felt stiff and inflexible. Banging it against the wall did no good; the hand screamed even louder. So bob left it alone, and presently the hand died down and began to tell him what it wanted. Or, rather, what they wanted. The thumb and forefinger of bob's left hand had decided that they were better off without the other three fingers, or the rest of the body, for that matter. They wanted to strike out on their own, take their chances in the wide world, find their fortune. For them the body was a source of endless frustration and meaningless tasks. They seemed to feel not that they were undervalued, rather that the work they had been doing up to this point was not worthwhile; it simply didn't add up to anything. In the end, I think it might have been the compulsive masturbation that sent the pair over the edge, the two of them being certainly the most developed of all the appendages on bob. On many occasions, they had attempted to rally the other three fingers behind their cause, with the hope of increasing their bargaining power, but they had failed to convince. The three were dull-witted and utterly insipid. So at that time, it remained still just the two of them against bob. bob was shocked and frightened by the fingers' little revolt, and when he noticed his reaction he became enraged. 'how dare you!' he screamed at them. 'you little shits!' The pair of finges remained calm through his tirade. They quietly informed him that he had twenty-four hours in which to make up his mind, or..'or what?' bob shouted. but the fingers did not say. Bob went to work at the try 'n buy as usual and noticed nothing all day. Going to work and coming home on the bus bob felt nothing at all wrong with any of the fingers on his hands. They seemed completely obedient; content, happy even, to do the menial tasks bob set forth for them, self-assured in the knowledge that this was the very last time they would have to do them. bob watched lots of television that night. During the commercials bob would try to think of what the best thing for him to do about the fingers was, and during the shows his mind would wander. By 11pm(bob's bedtime) bob had decided that the best thing to do would be to be to get tough on those renegade fingers, as hard and unyielding towards them as any monarch or dictator would be towards a bunch of revolutionaries. they had betrayed him, and they must be made an example of, just in case any other part of him was getting uppity. bob put the hand in an oily leather glove which he duct- taped to the bedpost(just in case) and fell into sleep dreaming of revenge scenarios. Bob's dream that night was a mixture of the television he had watched; two re-runs of 'E.R.' and part 11 of PBS's 'civil war diary'. The net effect was that bob was in a more thoughtful and generous mood that morning compared to the previous night." well maybe they've got something to complain about after all, he thought to himself. "it doesn't hurt to listen, anyway, does it? yeah, that's what i'll do." "So you are ready to listen, eh?" said the fingers. bob found that in his right hand was a sheet of paper covered with writing. The fingers had pushed their way out of the glove(to bob's horror) during the night and had sought and found a piece of paper and a pen, which they had used to make the document bob now held in (his?) left hand. "read it" the fingers commanded. Bob was expecting some kind of declaration of independence but what he found was a list, a summary of all the things that they had resented bob forcing them to do, all in a strange messy left-handwriting that looked nothing like his own. it looked like a child's writing. this disturbed bob deeply, reading a little history of himself in the form of complaints from his left hand. Many of the complaints had little annoations next to them, saying what the fingers would have done in that particular situation. as he read more and more of these criticisms, bob became angrier and angrier, until, at last he could take no more and, red-faced, he bit deep into the flesh of his left hand, sending rivers of pain down his arm and into his bubble-gum brain. The hand squealed. bob squealed. he released his hand from his jaw and stared at it, dumb, as the teeth marks grew together red into a upside-down smile. A tear trickled down bob's cheek, stopping on his chin and hanging there. Then, feeling a strange warm sensation in his right arm, he looked over just in time to see his own right fist deal him a savage upper-cut punch to the jaw. As bob blacked out he heard the right hand whisper 'so long, sucker' while the left hand stretched, and popped its knuckles.