Shaking Hands

“I have never been held by hands that didn’t shake.”

Charlie
Charlie
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

I have never been held by hands that didn’t shake.

After the war first came, hands shook as my first keeper clutched me close, alone in his bunker of steel and concrete. When the monsters made it through the door, he fired me in terror, chipping the low-quality material from the walls and revealing the shoddy workmanship that inevitably left him dead.


My second keeper was a soldier, but his hands shook too. A veteran of a war against fellow humans that he would make inhuman in his mind to detach himself from the horrors of war.

The monsters were different, though, and were always the same no matter how he tried to see them. He could not make them anything else in his mind than what they were, and he was horrified.

His hands shook as he took the final shots before they dragged him away.

I lay in the dirt for a few years. I do not know for how long, but I know that I became rusty and forlorn. I protected no one.


He found me before I succumbed to complete failure. He cleaned me, oiled me, repaired me, and for a long while I held steadier than I ever had in his hands.

His daughter was a young girl, sweet and innocent, unbowed and unbroken by the horrors of this new world. He used me to keep her safe.

Some days, she would wield me, her small fingers trembling before the recoil of each shot. I was much too powerful for her to do much more than train with, but I gave both father and daughter a sense of security.

When the day came she was bitten, I was too far away to be of any help, propped up against a milking stall in the barn of the farmhouse they had selected as shelter.

I heard the screams in the distance, his voice begging the monsters to take him, and not her, not his precious daughter. She was all he had.

He came running into the barn and picked me up from the dirt. I was already loaded, but he struggled to aim me with trembling hands.

I saw what had happened to her. Her eye were wild and bloodshot, her teeth sharp and dripping. The man cried as she pawed at him and attempted to sink those teeth into her own father's skin.

He sobbed harder than I had ever heard any man cry as he pressed me again the chest of his only reason to live, and pulled the trigger.

For a while after, we both lay there, resting in the dirt. Smoke poured from me into the air and trickled into his nostrils as his chest rose and fell regularly. We were there for a very long time.

His hands shook as he pulled me towards him, almost as though I was his daughter, resting his head on me.

It wasn't until I felt his fingers depress my trigger and a pulse rolled through me that I realised what he was doing. What he had done.

I fell to the dusty floor, his fingers loosely coiled around me, and that is where I lay now. I do not know how long I have been here, but I pray it won't be for much longer.

My purpose is to protect, but I cannot do it alone; I need the hands of others to guide me.

As I lay here, I wonder when the next hands will find me. Will they shake?

)

Charlie

Written by

Charlie

Incapable human. Twitter: @Eilrahhc

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