The Finger
The finger fell from the sky, fell from the sky and landed on the traffic island beside Joe’s car. Federation Avenue is congested and slow on weekday mornings when driving west to east. In contrast the two lanes going the other way were flowing freely.
Joe did not see the finger’s trajectory. He just saw a movement out of the corner of his eye as he sat in his car, the last in a queue of traffic that had passed through the last green light to only sit still and impotent again, waiting for the next set of lights to go green to allow the next smelly dump of traffic to pass through.
When he turned his head to see properly what had caught his eye he stared for some time. Then he said to himself,
“That’s a finger, that’s a fucking finger.”
And it was. From where he sat Joe could have taken off his seat belt, opened the car door, reached over, picked the finger up and still kept at least one leg in the car. The finger looked female and the nail was long, manicured and painted a blush pink. The severed end was red but dry. It sat on the concrete amongst gravel, bookended by a prickly weed and an empty potato chip packet.
Time passed and the traffic did not move and Joe still gaped at the finger. Eventually he looked up and his mind began to whir. Joe realised the finger had not literally fallen from the sky but had obviously been dropped or more likely thrown. But from where?
He looked around. It could have been from any of the cars that had streamed past him in the last minute. It could have come from some of the cars in front of him but if it had, he had no idea which one. All he could see were the silhouettes of the drivers’ heads still as they sat in their cars. No ride sharing here, there was not one car with a passenger.
He could not see any pranksters or a TV film crew watching and waiting to catch the gullible or, as he preferred to think of himself, the civil minded. He knew the finger was a real human finger, he just knew.
Joe’s heart was pounding and his mouth was filling with saliva. He swallowed heavily and looked around again. The finger was still there. No one else seemed to have noticed it. Realistically the only other car with any chance of seeing it would be the one behind him. Joe quickly gazed into the rear view mirror. The driver was a young woman who was clearly texting on her mobile.
“Clearly finger loss is not an issue there”, Joe said quietly to himself and he smiled at his wit. His fear was now fading and was being replaced with a strange exhilaration.
Joe reached for his own mobile to dial the police. He began to plan and rehearse what he would say to the operator. He was hoping for a difficult but savvy mix of black humour, factual detail and concern but Joe thought he might save his best lines for the media interviews afterwards.
Suddenly a man appeared between the two lines of stopped cars and started jaywalking towards him. He was young and big and dressed in construction clothes. He looked to Joe to be of South Sea Islander descent, perhaps from Tonga or Fiji and his orange safety vest barely covered his muscled torso.
Joe realised he must have looked panicked because the man looked up and after a second gave him a broad smile as he turned, passed in front of Joe’s car and stepped on to the traffic island just a metre from the finger.
The feeling of frustration in Joe was almost overwhelming. He was torn between winding down his window and saying, no yelling at the young man, “Look! Look what I found,” while pointing with his own index finger at some woman’s index finger lying on the concrete. But in the end, awash with some weird combination of the fear of looking responsible and the desire for the finger situation to be his and only his to reveal to a stunned world, he said nothing.
The construction worker didn’t pause anyway and he did not look down. He had seen a gap in the oncoming traffic and was already halfway across the opposite lanes. Joe collapsed back in his seat and was surprised at the amount of tension in his body. He had to breathe deeply and shrug and shake out the muscles across his shoulders and upper arms. Once again he looked down to dial his phone.
It was then another movement caught the corner of his eye.
Turning his head towards the traffic island he saw the finger was still there but it was now resting in the beak of a large black crow. All strut and shiny orb, the crow turned its head, looked Joe right in the eye and then took off.
Quickly the finger was lost to Joe’s sight as the crow flew away. That was the last he saw of it before a horn from the car behind him jerked him back to the present. He looked in the rear-view mirror and the young lady, now mobile phone free, used both hands and all ten fingers to wave him forward.
Joe grabbed the steering wheel and gently accelerated. Only a few seconds passed before he had closed up the gap between his car and the one in front and he was stopped again.
After a while Joe opened his eyes and looked in the rear vision mirror. The young lady was texting again. Joe turned his head towards the centre of road. Ahead he could see stopped cars and a black bird in the distance, perched on a power pole. He closed his eyes and sighed.
