My Ex's Uncle, My Trap novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Hands

"That's your hand," Dakota said.

"That's my hand."

"He filmed your hand and put his name on it."

"He used to film me working," I said. "He said it was for the slides. He said it was cute."

The machinist took the phone from the theater kid and held it at arm's length, squinting.

"He didn't even crop it," he said. "Amateur."

I put my left hand down on the workbench, flat, under the lamp.

The comma burn looked back at me.

"Somebody take a picture," I said.

Dakota held her phone over the bench.

I paused Winston's video on the frame where the soldering iron came close, the burn clear as day, and held my phone beside my hand.

Click.

I posted it at 1:31 a.m. with no caption.

Same hand.

Then I slept on the control-room couch for four hours.

When I woke up, the post had sixty thousand views.

By Thursday lunch, campus had split down the middle.

Half of them were posting their own hands with the comma drawn on in Sharpie.

The other half said I'd burned myself on purpose this week to match the video.

"Look," Dakota said, scrolling. "A sophomore drew it on his forehead."

Winston didn't take the video down. He turned off comments.

The build started Thursday night in the back room.

Two folding tables, the machinist's lathe on a dolly, and every work light in the building pointed at one spot.

I drew the whole thing again on the back of old waiver forms.

Stage one, the dial. Stage two, the sliding maze. Stage three, the pendulum.

On Friday, my mother showed up at nine at night with a casserole dish the size of a car door.

"Pierogi bake," she said. "Everybody eats. Nobody solders with their mouth full."

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