The Finger

by Peter Cherches

          I met Sandi in 1984. She was a dancer in a performance piece I did in collaboration with choreographer Kathleen MacDonald called “Five Women.” I interviewed each of the dancers, none of whom I’d met before, and put together tall tales about them based on their true stories, which I delivered wearing a suit and chomping on an unlit cigar as a prop, like George Burns or Alan King, as the women took their solo features. Little did I know that my tall tales were nothing compared to what would befall Sandi not long after, truth indeed being stranger than fiction.

          Sandi and I hit it off during rehearsals. She was a real wise guy, a great verbal sparring partner. We started seeing a lot of each other.

          One summer evening, when we were heading to dinner in the East Village, Sandi suddenly called out, “Wait!” I waited as she bent down and picked up a five-dollar bill.

          She told me she was always finding money on the street, that the secret was to always look down when walking, especially near parking meters. Sandi found hundreds of dimes and quarters this way, and occasionally even a twenty-dollar bill.

          A few months later, she called me and in a quavering voice told me she’d found a finger on the street—a severed finger with a gold wedding band around it. It repulsed her, but she knew she had to pick it up and bring it to the police. So she wrapped it in a Kleenex and put it in her purse. She took a cab to the police station and handed the finger over to the officer at the desk, explaining where she had found it. The policeman assured her that there would be a thorough investigation and asked Sandi for her address, in case there were any further questions.

          For months Sandi couldn’t get the finger out of her mind. She told me of dreams filled with severed fingers and fingerless men. She had one dream where, at her own wedding, as she was putting the ring on the groom’s finger, the finger fell off the groom’s hand onto the floor. She woke up screaming.

          “I’ve stopped looking down when I’m walking,” she told me. “I don’t want to know what’s on the street; I don’t care how much money I’m passing up.” She was eventually able to put the finger out of her mind.

          Then, one day about a year later, a policeman rang her doorbell and handed her a package.

          Nobody had claimed the finger, so now it was hers.

Called “one of the innovators of the short short story” by Publishers Weekly, Peter Cherches has published seven short fiction collections since 1986. His writing has also appeared in scores of magazines, anthologies and websites, including Harper’s, Bomb, 

Semiotext(e), Fence, North American Review, and Fiction International, as well as Billy Collins’ Poetry 180. His latest book is Things (Bamboo Dart Press, 2023), a collection of experimental short prose and poetry. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he is also a jazz singer and lyricist.