February 4, 1908 [The Thieving Hand]

The honest one-armed man standing on the sidewalk in The Thieving Hand is pitied by the rich man, who takes him to a limb-seller's shop where arms and legs and hands lie on the counter and hang on the wall—and not made of wood and leather and metal joints, but lively when attached to the one-armed man, playful and restless like a conjuror's hand flourishing before—well, before the hand plucks handkerchiefs and pocket-watches and purses from passers-by, the new arm an expert pickpocket, the fingers pointing the formerly one-armed man to prison—where he casts the offending limb to the ground—and it scurries to a one-armed convict made happy by what may indeed be a reunion.

The dream-book tells me that if I were a sailor a dream-amputation means "storm and the loss of having"; if a businessman, "serious commercial stagnation"; if a woman, "separation of object of love"--and I am not a woman but I stand with one arm and sweep my one hand in an arc, scattering paper and pen, blotter and ink-pot—and I find nothing there, so I wander through dimming rooms, pausing at every surface and grasping, until I'm sitting there, the storm outside drowned by the audience laughing at the thieving hand, my own still wet from the stagnant tide-pool where I'd dipped my hand like Whitman's noiseless patient spider launching "forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself; / Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them."

And all the while my arm crawls off, something caught in the corner of the eye before it's gone, trailing handkerchiefs and a golden chain, a few coins left behind as it seeks its own objects—all of them belonging to others, stolen like glances at the color that comes to her cheeks when she's angry at something that has nothing to do with me—except I see the two small roses there, watch them grow and fade; and I laugh a little at her anger—and she doesn't know I laugh because I'm stealing something from her, something she'll never miss because she doesn't really have it—it's mine, the same foolish sneaking thing I've tended to all my life—while my other arm finds its severed end—the shoulder long forgotten as it mutters like an old man who's lost his spectacles (all the while they sit on top of his head)—and the arm becomes a kind of wheel and rolls away, the stolen things forgotten.

Watch The Thieving Hand here.