Windward Review Vol. 20 (2022): Beginnings and Endings

Edward Wang
Embers of Ambition
It stood perfectly upright and
centered in full view when she opened
the door to the new place. In every
respect, a monkey’s paw was a strange
thing to encounter, certainly nothing
that Antimony remembered ever
purchasing or being gifted, and definitely
something that the white-glove moving
service failed to notify her of when they
moved and unpacked the bulk of her
items. Box in hand, she skirted around
the disembodied limb to set her burden
down and went back to the moving van
to retrieve everything else. Then, she
locked the door on her way out and drove
off.
The macabre thing was still
present when she returned. She squatted
down to almost eye-level and stared to
confirm its existence. It was definitely
a desiccated hand of some primate or
another with bristled, dark hair around
what was left of an arm, thick padding
on the palm, and five fingers slightly
too long to belong to a human. That
Antimony couldn’t identify the species
to which it could have belonged was no
concern. She was more preoccupied,
however ridiculous the notion, about
whether the thing before her was merely
a monkey’s paw or The Monkey’s Paw of
literary horror. A matter to ponder later
when she wasn’t still in the process of
moving and settling in.
Antimony strode over to the
kitchen and returned armed with a pair
of metal tongs. She gingerly grasped the
monkey’s paw, noted it felt very much
like handling a light length of wood, and
deposited it deep into a nearby alcove
where it was out of the way but clearly
in full view. There was no visible residue
or hair on the tongs but she washed them
with hot water and soap as a matter of
course.
She didn’t bother much with the
monkey paw beyond moving it around
as she cleaned and organized the rest of
her possessions. Ill-fated, wish-granting
item or decidedly not, she wasn’t much for
touching it in general and gladly sacrificed
one of her tongs to keep it at length.
Nothing seemed to happen while she
handled it and it thankfully didn’t move
itself from day to day. The idea of tossing
it out was considered and dismissed,
being more reassured in keeping it in
sight and harboring the slight paranoia
of it reasserting itself back into her life
somehow. The novelty of its appearance
soon wore thin against the more menial
tasks in her life. Most of those came with
moving to an entirely different place,
but there was still much cleaning to do,
figurative fires to put out, a new job to be
bored at, and every other adult thing to
deal with in daily life.
Social interactions were not one
of those things. Work people stayed as
work people and none of her neighbors
stopped by to say “hi”. To be fair, she chose
a residence that was just remote enough
that people had to try and she had little
initiative to introduce herself. Online
groups satisfied her low minimums for
interactions and the only people she saw
more frequently than her coworkers were
the various couriers who made the long
trips to her property. Antimony supposed
that, were she to ever entertain visitors,
the monkey paw didn’t particularly stand
out among her collections of books,
figures, trinkets, and generally interesting
clutter she failed to curate during the
Beginnings X Endings
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