Muffin Hands

When I woke, the first thing I noticed was I’d forgotten to close the bedroom window. The second thing was that, somehow, my hands had turned into muffins. I thought at first that it was a mirage, that I was seeing things perhaps. Maybe a bit of the night’s dreams had bled into my waking hours. But when I went to rub the sleep away from my eyes, crumbs began to fall onto my bed. My hands were muffins, soft and warm chocolate chip muffins, steaming like they’d just been taken out of the oven. 

I tried to pick up my phone, but my muffin hands could not attain a proper grip and it clattered to the floor. The screen cracked and chocolate was smeared on the side of the phone. Cursing to myself, I got up from the bed and tried to get dressed before attempting to figure out a solution. After shimmying into a pair of sweatpants and a mostly clean shirt, I figured my best bet was to call 911. I still thought that, eventually, this hallucination would fade and my hands would once again be hands. Surely my hands were not actually muffins now. Better to be around medical professionals when hallucinating, I figured. 

“Hey Siri,” I shouted into my phone. “Call 911.” The screen remained dark. I tried again, louder this time, to no avail. I cursed and took a harder look at my hands, thinking that if I focused enough I would be able to see through the hallucination and my hands would simply be hands. It did not work, and muffins remained. 

After fiddling with the deadbolt and doorknob, I made it out into the hallway. I did not know my neighbors well, but figured they would at the very least call emergency services for me. It’s what I would do, I thought, if someone turned up at my doorstep with muffins for hands. The woman next door, Gloria Something-or-other, was home. There was music coming from her apartment. I went to knock on her door, but hesitated when I realized I’d be banging muffins on her door. What if they crumbled? What if Gloria could not hear my muffins knocking? I kicked on her door, trying not to make it sound like I was trying to break it down.

“Ethan, what a surprise,” Gloria said after opening the door. “What can I do for you?” 

I did not know how to respond. Do I say that I’m hallucinating? Do I claim that my hands have turned into muffins, only for Gloria to assume that I was hallucinating? Suddenly I found myself more consumed with the intricacies of neighborly conversation than the more pressing issue of my muffin hands. I panicked, and said nothing, simply raising my muffin hands out for Gloria to see.

“Oh, delightful,” Gloria said. “I don’t mind if I do.” She reached out, took my right-hand muffin by the paper wrapping, and plucked it off of my wrist. 

As Gloria was reaching out, I hoped that the muffin hands were more like muffin gloves–that once someone had taken them, my hands would be there in its place. Instead, after Gloria had taken the muffin, there was nothing there but my stump of a wrist. My heart fell into my stomach as I watched Gloria take a bite, and when I looked upon the emptiness where my hand should have been, all the blood drained from my face. Darkness crept in from the edges of my vision as my throat began to close. My knees locked, and I felt myself faint. 

I awoke in an ambulance. Gloria was sitting near my feet and a man was leaning over me. I looked down at my hands. One was still a muffin, and the other was just a wrist. 

“Hey,” said the man. “Good morning, sir. Took quite a fall. How’re you feeling?”

“My hands,” I croaked. “They’re muffins.”

“You mean, you got your hand stuck in a muffin?”

I shook my head. “My hands are muffins.”

The man turned to Gloria. “Ma’am, do you have any idea what he’s talking about?”

“Not at all,” Gloria said. “But I saw him yesterday with normal hands, and now I’m afraid I ate one of them.”

I felt a tingling in my wrist, a slow burning heat. A tan goo began to seep out of my skin. A bit of it dropped onto the floor before the goo was enveloped by some sort of filmy paper, which also grew quickly out of my wrist. The heat, the tingling, I felt increased and the goo began to solidify. It puffed up, filling the paper wrapping as brown spots emerged. It did not hurt, but it certainly was not comfortable. It almost felt like the time I got a tattoo, there was a bit of pain, but a new and exciting kind. There was one more flash of heat and the goo was totally solid. Once more, there was a steaming chocolate chip muffin in place of my right hand. 

“What the fuck was that?” croaked the paramedic. The paramedic went pale and Gloria looked like she was going to vomit. 

The rest of the ride to the hospital was in silence, the three of us staring at my muffin hands in disbelief. What had happened to me? Body parts don’t just grow back, I’m not a lizard. What in the world happened to me overnight? 

I tried to retrace my steps of the night before as they wheeled me out of the ambulance and into the emergency room. I’d done some tidying, played some video games, and then went out to dinner with a woman I met online. It was fine, she was nice enough but the date was nothing to write home about. Surely she wouldn’t put some sort of hex on me to turn my hands into muffins, I thought. Someone else, maybe, but our date wasn’t bad enough to be hex-worthy. 

I thought this as a doctor wandered into the sequestered room they’d dropped me in. A few hours ago, I didn’t believe in curses or hexes. I was a normal, rational person with normal, rational thoughts. There was a cause and effect to everything. When I had a toothache, it was because I grind my teeth, not because the Tooth Fairy was angry with me. I had grown up steadfast in my belief that this was not a magical world. It was a logical, ordered place. I thought that life was a thing that made sense. But when I looked at my hands, when I recalled the muffin baking itself out of my wrists, I struggled to find any sense whatsoever. 

“So, you’ve got muffin hands,” said the doctor. He’d introduced himself as Dr. Andrews. I didn’t bother shaking his hand. Turning to Gloria, who sat on a stool beside my bed, Dr. Andrews added, “And you ate one? We should probably take a look at you, too.” A nurse escorted Gloria out of the room and Dr. Andrews took her stool and sat beside me. That was the last I ever saw of my neighbor. I hope she’s doing well. 

“Have you ever seen anything like this? Anything at all?” I asked.

“I’ll be honest with you, Ethan,” Dr. Andrews had to look at my intake papers for my name, “This is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen. I just want to ask you some questions before we start running some tests. Is that okay?” I nodded. “Great. Now, you’re absolutely positive that your hands are not simply stuck inside these muffins?”

“Yes. When Gloria ate one I didn’t have a hand underneath.”

“And have you had anything to drink today? Any alcohol? Any drugs of any kind?”

“I had a few glasses of wine with dinner last night, but that’s it.”

“Have you ever hallucinated before?”

“I did Molly at Coachella a few years ago. Thought my buddy Eric was a flamingo.”

“Have you ever baked muffins before?”

Just now in the ambulance, I thought to myself. “Not that I can recall. Maybe as a kid, I don’t know.”

This back and forth went on for a while, until I was struggling to come up with new and inventive ways to say, “I don’t know what the fuck is happening to me.” I felt as if I was going to explode. I wished that my muffin hands were stale, that way it might actually hurt him if I decided to hit Dr. Andrews over the head. 

“What kind of tests can we actually do about this?” I finally asked. At this, Dr. Andrews allowed a smile to creep across his face. I did not very much like its connotation, like he’d been looking forward to running tests on me since he saw me wheeled in. He said some medical jargon I did not fully comprehend, something about specialists, and he got a pair of nurses to wheel me out of the Emergency Room and to Radiology. 

I could understand why they did not want me to walk. At any moment, I could run, me and my muffin hands, back out into the world. There goes a fortune in medical bills; there goes research and a paper in some prestigious journal; there goes a seat on the lecture circuit or professorship at Johns Hopkins. But as my nurses pushed me through the halls, sneaking glances at my steaming chocolate chip muffins, I could not help but feel like an experiment. I thought of myself as a frog that they’d forgotten to make sure is dead before dissection. 

My muffins were X-Rayed from every angle there was. Once they were certain that there were absolutely no normal hand bones buried amongst the chocolate chips, I was carted into another room with a bigger machine. This, Dr. Andrews explained, was the MRI machine. It would give the doctors a much clearer image of the muscles and tendons and ligaments in a person’s hand. I thought about pointing out the redundancy of this scan, seeing as the x-rays just showed an almost cartoonish outline of a muffin, but Dr. Andrews was already pulling my arms into the machine. He told me to sit still. 

“Don’t even wiggle a finger,” Dr. Andrews said as he hurried out of the room. Once he was behind the two way mirror behind me, a microphone crackled to life and his voice filled the room. “Sorry, that was an unfortunate slip.”

According to the clock above the door, the MRI took only half an hour. I felt, however, like the machine was sucking out all of my perception of time. I tried to pass the time thinking about what I would say to the girl from last night if I were not in the hospital. I decided that, should I ever be able to text again, I would say I had a lovely time, and would like to see her again. It would be totally normal, boring even, and that’s exactly what I decided I needed. 

Dr. Andrews entered the room trying to mask his excitement. I don’t think he meant to be so excited about my being here. In fact, I think he maybe even felt a little guilty at his own emotions. But I was a medical mystery, and his uniquely scholarly greed, that unquenchable thirst for more knowledge, overcame him. 

“I’m afraid that the MRI came up empty,” he said, pretending not to be giddy as a child with his parent’s credit card at a toy store. “We’re going to be moving you to a more permanent room, just so that more specialists can take a look at you. Right now, like you, I’m sure, all we have are questions.”

In the thirty minutes that I was in the MRI room, word must have spread about  a man with muffins for hands. The halls were lined with nurses and doctors and interns and technicians as I was escorted to my new room. Even the janitors peered out of their closets to sneak a glance. I tried to keep my head down, tried to hide my muffin hands, but I could still feel the eyes of the hospital on me as I ran the gauntlet to get to my room.  Surely an intern took a photo of me on my way to the room and surely that photo is making the rounds on Twitter. People were probably trying to debunk it as a hoax. 

My room was empty for a while, allowing me just a bit of time to myself. I was not feeling the same anger as I was before, nor was I reeling with the same confusion. I was the man with muffins for hands, and no matter how many tests they ran or how many pairs of gloves I tried to squeeze on, that’s always who I would be. 

Eventually, a nurse came in with a clipboard and pen and asked me to sign a release so that they could continue running tests. I had no objection. What else was I to do with my muffin hands but to try and figure out how I got them? I squeezed the pen between the two muffins as tight as I could and scribbled some illegible squiggles onto the release form before the nurse nodded and took the board away. 

An hour later, there were about a dozen doctors surrounding my bed. Cardiologists and neurologists and orthopedic surgeons explained how they wanted to cut open the muffins for a look inside. Dermatologists wanted to take samples of the muffin tops and the paper wrappings. Physical therapists thought that they could help me adjust to a life of muffin hands. Psychiatrists asked me muffin related questions about my childhood. Each and every one of them had a series of tests and experiments they wanted to run on me, and none of them were too good at hiding their excitement. 

I was carted from room to room, test to test, for the next few days. After the first day, the spectacle of a man with muffin hands seemed to fade. There were real emergencies that the hospital had to take care of. There was a shooting that happened across town while I was getting various fluids drawn one day. All of the doctors had to rush away to the emergency room while a nurse pulled all the IVs from my skin. I know it was wrong to think so, but that day I was thankful for the shooting. It gave me a bit of respite from the parade of MDs and endless testing. 

Once they’d finished taking care of that emergency, however, it was back to me. 

The fifth day of testing, a neuromusculoskeletal doctor asked me to hold a bunch of things, asked me to open doors, and asked me to do a variety of tasks that would have been easy with any fine motor skills. Near the end of the day, he asked if he could eat a muffin into the shape of a hand while it was still on my wrist. Maybe that would give me some sort of control over my new hands. It was not the oddest request I’d heard. A team of bakers had come by the day before and asked to watch the muffins bake out of my wrist over and over again. They’d even taken samples of the batter. 

“Why not?” I replied to the neuromusculoskeletal doctor. “Maybe the key to the muffin hands is to actually have muffin hands.”

The doctor smiled, sensing that I was trying to make a joke, before leaning forward and taking a bite into me. It did not hurt, but I thought I could feel his teeth digging into me and tearing bits of muffin away. It was not the same sensation I got when doctors would pull the muffin off or cut bits away. This was far more intimate, hardly clinical at all. The way he peeled the paper wrapping away made me feel like slowly taking off my clothes, his fingernails scratching against my skin as he did. It felt good. For once, I did not feel like the center of attention the way a bearded lady or six fingered man does at the circus. I felt like the doctor was worshiping me as he consumed. I found that the more he ate, the more I wanted him to. I wanted him to take, to consume. He was delicate with his bites and I almost told him to go harder, to eat me more ferociously. 

Eventually, he had eaten my muffins into crude shapes of hands. He asked me to wiggle my new fingers, but as hard as I tried, I was unable to. As I was trying, the muffins bubbled up into whole muffins once more. Soon my hand shaped muffins were once again steaming fresh chocolate chip muffin hands. The doctor cursed under his breath and told me that he would need to conduct a few more tests. 

I found that I was not as put off by the prospect of a few more tests as I was in the days before. Although I was still stuck in this hospital, perhaps there was still a bit of fun, pleasure even, to be had here with my new muffin hands.