I was five years old the first time I saw it.
 

It was nap time, as it always was in North Africa. After lunch, the air grew heavy with stillness, and there was nothing to do but surrender to drowsiness on thin mattresses laid over the cool mosaic tiles. Outside, the sun scorched everything it touched. Inside, we floated in the half-light, the shutters drawn tight. My older sisters rested beside me. My mother lay on my other side, drawing a white silk sheet across our small bodies. She never slept, but remained near, fanning the thick air in slow, metronomic waves.
 

That day, I woke into silence, alone in the room.
 

Beyond the wall, I could hear my mother at work in the kitchen; the clatter of pots, her raised voice, the intermittent crackle of our aging radio. My sisters were laughing. I wanted to rise, but my body felt impossibly heavy. I couldn’t tell whether I was still half-asleep or if the oppressive heat had simply pinned me down. My limbs refused command; I was a body turned to lead. So I waited.
 

Perhaps my mother would appear in the doorway, see that I was awake, tell me to get up, and I would obey without question. But she did not come. My sisters’ laughter rippled on, and I remained still. The pillow was damp beneath my neck. I fixed my gaze on the ceiling. Its blue-green hue seemed to deepen the longer I looked, darkening to indigo, then to a black that glimmered like the sheen of a crow’s wing.
 

To my right, a thin blade of light slipped under the closed door, proof that it was still day. To my left, the same pale gold filtered through the slats of the shutters. Yet within the room itself, night seemed to gather by degrees, thickening in subtle shades of blue and shadow. Then I heard it: a soft rustle upon the silk sheet. Another, and then a third.

At first, I thought it was our little turtle, though I couldn’t imagine how she had found her way inside. We never let her into the resting room. I tried to sit up to look, but my body refused me. So I lifted my head, saw nothing, and the sound ceased.
 

I let my head fall back and waited. I wasn’t frightened. Not yet. Perhaps that is how childhood shields us: the border between the possible and the impossible is still mercifully blurred. I was simply in an unfamiliar state, and I accepted it as such.
 

Before fear could reach me, another sound began. A faint tapping, measured and deliberate, like fingertips drumming on the silk. It came from the foot of the bed. I strained my neck to see, but the sheet rose and fell in uneven folds, hiding whatever moved beneath. The tapping quickened, skittering from place to place in an invisible dance, far too swift for a turtle.
 

Then it stopped. And something seized my right calf.
 

I lifted my head in shock. My eyes widened, and I saw it.
 

A hand.
 

A hand alone, severed from any body. Large and broad, its skin gleamed like a serpent’s, scaled green, mottled with yellow and brown. The nails were long, sharp, and the color of tarnished bone.
 

I stared at it, and it seemed to stare back. I tried to scream, but no sound emerged. My voice was gone, and my body, rigid and convulsed, ached from the sheer effort of wanting to tremble.
 

The light under the door vanished. The shutters turned opaque. The room darkened into near-night. My sisters’ laughter reached me as warped, stifled echoes. My mother’s voice dwindled to a troubled murmur before dissolving into the radio’s static, which swelled until it devoured everything. The hand tightened its grip.
 

Time stretched, viscous and eternal. My neck burned from strain. Sweat gathered at my temples and slid down my face. I couldn’t move to wipe it away. My breath grew shallow.

At last, the hand released me, pausing in eerie stillness. I waited, as a prisoner waits, motionless and alert. The world beyond the wall had fallen silent. No voices. No laughter. No static. Only the pulse of my own heart, drumming in the hollow of my chest.
 

Then, the hand began to move again, not to seize, but to tap. One finger after another, in a steady rhythm I knew too well. My father made the same gesture when he was lost in thought.

A hand with serpent skin was studying me, thinking.
 

It began to climb my leg, inch by inch, using its fingers to pull itself upward. With every movement, my fear ripened into terror. The hand seemed to savor it. Suddenly, it accelerated, darting to my shoulder in a blur. It hovered just inches from my face. Panic broke through me; I forced the scream that clogged my throat. But before a single sound could escape, the hand pressed down over my mouth.
 

My head sank into the pillow. The serpentine skin brushed against my cheeks, crushed my lips, and pinched my nostrils shut between thumb and forefinger. I couldn’t breathe. I thought it meant to kill me. Yet in the same instant, I sensed that it could read my thoughts.
 

Its grip loosened. Air returned to me. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see it, so close, almost breathing my breath.
 

Its skin was both coarse and supple. It carried no scent. But it was alive. And thinking. Somehow, I knew it wanted me to be calm, that it would withdraw if I remained still. So I stopped resisting.
 

My body, stiff as a board, began to thaw. Through the wall, I heard my mother again, her voice clear, my sisters laughing freely. The radio no longer hissed; a song played, soon joined by the whir of a kitchen blender. The world had returned, bright and solid on the other side of the wall.

I opened my eyes. Light spilled through the shutters, a golden ribbon stretching beneath the door. I sat up carefully. My feet touched the cool tile. And there, before me, the serpentine hand crept across the floor and disappeared into the dark corner of the room.

​

Lilia Mahfouz is a French author based in Paris. A laureate of the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers Writing Prize, her fiction has appeared in numerous French literary journals, including Zone Critique, Marginales, Rue Saint Ambroise, and L’Encrier Renversé, as well as in a wide range of American and British literary magazines such as Ink In Thirds, Fiction on the Web, Quail Bell Magazine, In Parentheses, The Literary Hatchet, MoonLit Getaway, Hidden Peak Press, Grey Sparrow, Wild Greens, Skipjack Review, Lit Shark Magazine, Fjords Review, among others.