Short Scary Stories

Restless Hands

Content Warning: Explicit Gore

Since I was a child, I had always felt the need to move my hands and fiddle with objects. My parents would always pester me about it, how I couldn't do well with keeping them still and picking up and messing with things.

This affected me in more parts of my life than I would think of. I had difficulty making friends, as I would typically touch and tangle with belongings that weren't my own. This was because I began to grow a intolerable, unrelenting madness when my hands didn't move, even a short period of time.

The condition became so common after time that I sometimes wouldn't even feel or notice my own movements. Others would question curiously on why my fingers contorted and twisted in conversation, or why I would loudly tap on a desk during the middle of an essential test. I would only apologize, and say it was just a habit of mine. My parents never saw it as any real issue, as they believed it to be common for my early age.

My hands, with no surprise, also had a damaging impact on my process of sleep over the years. The feeling of my fingers became much more noticeable when I would seek rest. They dragged, curled, rapidly spread apart and closed, and did any other movements that would interrupt my falling into sleep. Sleeping medication helped to a point, but began to be ineffective when the problem continued to develop.

After years of attempting to cope with the problem, I took on a career that would involve an amount of finger movement, such as typing, in hopes that it would progressively lower my urges. I worked in an office building, and to my surprise, the problem never bothered me as much during the day. I still felt the urges to tighten and stretch my fingers, but it was never an obstacle to any task. I felt like a normal human.

Everything would change at night, when I would be alone. The problem always returned far worse, more than I could often handle. It was because of this phenomenon that I began to see the condition as more of a...possession. This sounds completely insane, I know, but my hands seem to come alive in some sort of way when I was alone and exposed. They felt more there, more apparent than any other part of my body.

With my parents out of my life and unable to refuse, I finally went to a doctor with the problem. He couldn't even explain what the source of the condition was, as he had never seen an issue that was acquainted with the hands in such a way. He compared it most to "Restless Leg Syndrome", which was classified as urges to move the leg muscles to cease uncomfortable sensations. Had my problem not been as bad as it was, I would have gone by this comparison. My problem was not "urges". I was positive that my hands physically moved themselves, that it was something that I had no real control of.

The doctor's only word of advice was to do regular activities that would exercise my hands and fingers, movements that would, in a way, satisfy and possibly remove the urge over time. This only lead to my fingers moving more, taking more control and seeking more attention than before.

I remember a particular night, where I first attempted to physically retrain my own hands, in hopes of sleeping well for the first time in years. I used a roll of duct tape to wrap each hand, forcing each joint and knuckle into a tight, immobile fist.

My hands were hardly stopped. After only minutes, they began to shake under the tape, rubbing against the material in a mix of cold sweat and burns from the friction. I forced my arms down to my sides as I lied on my bed, sweating entirely as my fists began to itch, burn, and ache. They had always felt like some sort of living, controlling being, and I had put it in a cage which it was desperate to be free.

I sawed the tape off with a knife as soon as I felt a pain begin to spread up my wrists, going as far as my upper arms. This horrified me enough to were obeying my hands felt like the greater option.