Magical Realism - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Larry Carmichael's Hands Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

LARRY CARMICHAEL’S HANDS

Probably I was the only one who looked away when that scream continued. Ginger had bent the pinky finger of the brown leather glove on Larry Carmichael’s right hand and the crack was nearly as great as his wail. That anguish had me cringing, half-eaten bologna on white bread floating a few inches from my mouth. I understood immediately. My guess, it took a second for everyone else to clue in. The pain spun him. The whites of his sclera showed double and his dilated pupils darted around the room like fireflies.

That was in the eighth grade. I met Larry in the summer after third grade.

My mother had this thing about vulnerable people. She was a helper—even when they didn’t want or need her kind of help. She used money to manipulate situations in ways people couldn’t refuse, and when she saw Larry at the front of the church with his big leather gloves on, she zeroed in. She left me and Dad with Kerry Sutter and his son Douglas—I think Dad sat us there for me, Kerry Sutter’s brother played in the NHL and I was a hockey maniac.

The meet and greet stuff after church lasted about an hour and in the final lingering minutes, my mother came over to us and informed me that I was going to spend the afternoon at the Carmichael house, and more specifically, with the weirdo who wore the big gloves in the middle of summer. They had this shitbox Ford that smelled like engine grease. There was Larry’s mom, Larry, and two of his siblings. I sat in back with the siblings: Jessica and Darren. Larry sat up front because of his hands. Jessica looked out her window and Darren grumbled and looked out his window while Mrs. Carmichael explained about Larry’s gloves and why he had to wear them. That’s how she did it too, as if the gloves came first.

Turned out, Larry had a rare medical condition called Osteopotiri, which translates roughly into bone glass—I got it then, I was a piece to one of my mother’s grand charity schemes.

“He wears the gloves to protect his hands. It’s a birth defect. The bones in his hands are made of glass. He has to be very careful.”

I held in everything: questions, remarks, facial expressions.

The trip was no more than twenty minutes and she told me about how kindergarten and the first grade were “For other kids. Boys and girls without gloves.” She’d quit her job and homeschooled Larry—Darren grumbled something about their old car and their old house in the city, but Mrs. Carmichael ignored him and kept on talking. “He tried regular classes for the second grade, but the children were mean.”

At this, I clued into something else, too: this kid was a loser. I tried to say something, I don’t remember what, but Larry started talking with an angry whine, “What’s with the gloves? What’s wrong with you? What’re you some kind of freak?”

“Well, are ya?” Darren mumbled and this time Mrs. Carmichael told him to shush. Before we even made it to the old side of town, she told me about the cost of the gloves and how expensive the treatments were and how the government didn’t cover cosmetic diseases.

“We’ve argued to the moon. His bones aren’t cosmetic!”

The walls were closing in on me. This whole situation was wrong and weird, and I was stuck. There was a minor relief when we cleared the outskirts of town. Barns and sheds, mostly red and mostly faded, passed by the windows before Mrs. Carmichael took a left onto a road with a number for a name. She took another left up a short lane that dead-ended at a tall farmhouse, rough and ramshackle as a fixer-upper parody.

“Here we are,” Mrs. Carmichael said.

Jessica turned to me. “We used to have a nice house in Richmond,” she said and climbed out. I waited a second for Darren to get out after Mrs. Carmichael opened Larry’s door.

Never on that whole trip did I expect to like Larry, but when we got to his room—after his mother helped him put on slimmer, more dexterous gloves—he carefully withdrew a padded binder of hockey cards from a shelf. Immediately, I forgot about the gloves.

The cards were older, but not old enough to have real value. “They were Darren’s mostly, but some were Mike’s. He’s at work. He got a job doing hay. He’s in high school.”

I was nodding and flipping through.

“Mom and Dad get me a pack every two weeks. Before I came around, we had more money,” Larry said and I looked up, trying to be polite or something, but he was reaching for another padded binder. He sneezed twice opening it. “They always get me…” His face scrunched and he sneezed again. “…these ones Dad got from one of his friends.” The cards were from the ‘70s, but dog-eared and creased and stained and musty, worthless but cool as hell.

On the last page before I switched to look at the real old cards, I pointed to Dirk Sutter and said, “His brother goes to our church.”

The three Sundays following, I was at camp. I didn’t see Larry again until school.

—

Larry was in the other half of third grade, but his presence reached through the walls. First thing, first day, the PA squeaked and the principal explained about Larry’s condition, and how we should play nice, and welcome him and his siblings, Darren and Jessica, into our school. By first recess, kids were calling Larry Pussy Hands.

When we made eye contact in the hall, I looked away.

—

Mom bought Larry middle of the road protective gloves. I guess there’s tiers of protection and treatments for Osteopotiri. But since there weren’t any celebrities with it and nobody did concerts for it and it was so rare, help was expensive and difficult to find. My mother told my dad and me all this at supper one night after Larry showed up at school with new gloves—still clumsy and awkward looking. Dad nodded and I did nothing. When Mom asked how Larry got along at school, I said he was in the other class.

—

The next year, Larry was in my class and sat at a desk by himself while the rest of us sat at tables. Some teachers were as bad as the students—worse, because teachers knew better. Mr. Nixon hated Larry and made him wipe the chalkboard with his gloves instead of the brushes. “Get used to it. It’s about all you’re good for,” Mr. Nixon would say, or something thereabouts, and the mean kids would laugh. Nobody defended him.

Larry did as told and never complained.

Now and then, my mother made me go home from church with Larry, sometimes she even drove us and stopped in at Hank’s Collectables and bought us boxes of hockey card packs to open—which I let Larry keep all of, like an apology. He never mentioned that we didn’t talk at school and that almost made it worse.

—

High school was in the bigger town one over. Bryce Angus invited me for a Friday night sleepover and I rode the bus home with him. He took the same bus as Larry.

 Larry sat alone in the seat behind the bus driver. When the driver wasn’t looking, students threw food and spat wads of chewed paper against the back of his head. Larry did nothing, and I did nothing when Bryce chewed up a page corner and spat it through a straw.

In penance, I went to Larry’s the following Sunday afternoon. His father was home, but still had on the company shirt he wore to sell chainsaws and lawnmowers. The TV aired an evangelical program. A man in a white suit stood before women in burgundy robes. He started screaming, “Abominations! These devil diseases! It’s not just AIDS! You’ve got poor babies born of sin, reminding us that Satan is real! Kids with bad hearts, weak legs, glass for bones! These kids are sent by Satan himself to destroy our race!”

Larry’s father turned to us then and said, “Maybe he’s got a point.”

There was nothing to say. People all over believed this kind of thing about Larry’s bones.

“If I had good hands, I’d play hockey,” Larry said as we sat in his room. I watched him sort through the big box of cards I brought him from home. “You ever play hockey?”

“Of course,” I said and then burned with embarrassment. Larry had hand-me-down pictures of people having fun and the rest of us simply had fun.

This time was different from other visits. Sad and defeated, he sat in his bedroom, staring out the window, maybe imagining a place where normal children played and where he was one of them.

My mother told Dad and me that insurance companies refused coverage, doctors treated Larry like a curiosity, Larry’s parents did not take Larry anywhere with too many stairs, and that she was doing her part to help them out.

—

When I saw them, I stopped dead. Hope had sprung and at fifteen, Larry made a public friend. She smiled and talked to him over lunch hours. She asked about his gloves and the hands beneath. She knew, but wanted to understand how it felt. He couldn’t tell her because he didn’t know. He had no comparison.

He told me all this, gleeful and uncaring that I only associated with him one Sunday a month. Sometimes I sat near them in the cafeteria, trying to understand this girl.

 “I want to see them,” she’d said between tater tots.

He took his gloves off for Ginger and she held his hands, gently.

“They don’t look no different.” She massaged them while he closed his eyes. “They look normal.”

He shook his head at this and the gloves went back on.

She clung and people called them girlfriend boyfriend. They weren’t, according to Larry, but he wanted to ask her. I even encouraged him and he laughed at me, shy and embarrassed. Ginger was not pretty and sometimes she smelled too much like Irish Spring soap. Her hair was stringy. She had more freckles than not-freckles. Had beady lobster eyes.

A match made somewhere, if not in Heaven.

—

“That’s not even my real name, stupid!” Ginger shouted.

It was the first day of eleventh grade, a Tuesday, lunchtime, in the cafeteria and happening before an audience.

“It’s a stupid nickname. How’d you like it if I called you Pussy Hands?”

Larry Carmichael had been Pussy Hands since he came to our school, but never to Ginger—never to Tiffany.

He apologized. By that Friday, she was again yelling at him in front of everyone. “I don’t even think you got it. I think you’re trying to get sympathy.” Ginger grabbed Larry’s pinky finger.

He screamed and we all turned to see. I knew before the rest and I looked away. My heart raced and Larry just kept screaming. There was nothing he could’ve done, couldn’t even push her away if he wanted.

I couldn’t save him anyway and he stood there, still, but screaming. None of us knew Osteopotiri typically stayed in the hands, but not always. In rare cases, the syndrome mutated and travelled, it was possible the shattering of a finger might send a tremor, destroy something in his arm or shoulder, maybe a rib.

I visited Larry one night in the hospital—he had to stay for three weeks. Painkillers and therapy for the following eight months. Larry’s parents sold their house again because Osteopotiri wasn’t covered.

Mr. Carmichael said to my mother, “Government insurance doesn’t cover freaks,” and she nodded while opening her checkbook.

—

He stayed out of school for a year after that. Larry’s siblings started going by Mrs. Carmichael’s maiden name. I would sidle up and ask about Larry, but they’d come to hate him and pretended to not hear me.

Larry returned for the twelfth grade, so as to achieve a proper diploma. Mrs. Carmichael thought if he had a diploma rather than a home-schooled test score that he’d find a better job. She wanted him gone.

He hardly grew and the same gloves my mother bought him were the same ones he still wore. Those gloves protected his hands against bumps, but left him vulnerable to everything else. The gloves broadened the bull’s eye on his back. He resorted to an old habit and circled the librarian between classes.

By then Ginger had grown into her freckles and beady eyes. She had a boyfriend and she grinned when passing Larry. I saw it all and my heart concealed my shame in silence. I could’ve been his friend, at any time. I could’ve stood up and did something real for him.

One day there was a new girl named Jeannie who was a couple grades behind us, and Larry harbored some deep down hope. She came to town from the city. She wore gloves. They were black sequined and more shapely than the brown leather gloves he wore. They were wonderful and expensive looking. They were everything that his gloves were not, and still, they were gloves. They were the same.

I was in the library skipping class to catch up on an assignment about Henry VIII. I saw him staring and saw the pretty girl look his way. She was with the jocks and cheerleaders in their school team windbreakers. 

Jeannie walked toward him and I could almost read his mind. There were two sets of glass-boned hands and they were about to come together. He looked at her like she was the answer to all the questions: did she have any scars from stitches and surgery, would their lips feel right and perfect together, what about his tuxedo next to her prom dress, handsome new gloves, what about Larry finding his place and a mate and all the happiness afforded to regular kids?

My god, the pre-emptive embarrassment I felt.

“Nice gloves, those from Walmart?” Jeannie said.

“No.”

Wal-Mart never sold specialty gloves; couldn’t buy them in bulk.

“No,” she mocked and the chorus of acceptable young adults snickered behind her. “I want you to stop looking at me. You’re a creep and you’re poor. We’re not the same.”

His face went so red it turned purple. His hands clenched, as if he’d willingly break his bones on her face to prove how much the same they were.

I doubt she ever spoke to him again and I doubt he ever imagined the boutonniere he’d pin to his chest that would match her prom dress.

—

After graduation, I screwed up. College was too fun and I drank too much, so my father made me get a crappy job to understand what life would look like without all my privilege.

My foreman at the yogurt factory was a guy two years older than me who had dropped out and somehow passed his GED test while being a complete and utter idiot. I was ready to quit and promise to do better at school, promise anything my dad wanted, but then Larry Carmichael started and Larry had a way of making me forget myself.

My foreman told me the manager had a daughter with Osteopotiri—a girl who happened to wear black sequined gloves and was in her final year of high school. The manager was understanding and sympathetic of Larry’s plight. He forced all of Larry’s coworkers, me included, to watch a thirty-minute video about the glass under his skin. It was paid time, so nobody complained. Not about the movie.

We all had to pull a little extra because Larry was to load the lids and press the kill button only, nothing else. I guess a man with glass hands is a good man for the right task. The spinning and rushing of lids on machines. He was careful where others were not so careful. Men and women—hungover, high, plain tired—lost track of fingers and then lost fingers. Not that I ever saw that, but people talked and showed off nubs like party gags.

—

Maybe it was my fault. For the first time ever in public, I said hello to Larry as I was leaving the lunchroom and he was just coming in. He smiled and waved. Around a corner was the men’s change room and I heard the conversation. Larry had worked up the nerve to talk to one of the other guys. Larry had to know we all watched the video and maybe he thought that made people care, maybe it was just me acknowledging him; like, hey, your hands are not your fault and you’re the same as them everywhere else.

“Fuck off, Pussy Hands. You ruined gym class for a whole year.”

Larry said nothing that I heard and I stumbled back to the doorway to listen.

“Just fuck off, freak.”

Larry whined then, “Gym class? When we were kids?”

The way he put it, that perspective, I sank against the cool wall and closed my eyes. It would never stop.

“In the fourth grade?” Larry said then.

I tried to shout. People had to be sensible, it was so long ago. Couldn’t they let it pass? Couldn’t they be nice?

“So what if it was? Pussy Hands.”

Nobody said anything else and I got back into my white coveralls and white rubber boots.

—

I waited after work the next day. “Hey, Larry!” I shouted and he turned, but didn’t quite smile, did not wave. “Want to hang?”

“Okay,” he said and I drove us to his apartment after grabbing a sixer of Moosehead. The place was sad and grungy. He opened the lobby door and the staircase door with his back. His apartment door demanded his hands and he was gentle as ever. Slow. Methodical.

There was a stained chair that looked like it came from the lobby of a defunct ‘90s doctor’s office. It sat next to a window. He had a computer and a TV, but the chair seemed to be the important spot. There was a park outside and I imagined him alone, watching people with dogs on leashes, and kids running free, and fathers and sons playing catch. Then I imagined his glass bones with calcium fortitude. He’d be such a different person.

The adult gloves were better. He’d used a VISA to buy a pair made of slim Kevlar that sunk onto his hands like a second skin.

We drank the beers and he asked me all about college and I explained how bad I screwed up and then he told me about how my mother stopped talking to his family once there was a second kid in town with Osteopotiri. 

—

My two weeks’ notice went in eight shifts earlier. The manager left on that same day and they brought a new guy through. He’d managed a plant out east that closed a month prior. He was fat and had a huge moustache—most of the managers did; we had to wear hairnets and beardnets, but they all had moustaches and no nets for them.

“Gloves get in the way of work. Take them off,” the new manager said.

I was sweeping up by Larry’s station. Larry told the manager no and then explained why he couldn’t take them off.

“How long have you worked here?” the manager said.

Larry told him how long.

The man grunted and walked away.

People saw and people talked. A factory is a miserable place and people need to let out their anger somewhere that won’t cost them their livelihoods.

The following morning in the change room, the new manager stood in front of Larry and said, “You’re still here? Didn’t I fire you? Oh, wait, no. Can’t fire someone for being weak and holding up the line.”

That same voice, the one who accused Larry of ruining gym class, said, “He holds up everything.”

Morning passed. The lunch buzz was two minutes away. I was dicking around because it was my last shift—turned out it was Larry’s last shift, too—pushing a broom not far from where Larry worked. The final two minutes were mostly automated. It was up to Larry to load the last of the lids and then hit the kill button after the others left.

Larry stacked the lids into the tubular steel frame that shook them down one at a time onto the liter pails that followed on the conveyor. I watched, waiting for him to finish and then we’d go to lunch together. Larry eyed the lids, hand over the red button, ready to kill that part of the line—nothing fully shutdown until Friday night.

Factories are loud places, and I had my plugs in. I’d swung my broom a couple times, looking at the floor, so I didn’t see or hear the men coming. Three of them grabbed and lifted Larry by his feet. I looked up then when Larry yipped and began shouting.

“No, wait! No, wait!”

The cruelty was one thing, but the method was overkill. The bones in his hands were hollow glass. They didn’t need to tip him upside down and guide his hands into the gears, didn’t need to keep pushing until his gloves caught and dragged him into the machine like bunched cloth.

Larry screamed, steady then, and the men ran as his flesh and bones triggered an automatic shutdown. There he sat, crouched forward, knees on the hard floor, arms jammed to his shoulders, mouth wailing into the rubber surface of a conveyor system.

I dug into my jeans below my coveralls and found my phone. I dialed 911 and ran toward the quiet of the change room.

Paramedics removed him a few minutes after noon and I followed in the car my parents bought me for graduating high school. The nurses and the doctor kept me up to date on his condition. They asked about his family and I told them who they were. An hour later, I asked a nurse if she got a hold of anyone and she said they refused to come.

“Said they can’t pay another Larry bill.”

I spent the day and came back the next morning. A nurse let me in to see him first thing. Larry was high and furious. I told him not to get excited, told him the cops had been called, told him he’d be able to sue and never have to work a day in his life.

“Yeah, and what am I supposed to do with my time then?” he said and I had nothing.

The doctor entered and I stepped back to a wall, giving them all the space they’d need. She was youngish and sad looking. She carried a manila folder; Larry Carmichael typed on a white sticker. They traded greetings. She asked obligatory questions and he answered.

“I see you’ve had corrective surgery and extensive therapy before.” Larry agreed that yeah, he had. “This is much worse than that.” He nodded. “That’s not all.”

My head went into my hands, the guy had never caught a break and it just got worse and worse.

The doctor took a deep breath and exhaled before saying, “The Osteopotiri has mutated.” The doctor withdrew three black and grey images from the folder. “It’s rare and unfortunate—”

“Incredible,” Larry whispered and I straightened, started over to him. She held the scans of his chest so he could see—light grey lines spider-webbed over an ovular mass. “Is that my heart?”

“As I said, it has mutated.”

“Jesus,” I said, unable to move closer or away. The sight had me rooted. He had a glass heart. A fucking glass heart!

“That’s my heart?” Larry asked again and she closed her eyes. He smiled. “It’s beautiful.”

The doctor didn’t seem to hear. “The only real option we have is to install a prosthetic,” she said. “And we have to do it as soon as possible.”

“No.”

“No?”

I covered my mouth.

“You can’t change this, it’s exactly right,” Larry said.

“But you’re a heavy cough or sneeze away from the glass shattering and, and then that’s it.” The doctor was firm.

“I don’t want you to do anything.”

“I think the morphine is clouding your judgement.”

“No, it’s not.”

The doctor left and I said, “Man, Larry, you got to do something.”

He looked at me then and said, “You have to do something. Finally. For the first time. You have to do something.”

My mouth was dry and sticky. He’d kept track how I’d kept track.

“I need you to go to Hank’s and get me the oldest pack of cards he has.”

It was so unexpected that I didn’t question him, and I certainly didn’t understand. Hank’s was about five blocks from the hospital and I paid three hundred bucks for six packs of O-Pee-Chee from 1975. I didn’t know, I thought the more the merrier, like we were kids again, opening hockey cards.

Larry was giddy at seeing them and said, “Open them where I can see them. Do it like your arms are mine.”

Next to him, I was hardly looking, just doing because I owed him and I didn’t understand and he loved hockey cards. Really, I was doing because of everything I’d never had the nerve to do.

“Closer.”

I moved the cards to under his chin and flipped from one player to the next. There were ten cards and I made it through the first bunch quickly. A cement-like stick of off-pink gum fell onto his chest.

Larry was breathy, agitated, and said, “Next one, and flip them too, so I can read.”

As I did what he told me to do, unsealing the brittle glue and peeling away the wax pack to reveal the first card and another stick of gum, a memory came to mind: his binder of old cards and how they always made him—

Larry sneezed three times in quick succession, and it sounded like someone dropped a vase on linoleum, soft but final.

He exhaled a final breath as tears streamed from his eyes. I stepped in reverse, cards falling from my hands onto the floor. That was that, and I’d finally done something real for him.

XX