Duma Key by Stephen King

and brilliant track across the water, but it was still at least two hours to sundown, and I was sitting in the Florida room. The tide was high. Beneath me, the deep drifts of shell shifted and grated, making that sound that was so like breath or hoarse confidential speaking. I ran my thumb over the postscript— I have some special news —and my right arm, the one that was no longer there, began to tingle. The location of that tingle was clearly, almost exquisitely, defined. It began in the fold of the elbow and spiraled to an end on the outside of the wrist. It deepened to an itch I longed to reach over and scratch.
    I closed my eyes and snapped the thumb of my right hand against the second finger. There was no sound, but I could feel the snap. I rubbed my arm against my side and could feel the rub. I lowered my right hand, long since burned in the incinerator of a St. Paul hospital, to the arm of my chair and drummed the fingers. No sound, but the sensation was there: skin on wicker. I would have sworn to it in the name of God.
    All at once I wanted to draw.
    I thought about the big room upstairs, but LittlePink seemed too far to go. I went into the living room and took an Artisan pad off a stack of them sitting on the coffee table. Most of my art supplies were upstairs, but there were a few boxes of colored pencils in one of the drawers of the living room desk, and I took one of those, as well.
    Back in the Florida room (which I would always think of as a porch), I sat down and closed my eyes. I listened to the waves do their work beneath me, lifting the shells and turning them into new patterns, each one different from the one before. With my eyes shut, that grating was more than ever like talk: the water giving temporary tongue to the edge of the land. And the land itself was temporary, because if you took the geological view, Duma wouldn’t last long. None of the Keys would; in the end the Gulf would take them all and new ones would rise in new locations. It was probably true of Florida itself. The land was low, and on loan.
    Ah, but that sound was restful. Hypnotic.
    Without opening my eyes, I felt for Ilse’s e-mail and ran the tips of my fingers over it again. I did this with my right hand. Then I opened my eyes, brushed the e-mail printout aside with the hand that was there, and pulled the Artisan pad onto my lap. I flipped back the cover, shook all twelve of the pre-sharpened Venus pencils onto the table in front of me, and began to draw. I had an idea I meant to draw Ilse—who had I been thinking of, after all?—and thought I’d make a spectacularly bad job of it, because I hadn’t attempted a single human figure since starting to draw again. But it wasn’t Ilse, and it wasn’t bad. Not great, maybe, not Rembrandt (not even Norman Rockwell), but not bad.
    It was a young man in jeans and a Minnesota Twins tee-shirt. The number on the tee was 48, which meant nothing to me; in my old life I used to go to as many T-Wolves games as I could, but I’ve never been a baseball fan. The guy had blond hair which I knew wasn’t quite right; I didn’t have the colors to get the exact darkening-toward-brown shade. He was carrying a book in one hand. He was smiling. I knew who he was. He was Ilse’s special news. That was what the shells were saying as the tide lifted them and turned them and dropped them again. Engaged, engaged. She had a ring, a diamond, he had bought it at—
    I had been shading the young man’s jeans with Venus Blue. Now I dropped it, picked up the black, and stroked the word
    ZALES
    at the bottom of the sheet. It was information; it was also the name of the picture. Naming lends power.
    Then, without a pause, I dropped the black, picked up orange, and added workboots. The orange was too bright, it made the boots look new when they weren’t, but the idea was right.
    I scratched at my right arm, scratched through my right arm, and got my ribs