The Finger

The child psychologist was missing the tip of his ring finger. The finger simply ended at the breach of the second knuckle, the abbreviated digit capped with smooth shiny scar-skin. The psychologist had a tic of tapping this cap against his thumb, in a regular drumming motion that might have been an automatic reaction he was helpless to control, or it might have felt good and transgressive like a Q-tip in the ear, or perhaps it hurt and thus concentrated his mind on the task of helping Allan to be well. Allan never asked, nor did he ask how the child psychologist had lost the fingertip, though he was dying to know. He hadn't noticed the shortened finger the first few times he'd come, being more entranced by the child psychologist's trimmed beard and wire-rim glasses and bright solid primary-colour shirts that made him look like a clown or a magician, and at eleven Allan was sufficiently mature to be embarrassed to ask about something like this on their fifth or sixth meeting.

There was a ring on the partial finger, which must have meant the child psychologist was married. Allan imagined their wedding, the bride whom Allan for convenience's sake imagined as looking exactly like the child psychologist's stocky secretary, but platinum blonde instead of raven-haired with a rebellious purple streak, and the moment when she had taken that ring and pushed into onto that finger that was not all there. The child psychologist's secretary-wife must love him very much, Allan decided.