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The fire herder asked me to look at my hands and when I did I saw a caterpillar struggling up a stone in the space where my left palm should’ve been.

“What the hell?”

The fire herder said, “Okay, okay. It’s an illusion only.”

The caterpillar withdrew behind my thumb and index finger. I said, “That’s better.”

He said, “Your hands are metaphors,” though the way he said it it came out “metaphers.” He said, “For a poet just learning she’s a punching bag and words are the boxer who’s sweating, mean, and just won’t quite coming.”

You, reader, ask, “What’s a fire herder?”

I asked Father the same question and he said, “A fire herder’s someone who herds fire. Pretty obvious that.”

“Is it like someone who tires to make mud stand on end?”

“Pretty much,” Father said.

“Is he magic?”

“He can make your hands disappear,” Father said. “Ed up on the hill you know. He was once a guitar player. But he doesn’t have any hands anymore and so he sold all his instruments.”

“The fire herder took his hands?”

“You didn’t hear it from me.”

My hands were like cats. It took weeks but I soon managed D7 to the A shaped Eb chord, which is the way one turns the hands into unmanaged wire or loose crabs. My hands had taken on new life. At night, I’d hear cats chasing through the bedroom. But it was my hands with minds of their own, racing in and out and wrestling on the carpet, tumbling, knocking, banging at the windows, and burrowing into the sock drawer. In the morning, I’d brush my teeth and my fingers would claw for my tongue and I’d subdue them in a bucket of ice.

My brother said, “Last night your hands near strangled me.”

“They’re just playing,” I said.

The fire herder come through town. I watched him from the porch. He had a long stick and five pieces of fire marching in front of him, little smoking fluffs of light the color of hot magnesium that would often dart left and right, and the herder would snap them with his prod and they’d ease back into place.

I called to him. “When will my hands learn to walk like that? When will they smoke and dart?”

He stopped and said, “Don’t rush things. But I’m late. Inquire elsewhere” and he stepped off down the road with his strange flock.

It was good advice. I avoided him. I remember the day he made my hands disappear. It had rained. The air had smelled of snow. The caterpillar had emerged then disappeared and the strength of my fingers was like stones crushing.

In the kitchen, soon after my last encounter with the fire herder, I lay B7 onto the table top and sprinkled some pepper on Cm. I made a crowd of other shapes and arranged them into constellations, shadow dapples. I arranged them into ancient stains, various dactyl lengths, paisleys, grins and frowns, spider prints on ash.

Father came in with an ax. He said, “Make sure you don’t break those. Make sure to clean them up, too.”