A Helping Hand

By Michael Hearing

"It’s not every day you find a human hand while digging potatoes. But that's exactly what happened to Leonard Johnson on a Saturday morning not long ago." That's how this quirky little story begins.

When you're a fast-failing organic farmer in New Hampshire, with a known termagant for a wife, an event like this can be devastating to your small profits when the news gets out – especially since that ancient hand has peculiar "qualities."

This discovery sets off a chain of inexorable events that lead Leonard to rash action resulting in a terrible kind of justice. A balance must be restored and a lesson learned.

"A Helping Hand" is a paranormal short story with a touch of horror, approximately 6,200 words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Hearing
• Release date: May 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301158157

Michael Hearing

Michael Hearing is a freelance writer/essayist/novelist living with his wife, dogs, cats, horses, and ferrets on a few acres with a small lake in northeastern Oklahoma. There, he tries to grow vegetables, catches quite a few fish, and does his writing.Having lived a fairly desultory life, Michael decided that it’s time for some order and method. So he is finishing up and publishing some books he’s had in the works for many years. But, still, he is likely to be all over the genre map. In most cases, though, he has lived what he writes about, and his works ring true.

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A Helping Hand

Michael Hearing

Smashwords Edition

Spring Lake Books

Copyright 2013

All rights reserved. This book may not be used or reproduced in any manner—by any means or in any medium whatsoever—in part or in whole without written permission of the author (except, of course, small excerpts in reviews). Please respect intellectual-property rights and help authors protect what they've created.

This is a work of paranormal/supernatural fiction with an admixture of psychological horror. The characters and situations presented here are nothing more than inventions of the author’s imagination. If anything in this story resembles real persons, places, or institutions, it is purely the result of coincidence.

A Helping Hand

It’s not every day you find a human hand while digging potatoes. But that's exactly what happened to Leonard Johnson on a Saturday morning not long ago.

Leonard, a failing organic farmer in New Hampshire, was just trying to eke out a living on the diminishing land his parents had left him, the land his great-grandfather had settled. Leonard raised and sold common, non-niche vegetables such as potatoes, green beans, corn, and tomatoes—which, he now realized after five years at this endeavor, was a mistake. But he also had one good hay meadow that he cut and baled. This was the only part of his small farming operation that made much of a profit—when he could keep his ancient baler working, that is. It was always breaking down or getting the wire tangled up or locking up because he had picked up root or a rock.

Anyhow, Leonard was digging potatoes to take to the local farmer's market early that Saturday morning when dawn was just beginning to make itself known in the east. Over and over again, he drove his potato fork into the soft soil and brought it up loaded with well