Madonna of the Three Hands and Her Secret Circle

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Nobody knew exactly when the Madonna acquired her third hand. It was a delicate affair, like discovering an extra Tuesday hidden between Wednesday and Thursday.

The first two hands were perfectly ordinary. They could hold a cup of tea, button a dress, or wave goodbye to somebody who had already disappeared around the corner.

But the third hand belonged to another universe.

She kept it raised toward the ceiling of an abandoned cathedral, where the saints had long ago moved out, leaving behind their furniture and a peculiar smell of eternity.

In front of her floated a golden circle.

It was not a clock, although it knew the time. It was not a compass, although it knew where everything was going. It was not a religious instrument, although several religions had attempted to claim it and subsequently misplaced the paperwork.

The circle was a secret.

It had been invented by a woman who wanted to measure the distance between two thoughts without disturbing either of them.

This turned out to be considerably more difficult than measuring the distance between two stars.

Stars, after all, are reasonably cooperative.

Thoughts are not.

The Madonna wore a white dress and a little hat that looked as though it had been borrowed from a picnic in 1937. She had arrived at the cathedral that morning carrying nothing but her three hands and a theory about the universe.

Her theory was that everything had already happened, but nobody had bothered to tell the future.

The golden circle contained thirteen invisible doors.

Each door opened into the same room, but the room was different depending on which door you entered.

Behind the first door was a forest where the trees dreamed of becoming violins.

Behind the second was an ocean filled with the memories of people who had never been born.

Behind the third was a small kitchen where God had left a pot of coffee boiling sometime before the invention of gravity.

The remaining doors were more difficult to explain.

One contained the childhood of the moon.

Another contained every conversation that had almost happened.

The last door was so small that only the third hand could open it.

The Madonna had spent years studying the circle, but she had never discovered its center.

Whenever she reached toward it, the center moved somewhere else.

Eventually she began to suspect that the center was not a place.

Perhaps it was an event.

Perhaps it was the moment when a person stopped believing that the universe required an explanation.

Or perhaps it was simply the place where lost buttons went.

She preferred the last possibility.

It seemed more practical.

One afternoon, the circle began turning backward.

The cathedral became younger.

Dust climbed back onto the stones from which it had fallen. A spider carefully dismantled its web and returned the silk to its own mysterious interior.

Somewhere outside, a bird flew backward into an egg.

The Madonna smiled.

Her third hand opened.

And for one extraordinary instant, the entire universe passed through her fingers without touching anything.

Then everything became perfectly still.

The golden circle disappeared.

Nobody noticed.

Except a black cat sleeping beneath the cathedral steps, who opened one eye and understood immediately.

The secret circle had never been around the Madonna.

It had been around everything else.

And the third hand?

That was the hand she used to wave goodbye to the world whenever the world forgot that it was dreaming.