My palms slide across the worn pavement, tracing cracks and textures, feeling the history embedded in stone. I imagine the countless footsteps that have passed here since the arch was first raised — a silent archive of presence. Suddenly, my left hand meets something that does not belong to the rhythm of plaster and dust.

A book.

Its cover is disturbing: chopped chicken legs, fragmented and raw, sketched with brutal clarity. The image arrests me, pulling me out of reverie and into unease. I lift it into my lap. Cold as the ground beneath me, yet from within it seems to radiate a warmth that seeps into my stomach and thighs. A heat that feels not external but born inside me, stirred awake by its presence.

I open the book.

On the page: two hands, rendered in pencil. They are not inert illustrations. They watch me. Their gaze is heavy, interrogating, as if waiting for me to speak. My chest tightens. I want to turn the page, but my fingers resist me. The hands will not release me. They seem to grow, stretching across dimensions, pressing toward me with silent urgency.

And then they are no longer drawings.

They emerge, shape-shifting, rising from paper into air. One strokes my arm — cool, deliberate, undeniable. A shudder runs through me. Another follows, tracing the line of my shoulder, the curve of my neck. Their touch is neither fully tender nor fully commanding, but something in between: a conversation written on skin.

I tremble, caught between fear and anticipation. The hands are questions embodied. Do you yield? Do you allow? Do you trust? My head nods faintly, almost without my permission. Heat floods through me. Breath shortens. The world dissolves into the rhythm of sensation.

The hands explore. They map the topography of my body with patience and insistence — tracing bone, muscle, flesh. Each movement pulls me deeper into a dreamstate where boundaries blur. The pavement dissolves into color; time fragments into pulses of heat and coolness. I am simultaneously held and undone.

Pleasure and unease entwine. The hands awaken something ancient, a language beneath words, a truth written in shivers and quickened breath. My body arches toward them, yet I am rooted in place, as if the stone itself has claimed me.

And then, silence.

The hands withdraw.

I blink. The book lies motionless on my lap. Its pages are blank, covered only in dust. Around me, scattered chicken feet litter the stones. The air is still, too still. I smooth my dress, close the book, and rise.

I step out from the shadow of the arch into the blaze of the sun. My skin hums as if the hands still touch me.

Were they only a dream? Or have they left their mark on me forever?