K danced with the woman with the metal hook hand who lost her original hand while defecting from an impoverished nation K knew nothing about. She placed it, her metal hook hand, gingerly on his shoulder. He held firmly to her other fleshy hand, and, with an equally firm grip around her waist, paraded her through a room of riff-raff who were focusing their attentions on K and the woman with the metal hook hand and had stopped their own dance floor rituals almost entirely.

“Why are they watching us,” K asked.

“Because you’re not from around here. And they don’t like strangers, especially when strangers touch the local women.” K hardly considered the ways in which he was touching the woman with the metal hook hand to be “touching” in the sense that she meant.

He felt the riff-raff tighten their grip. Pressing his mouth to her ear, he whispered:

“I like your metal hook hand.”

She whispered back, “They don’t like it when strangers whisper things into the ears of the local women.”

……….

K woke up in a hospital bed a day later with two metal hook hands of his own. He didn’t like them so much.