The Hand by Colette, 1925
The magic trick:
A joke standing in for a real problem
“The Hand” is a classic of dark comedy.
It takes a very real thing – the fading of a married couple’s glow – and compresses it and makes a joke out of it by assigning the decline to something nearly absurdist: a newlywed finds herself obsessively disgusted by her husband’s hand.
Funny, sad, weird, relatable.
And that’s quite a trick on Colette’s part.
The selection:
“Too happy to sleep,” she thought. Too excited also, and often surprised by her new state. It had been only two weeks since she had began to live the scandalous life of a newlywed who tastes the joys of living with someone unknown and with whom she is in love. To meet a handsome, blond young man, recently widowed, good at tennis and rowing, to marry him a month later: her conjugal adventure had been little more than a kidnapping. So that whenever she lay awake beside her husband, like tonight, she still kept her eyes closed for along time, then opened them again in order to savor, with astonishment, the blue of the brand-new curtains, instead of the apricot-pink through which the first light of day filtered into the room where she had slept as a little girl.
Short Story Magic Tricks 