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BY_YOUR_OWN_HAND

                                             May  9, 2017

A DC comic book story I read as a kid,
probably from the mid-60s:

Superman is under attack by mysterious flying
arms: they're dressed in various strange,
flamboyant ways and fully as strong as he is.

They come striking at him from all angles,
at different random times. They have no body
he can attack in self-defense, and there's
no face he can confront.  They have no
voice, no plan, no reason.



   He eventually realizes that this is
   a Red Kryptonite phenomena--
   he'd been experimenting with Red
   Kryptonite from behind a lead shield,
   but he'd reached around the shield
   and allowed his arm to be exposed.

   He's fighting with his *own* arms;
   He's fighting with a reflection of himself
   distorted through a Red Kryptonite mirror.



                                            It occurs to me that
                                            I've had this dream.

                                            Inside my dream, I woke
                                            with my right hand feeling
                                            numb, and encountered
                                            another hand with my left
                                            which I somehow realized
                                            was my own hand slipped
                                            through some sort of
                                            dimensional gate.

                                            I waved the hand around
                                            thumping it against things,
                                            trying to get it to pop
                                            through to where it belonged...


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