If my mom had been alive, she would have thought it was a divine sign. “God doesn’t give you anything that isn’t good,” she would have said. It was something that she said all the time, even when things were tough, when we were, “in the shit.” I don’t know how she would have been able to interpret a fifty-foot-tall hand with the extended middle finger pointed right at me as a positive sign from the Lord, but I’m sure she would have gotten there somehow. We never really saw things in the same way. 

I wish I had seen it first. Instead, I heard a commotion outside of my window and I looked to see what it was. Five or six people from my apartment were slowly walking towards it, most of their mouths open in disbelief. When you see something that everything in your life has taught you should not exist, a lot of thoughts will cascade through your consciousness in rapid succession. I thought: art installation, hallucination, government experiment, aliens. And I still try and puzzle through exactly what it is and where it came from. No one has been able to provide an answer, but most people have an opinion. 

My apartment faces west so the giant salute was shining in as much morning glow as Minnesota could muster in the middle of winter. I bundled up and walked outside. If it had appeared in the summer, we would have all stopped at the edge of the manmade lake on the grounds of our apartment to gawk. But winter ensured that the surface was safe enough to walk penguin-like right up to it. Almost all of us had our phones out and I was one of them. I tried calling my sister in Ohio, but it was Sunday, and it was likely she was at church with Freddy and the kids. So I pressed record as I walked through the breezeway door to the outside. I’d send her the video later. I could hear people shouting to each other as I got closer. “I think it’s moving,” being one of the first things that I heard.

If I were to guess, it was a man’s hand. Not that hands have a gender that I know of, but the nails were short and unpainted with inelegant fingers.  The knuckles were slightly thicker, a small hangnail on one of the cuticles, and the palm (I know from pictures) had some meat to it. As I got closer, I could tell it was a full-on statement of fuck you. The giant thumb wrapped around to hold the non-elevated fingers in place. This wasn’t the lazy type of flip off where the thumb was extended to the side, the non-offending fingers relaxed downwards. The hand seemed like it was angry and it was pointing right at me. 

Which became apparent as I got closer. It turned and rotated so that it was pointed right at me. People noticed. And I noticed that they, like me, also had their phones out. I was sure that I was being included in their framing. 

The hand was noiseless as it moved. The middle knuckle of the middle finger was always pointing at me. I tested this by walking in slight zig-zags as I approached. I kept getting closer and felt, maybe still feel, that it was all a dream. I wanted to touch it, but it was ten feet off the ground so I couldn’t even get to it by jumping. By the time I was completely underneath it, it had angled so that the back of the hand was facing me and the ice below. I was underneath a giant and unmistakable sign to go fuck myself. 

I ran as fast as I could back to my apartment.