The hand is soft. The fingers are long and sinewy. It is a hand that once worked magic -- on the pitcher's mound, the football field and basketball court.
Joe Kinan hopes that someday his hand will perform some magic for him, too.
The hand was a gift of love. It once belonged to 18-year-old Troy Pappas, an honors student and star athlete from Eliot, Maine, who died from catastrophic brain injuries suffered in a fall last September in a Bates College dormitory.
Parts of him are now living on in seven people. Kinan, one of the most badly burned survivors of The Station nightclub fire, received Pappas' left hand.
The story will be published online Sunday and in The Providence Sunday Journal, as part of The Journal's special report, Forged by Fire, 10 years after the Feb. 20, 2003, blaze in West Warwick that killed 100 people.