Lady Fingers (2018)
I always wanted pretty hands. They’d feel like a flower petal, and somehow they would always be slightly warm. I try to imagine a life where my hands looked like a woman’s are supposed to. My hands are clunky and small. As though I should work in some physically-strenuous field. (I don’t.) They look like miniature versions of my Dad’s hands—I was always embarrassed by this. To point “this way” or “that way” was a means to an end. Please don’t look at my hands. It is interesting, funny, strange how we become self conscious of these small things. They take brain space that could be utilized elsewhere, though here I am: looking at my hands, the things that allow me to write, to touch, to know.
Lady fingers are slender and lean, hairless and kind. They touch carefully; if they move something in an unorthodox way they will break it. It will be ruined. My hands tend to do this. I grab. I punch. I yank. I get angry and I am not afraid to. The knuckles bulge out from my fingers like rocks that have piled up in a the crack of pavement. They jut out and trip passers-by without meaning to. It’s always an accident. They never mean to. It’s just that sometimes they forget what they’re doing.