Pick pick pick
at your thumbs. Your cuticles are raw and ready and waiting. Around your right
thumbnail a tiny piece of loose skin asks you to pull at it. It stays attached
for longer than you think it will, finally releases almost at the first crease
of your knuckle. A small drop of blood forms at the site of separation. You
suck it up with your mouth to avoid getting it on your clothes. That would
leave a stain as evidence. It tastes like pennies and that white lily lotion
your mother got you for your last birthday.
She slept with
one of his dress shirts each night after. It was trite, she knew. But his
smell. His smell lingered. When it started smelling too much like her and less
like him, she’d grab another to replace it, dipping one arm into his dark side
of the walk-in closet as if she were afraid of falling in.
When she’d
cycled through all of them, she donated every piece of clothing he’d owned.
Suits, slacks, t-shirts and dress shirts, swim trunks and pajamas. His scrubs,
too, as well as his extensive tie collection. You first felt rage when she
didn’t spare the singing tie with all the tiny Santa Clauses on it. Your hands
– still those of a child but large, like his – would reach up to his chest and
search for the magic button that would make that tinny Christmas song play out
of nowhere. Pick pick pick. Tear. Chew.
It’s the best time of the year.
Someone Else’s
Father taught you to ride a bike. There were lots of other moms and dads and
kids watching. Even if they didn’t know, they knew. You were too old, too big
to just be learning. Your tall-for-your-age self looked clumsy on two wheels,
but perhaps not as odd as you did on three. Your
thumbs are bleeding, sweetheart. When you fell, your right leg mashed up
under the back wheel, and both knees skinned, Someone Else’s Father didn’t rush
to you quite as fast as he might have to one of his own.
How many layers
of skin will you destroy before all that’s left is bloody tissue, becoming a
real-life drawing of ligaments and veins like in your tenth grade biology
textbook. The week you’d studied the parts of the hand (carpals, metacarpals,
and phalanges – 27 bones total) you’d felt uncomfortable looking at the bare
skeletons of fingers, but still you’d looked longer than anyone else. That’s what your thumbs will look like if
you keep up this picking. Sarina Milosevich, a pretty girl in grade school,
was the first to inform you (perhaps incorrectly) that you had exactly 9 layers
before it would all stop growing back and you’d be stuck with bloody thumbs for
life. Her mother had left an especially soft stuffed bear with a red bow round
its neck on your doorstop the day after he died, but you still hated Sarina for
her thick ponytail and smooth, unscarred fingertips.
Now, your pillow
falls in that same small space between the bed and the wall each night. You’ve
tried pushing the bed closer, but the mattress is smaller than the frame, and
it will always shift out and away from the wall, making that same pillow-hungry
gap. You wake up to flatness. Your neck hurts. Your speech feels oddly stilted. For how could you explain the
devastatingly reliable unreliability of cotton and goose down and the small
spaces that eat them.
All these birds
singing at night, and you can’t sleep. So strange to think you would have given
anything to hear a bird (just one) all winter, and now here they are in a
legion of discordant pipes and trills. They sound almost maniacal. Perhaps it
is the lightning that drives them mad.
They say it’s best to leave hangnails alone. You wonder if Stravinsky
picked at his big Russian thumbs as he composed “The Rite of Spring.” Would you
be comforted if he did.