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Hands
by Kate Grimes
My father has been taking sips from the brown bottle. It is a medicine bottle but what is in it is not precisely medicine, nor is it precisely liquor. I listen to my father, who sits at his writing desk. He speaks quietly, but the acoustics are such that I hear him from the parlor. He sits at the desk with his hands palms-up in front of his face and I hear him and this is what he says: "My hands, I am tired of hurting you. I have cut my fingers all in half so as to have twenty and watched them bend and tragically curl, useless flaps like banana peels. I have plunged you into molten steel to make you strong and pulled you out, smoking briquettes that crumbled when we tried to play the piano. I have tried to make you shiny, taloned, quilled. I have tried to make you as big as sails and as sharp as fangs, all with disastrous results. Now I am tired. The thought of filing nails exhausts me. You are free to do as you will." They lift the bottle to his mouth. |
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