Handfuls of Fingertips
an excerpt

Hands see as though an eye and an ear are at the tip of each finger. With wrinkles on palms and the cracks, calluses, and worries of age comes wisdom without limit, as hands experience all things closer than body parts, notice and remember more than the human mind. Feet are too far away to hear our conversations, and they work too hard with too little pleasures to take note of the beauty in life. Ears can only hear, eyes can not think, and the heart’s feelings are muffled by being so deep inside. Hands taste each experience firsthand, in the miniscule and dreadfully important ways alike, being caressed by foreign lips and sliced by a haphazard kitchen knife.
My earliest memories are of hands: my grandmother’s hands covering her laughter as she tells stories, my mother’s hands swaddling my brother the day he was born, my father’s hands carrying me through the hospital parking lot when I broke my ankle, and my own hands exploring dirt and clutching flowers in front of me. During these moments, I didn’t wonder what my hands or theirs would remember and carry with them. Even now, as one grips my plain mechanical pencil, and my head rests upon the other, I am not aware of the history within, the time being absorbed and words they will retain.

My Grandmother’s Hands

Time hangs heavily in the deep crevices, clinging to the purple splotches of age on her skin. Since I have lived, her hands have changed; in just sixteen years of her seventy-nine, they have seen enough to morph into a greater form, hold more thoughts and images than any novel, song, or picture show. They’re full of the mysteries of her childhood and adolescence, her love, marriage, children, and divorce.
Grama’s tinkling voice disappears as I listen to her stories. I instead see her hands held out in front of her as she chases a chicken at her grandfather’s farm. Summer sweat forms a layer on her palms, and a grey feather thrown into the air brushes against her pinky. When her laughter dies and her own grandmother brings assistance, handing her the disgruntled hen, Grama, then a young Betty, she can feel the warmth of her body, like a fresh egg, and her fingertips count the pulses beneath dimpled chicken skin, the blood that flows in an excited dance underneath and will soon be rolling down the sides of the chopping block. Betty pets the chicken’s head as her grandmother fetches the axe from the barn.
Betty’s fingers forget the sheer silver of a fork at dinner and instead pry the meat from the bones, her grandmother’s famous fried chicken slippery against her skin. Fingertips brush against her lips as she places juicy tidbits on her tongue; though her lips smile and her mind laughs at her grandfather’s silly tale, muffled by cigar smoke, her hands recall the fervor of a tiny heartbeat, the softness of feathers that now blanket the ground outside.