Hands
She remembered a time when her hands were smooth and pale. Each slender finger adorned with a different silver ring. She always felt that silver suited her complexion far better than gold.
Her favorite ring was one she wore on her pinky. The thin band of silver was somewhat tarnished, but it gleamed just the same. In the center there lay a ruby that reflected her face in each one of its facets.
The day she lost that ring, she sobbed for hours, her face pressed into her pillow, screaming, howling, while her little sister and her mother stood just outside her doorway, uncomprehending.
She knew her ring lay somewhere in the graveyard, carelessly thrown off and now residing on the dust of the slain. She returned the next day and searched for hours but it was nowhere to be found. The ring was lost forever. Her mother had tried to console her with promises of a new ruby ring, but at that moment the fifteen year old girl understood that rings, French manicures, lotion—they were no longer part of her life.
She had fought against the realization for a long time, religiously showing up at a nail salon at ten AM every Saturday morning. The women would take her hands in theirs and cluck their tongues disapprovingly, picking up their file and trying to work the jagged edges of her fingernails into presentable rounds.
Eventually she gave up. It became too much to worry about the fate of the world and her cuticles. Now her hands were weathered and calloused, evidence of how hard she worked them, how much she and the rest of humanity depended on those two body parts.
She thought that there must be thousands of wooden splinters wedged into each pore of her hand. Sometimes she felt like they were trying to break the barrier of her skin, trying to prick their way out through the tip of each finger. She clenched her hands into fists when they felt like that, and after a few moments the feeling passed.
She sighed as she stared down at the hands, wondering what the manicurists would say now. Maybe, if she made an appointment… Maybe, if she started taking care of…
She let her hands drop to her side. They would never again be smooth and pale. Silver rings would never again decorate her fingers.
No. They would be worked to the bone, little cuts and scabs dotting the flesh, calluses and blisters roughing them to the touch. It was their destiny.
It was her destiny.
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