'Fingernails' by Ashley McCurry

You could always tell how things were going by looking at my hands. During tax season, you’d notice my ragged nails and bleeding cuticles, ripped away as I battled the shame of dyscalculia.

But that’s not what my hands looked like when we first met for coffee. These nails were buffed and polished to a high shine. They gripped the cappuccino, trembling, as we discussed our favorite 80s bands and the kinds of things you talk about when deciding if you like someone else’s company. Three years later, they cradled your face in the car, when you learned your grandfather had died.

I once had a hangnail infection creep into the edge of my index finger. You recalled a teenager whose thumb was almost amputated because she thought the pus-filled swell was just a bruise. You delicately smeared ointment onto my wound and wrapped it lovingly in a bandage, and it felt like all the nights when I couldn’t breathe between panic-induced sobs until your arms enveloped me, firm and unwavering.

What I don’t understand is how people gaze, silently, in the sterile chill of these waiting rooms, watching the physician approach as if in slow motion—every footstep inching closer, stretched through time like saltwater taffy. How do they sit in these unpleasant chairs with hands as still as fallen snow? How do they not tear away layers of translucent proteins and pink flesh as the dull vibration of whatever these words are—something about lab results and unexpected diagnoses—fill their ears and the ringing starts and tears splash along the hospital floor?

I see a drop of blood emerge from my left ring finger.

I’m afraid my hands, now landscapes of cracked, dry soil and cerulean river veins, will not make it out of this place intact.