The Prompt Was About Hands

If my mother saw my hands right now she’d scowl and point at my ripped cuticles and comment on whatever vice – chewing or gardening without gloves – must have led to their shabby appearance.

If my sister, the omnipotent one, saw my hands she’d remark on how much she disliked her own and preferred mine, something that she only confessed to me in recent years.

We compare, we see each other and ourselves in our digits, rip off our socks at Thanksgiving to reveal who did or did not have the family “porpoise toe”, and then argue about what constitutes the porpoise toe other than people knowing it when they see it but seeing it differently from one another. We do not know which ancestor begat the toe.

At a Starbucks in the former meat market in Bergen where our female ancestors were butchers, we have coffee with a distant relative who chastises, in absentia, a woman who married into the family and passed along a congenital hip ailment. My laugh was not appreciated. Was the family perfect beforehand?

My father had one finger so mighty that it could end conversations and silence the room. His hands were wide, his fingers square at the tips, on the end of normal sized fingers. The index finger, his family-famous “spatulate finger”, would smite the dinner table, perpendicular to it, for emphasis. The finger spoke.

Nobody inherited the spatulate finger. The nephew has the shape, but also an ameliorating curved nailbed from an outside genetic force. He does not wield the finger with power.

The week my hands failed, life sat up and barked orders. It expected new things and did not explain the alternatives. Gone was the ability to operate doorknobs without pain. The hands subcontracted to other bodyparts as slow healing commenced through disuse. Feet were the new tools of choice. The hands returned, changed. The price of today's ability to play music or use a stubborn remote is tomorrow's pain. I’m grateful and I’m different and I can see to the other side in new ways since the time of my original hands.