Hands

Another thing I wrote when I was seventeen. I read it at a reading. That was the night my brother stopped talking to my mother.

Her hands were skinny. Her hands were always skinny, even when her body swelled with childhood insecurities. Her hands were awkward and she hated them, just as I hate my hands now. Her hands were olive with bright blue veins sticking out. When she flexed her fingers you could see her joints move.
Skinny hands turned into bony wrists and long, thin agile fingers. Her nails were bitten and bleeding with anxiety. She bit her nails most when she was around her mother. She painted on clear bad tasting nail polish to try and stop herself from biting her nails, but she had grown accustomed to the taste and so the bitter peppery taste constantly filled her mouth and she thought that she must be very unpleasant to kiss.
When she was at peace with herself she was able to stop biting her nails, but these were short intervals. Her brittle nails broke easily and she couldn’t help picking at them.
She loved things that smelled good, and so she put on lotion every morning and night after her shower to clean her deoderant allergic skin. I used to love the feeling of her smooth hand in mine and wondered how she made them so soft. I started biting my nails, thinking that it would make my hands like hers, and now my nails bleed too.
Her fingers are bleeding again and she wears finger condoms to keep dirt out of the cuts. The finger condoms make her fingers smell like rubber, and I am reminded of hospitals and sex.
Her hands are skinny. Skinnier than when she was teenager. The joints in her fingers stick out grotesquely and her olive skin looks like a thin glove over her bones. Her skins looks glistens because of the extra-strong moisturizing lotion she slathers on her dry cracked skin.
Her hands shake now. She can barely hold onto the red gel anti-depressant capsules she takes everyday. She says that chemicals have burned through the skin on her hands and everything she touches makes them sting.