September 4, 2008Nails
Tammy’s mother wanted to save me so drove me to church every Sunday.
This was back when I wanted rich white shag like Tammy’s, where
on Sunday afternoons we’d lie on bellies face-to-face, where
I confessed my dream of living on an alp in Switzerland with
my three Saint Bernards that would rescue me should I get lost
while searching for firewood or building a snowman, where
Tammy told me her mother’s no-dog-in-the-house rule. When
Tammy’s mother called us to lunch, we sat across from her
at the fingerprint-free, glass-topped table, the pesticide stench
of nail polish remover mingling with tomato soup and saltines.
After Tammy said grace, I sipped soup and cold milk
and imagined crawling under the table, not to beg
for scraps, but to see everything upside down: the bottoms
of the plastic bowls and cups and her mother’s nearly line-free
palm, that hand splayed, all the people in the steeple flattened
corpses, the tiny bottle already shaken with a click, clickety,
click, click, each inch-long nail already scrubbed of their Sunday
coral, four cotton balls pinched, dense, the color of punched skin.
And while we ate, Tammy’s mother applied cherry-sucker-tongue
red to all ten beds. We left her to blow on a hand turned claw,
and I toted my bowl to the porcelain sink, just like Tammy,
and rinsed it out, just like Tammy, but didn’t mention how someday
I wanted nails after church, didn’t lie on Tammy’s shag rug
that afternoon and whisper about how I wanted my dirty hands,
their abused nails chewed to jagged little lips, to someday be tipped
in a sharp red. Didn’t tell her how badly I wanted to someday
have nails like her mother’s, nails that could scratch eyes out,
nails that could easily drive into some savior’s back.
from #28 - Winter 2007