The Hands

They touched a small gas blue flame at the age of three, and taught him the fear and wonder of pain. It was with these that he played cricket with his father - leg spin, out for 25 and returned in abjection to afternoon tea. The nails were bitten to shreds, slowly and methodically, one at a time from right to left until he had finished his final exam. They were not always this creased. The smooth domes at the heels were used to knead play dough - flour - her.

The scar on the top of the third knuckle left hand, short and curved like a sickle was a fight with Tom Garver in the fourth form - he lost, and spent the following three hours in the nurses room. Garver sat next to him. The nails picked at one another in a reflex that soothed when all around him burnt. The dirt dug deep beneath the nails, as he clawed the trench that saved his life out of mud thick with blood and fear.

The hands built a house for her. They hammered and sawed and tiled until sweat ran down them in rivulets attesting to his love. And in that home they lived an ethereal lifetime that breezed away like the seeds of a dandelion. With the tips of the coarse digits he felt the softness of her etched themselves into his memory, and as they glided further the deeper the memory became.

They shook in fear as they held the babe for the first time, until she had to remove it from them. They played cricket once again, for the first time in years, but this time on the losing team. This defeat was shameless and proud.

Dirt began again to fill the nails again, and the roses grew taller and stronger because of it. And all the while the creases cut and folded the skin into leather, soft and papery. The domes crumbled slowly and with a dignity befitting the giants they once were.

And when the day came that comes to all men, one hand lay out on the bed, vaguely pointing at an object unknown, and the other sat in repose upon the stillness of his chest.