See your hands. You notice a black spider on the knuckle of the left-hand middle finger. They’re your hands and now a spider. These wrinkles and those grains under the nails from the garden. Your hands. They appear to you suddenly with the somatic lucidity of a sting.
Thick hands. You’d trapped one in a bottle once when a ring had fallen in and the two of you had laughed. But then you’d thought only of the bottle, but now you recall the bottle’s inner rim and the pressure of your hand’s width against it. You let go, turned the bottle over and let the ring slide gently out and onto the table.
You’d once inked in the wrinkles of your palms but they didn’t seem the same. They became just glabrous lines, black tracks that had nothing to do with you, even though the woman in the tent had estimated you with them, gliding her painted red nail east to west across and down the head line with a shake of her head, which you resented.
And now you want to know what you’d felt: your hand or her nail? The person she described was far ahead of you and had no hands, lacked sensitivities and a name. She, the woman said, would die by drowning.
Everything behind your hands blurs and transmutes into background like foliage. You remember attempting a number for the palm wrinkles but lost count at the problem of intersections and curves. You imagine that the wrinkles may be infinite or accidental and when is a wrinkle not a whorl or vice versa?
And those are your impossible bones extending to the tips of your fingers over woven with thick green ropes, which you’ve never felt and which you find all of the sudden a horror. You find their complexity a thing to fear. You remember and resent the palm reader that much more. Or not the palm reader but you, giving her your hand inconsiderate of the veins, which feel nothing, and the bones and the scar you see along the thumb which is evidence of a fence and running and the swish of your desperate feet through a meadow, and nerves, which you know about but have never seen. You think, If we indeed registered the rush of blood, we’d go mad.
Your hands so much of which are all feeling and act in so many ways like eyes. Terrifying when you consider all that you’ve done with them and to them and how, when they are considered too long, they become ugly and alien, like crab shells.
The spider has yet to move. It’s weightless and black and you know exactly what it is. These are your hands and on one of them is a black spider, unmoving, as if it’s waiting for your next move, as if it crawled here to ask but forgot the question.
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