Nimble fingers
12 September 2011 09:26 AM Categories: Writing prompts
Yes, they grip the tomato or the apple or the newly naked shallot. One set holds down the sacrifice, another splays it open, releases the green or pungent scent, and later they all clean up the dirty work, grab a towel and steady the cutting board, wipe away the clear vegetal blood, the remains of violence.
They are obedient. I write shocking things, unwise, angry, pathetic. They tap at the keyboard, never judging or editorializing. They don’t even proofread. It appears as though they seek out the dog or sleek cats of their own volition, that they enjoy pleasure for pleasure’s sake, but the fingers are just following orders. Complicated though the messaging system might be, amazing as the structure of my hands is, my fingers are still slaves to my addled self.
Have you ever tried threading a needle after a night of wine and tears? The boy is standing in front of you, looking at the injured party, a rubber frog who already has one set of stitches attaching a leg, sewn after an unfortunate stretching accident. Your fingers tremble, the needle's eye eludes you. You have to turn away from the boy or go to a different room. You have to struggle with yourself by yourself until the trembling stops.
This is how you do it: you remember last night’s dog walk, the air feeling just like a spring night in DC, cool with a hint of warmth beneath it. It was a memory come alive, for the now, and you repeated a sentence again and again, rushed inside to write your impressions down, like half-baked poetry: tonight the air felt like springtime in DC, some time in midapril before the wet air set heavy in the evening, or like the freshly cleansed early june nights after a thunderstorm, the way the clouds wiped our worries away. I silenced the crickets by walking under their trees and every tree was alive to me, my senses were no longer muffled and I thought: I can do this. I can live again and mourn what went before. I can love, too, after this heavy period of mourning is over. I am alive.
It was the same the day before at the grocery store. You are caring again, coming alive, and no one can stop that process. The produce showed you its colors, its properties, you wanted to see, to be, to experience. You saw the people – how long has it been since you could look across the expanse of the organic section and see your fellow shoppers, observe them, make up stories about who they were and why they were there?
The fingers were pleased. They ran over dampened greens, grasped pears, lightly tapped voluptuous figs. They held the handle of the dog leash with a sense of responsibility, and when Nora looked to them for a treat, proud of her fast walking, her attentiveness, the fingers thrilled to the feel of her soft dog lips, her gentleness, with the hard promise of teeth underneath.
From the prompt "My fingers."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I expanded this one a bit. The Round Robin is almost over ...
Image: My fingers, as seen by my computer.
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