Perfect Toenails

You have perfect toenails.  Toes that are shaped like a tiny girl’s hands, perfectly sized, perfect shaped nail beds with just the right amount of white distal edge.  Not too short, not too long.  Too perfect actually.  It makes me want to bite them off.  Like my own fingernails, bitten off, married to chewed and chomped cuticles.

It didn’t matter what Ma threatened - matches, nail oil, the taste of sour metal.  What do they put in that stuff anyway?

My fingernails are not allowed to progress to the length they have strived for over the past 54 years.  Oh, now and then, the rare manicure protects them from my jaws for a short time but not from the opposite hand which picks away, like chisel to marble, leaving cracks in the paint, then no more paint, then teeth return to their exposed prey.  It’s a nervous tick, anxiety honed from years of her pre-emptive strikes, stealth like assaults, catching me off guard.  Not this time, I would say as I crouched in my corner, eyes darting back and forth, scanning the room for a sign of her approach, subsisting on my own cannibalistic meals of keratin and protein.

You have perfect toenails.  How is that possible?  To not have dried up skin hanging off the lateral nail field, coupled with scraggly nail edges? This pisses me off.  You don’t look like you have nail-coifing tendencies.  I have no mouth access to my own toes.  If I could get my teeth down there, they would be as perfect as yours, albeit quite a bit shorter.  I looked up at your face and you do not have the face of a nail biter.  Come to think of it, you don’t have the face of someone with perfect toenails.

Does your mother know my mother?  I will ask you tomorrow.

Alone and Awake

Sleepless, so get stoned, fall in love with your children all over again, panic, gasp for a breath and wonder if anxiety is becoming the norm. Look where you've gone, been to, going to, long for, escape from, retreat to the imaginings of an ever youthful heart that thinks life began an hour ago. Long for dirt trails and hoofed animals, barns and pooches, a walk in your beloved birches, the only tree you know, but why not, you only need one kind to love...me, sons, a life better than on the planet of loons where you find yourself working today and wondering how you got there in the first place. Lessons waiting for mastering if you could only figure out whom the teacher is and what the fuck she is mumbling under her breath. A course you completed years ago.

And I miss you.  Alone, awake, stoned.