Not everyone will understand the appeal of a fingernail. I know this. But when I find myself hunched over the five digits (or sometimes four) of someone who paid me good money to soften their skin, push away their cuticles, notice the nail’s ridges coursing like wood grain, comment on the care they’ve taken (or ignore it if they hadn’t), and cover every arched millimeter with an even coat of paint, I lose myself in that single piece of keratin.

There’s so much history in one nail. The damp fertilizer spread across the lawn this morning, or the BB that a ricochet lodged beneath my brother’s thumb those years ago. He’d said, “Michael, you can name the BB,” so I’d named it after his girlfriend.

I don’t have a personalized station at the salon. Just a few utensils and a generic “Nail Technology Specialist” certificate hanging framed in gold.  Few people comment on it. I spot that my first client of the day was briefly malnourished last month. I know I’ll see a perpendicular wave coursing above his tobacco-yellowed fingers for over twenty-four weeks. How is it that nails never seem to stop growing?

His nails remind me how difficult I find it to see the present. I’d lived in this Midwest town since I was an infant boy, too young to talk. Everywhere is small, but intimidating. Too many people look like me.

Somehow the news finds a horror to report every week day. I used to see the stories in the papers. Two men stabbed in St. Louis, someone robbed in Springfield, a couple missing and last seen down a bend in highway J. Once, some kid jumped off a bridge and drowned in the creek. The paper said he’d got stuck in the mud. Three inches of water, simple as that.

After they put my brother, his shattered glasses, and his right-angled tattoos on the front page, I stopped reading these stories. Every morning, while the other manicurist arranges her smattering of filing tools, I open the St. Louis Post-Dispatch vending machine and hide the headlines. When I cannot see the bold, clustered stretches of words, I find it easier to give myself to my work. There’s something beautifully immortal about a polished nail, and then the next waiting four (or sometimes three) nails beside it.

I spend the afternoon lounging in my pedicure chair and smoking. I think about how difficult it would be to pick up a coin without fingernails.

They tell me that the client will be happiest if all my attention goes to their result. But, every now and then, one of my clients tries to make small talk.

An hour before my shift ends, my last client of the day, Joan asks, “How did a man like you gain such a passion for manicures?” I want to say, I’ve no interest in manicures, just fingernails—even if that’s not quite true.

Instead, I say, “I suppose I’ve always enjoyed taking up the little jobs, the ones everyone needs, but no one sees. In the third grade, I always volunteered to empty my classroom’s trash cans at 3 p.m.” 

Joan was a school teacher, and she exudes school teacher. Sometimes, I think she must have been one of mine. She says, “But didn’t they have janitors to do that?” She lies back with her eyes shut, her skin so calm it could have melted off.

“Well,” I say, “I enjoyed that little responsibility and knowing I gave him a thirty-second break.” Of course, I don’t mention how I’d loved the rippling plastic, how the shine of every bag hid the endless black hole. Or how Teresa’s yellow Post-its were always stuck to the side. She drew cartoons, mostly about unicorns, but I loved them.

Mrs. Joan holds out her left hand. Somehow, I can see only one nail at a time. I don’t see her digits, spread wide by cotton balls, or the single dark strand of hair that sprouted just above her knuckle. She often chides herself about the hair, but I don’t understand why. I would never have seen that dark strand if she hadn’t said a word.

 The nail is like a pink-colored window, and when I polish her keratin, I see the weeds she picked from her garden, the brick some men threw through her window, the glass she swept into the dustbin and the white paint she’d used to cover up the slurs muraled onto her garage door. I can see that she had dipped her fingers in Holy Water three times a week, and that she’d stopped sometime after she’d collected shards off her carpet.

Everything I see in her hands reminds me of my brother.

I know nothing I do here today would erase the memories contained in her fingers.

I say, “Would you like to try your nails in gold?”

– Alex Hughes