I look down at my palms, into the slender vein running from forefinger to wrist and I don’t see blood, but years. I think of the number of years that might pulse through it and of the shadows slow to clot. How they once breathed and might, still. How they might be resuscitated by a mouth already half dead, how maybe sometimes they get lonely, or cold. I think of how much breath I have left to give, and then of the hands. What architecture, what tragedy and holy mess, what years they’ve migrated through. What bodies. I think of hands that once draped from the edge of my mother’s wrists, from my grandmother’s and her mother’s before, and the mothers’ whose faces I recognize only in some vague sense of what I understand to be but do not feel as love, as less than a memory but more than a dream. So many nights, so much reaching. All of it to find me. 

They were sculpted, once. Freshly chiseled and polished for Eve in the Garden, they arrive to me now in fragments. Hangnails around the thumbs, a crooked right pinky, scarred, between the distal and proximal interphalangeal joints. I like to think Eve clung to the Tree as she fell from Eden. Not as a manifesto of strength, because that would be too flattering of God’s craftsmanship, but as a political statement, a final temptation. The fingers were never made to grasp. They are fingers of the first rib; a flat bone, a protective bone. Fingers not made to curve, or touch. Finger made to cushion a fall. Paradise was created to be lost, and Eve held on anyway. I am the daughter not of God’s strength but of the strength of Eve’s spite, white knuckled and gripping still.