little thought.
I saw her right hand first. It was the hand of a woman four times her age; it was curled in her lap like a conch shell, curved and knobby-knuckled. It must have been in a fire, from the way her skin looked; the scars curved and rippled like the flame had been caught, like it had pressed into her skin. Delicate ridges, the unnatural smoothness of scars. Pink, purple and white interrupting the deep coffee-brown of her skin.
It wasn't until she stood up that I saw her left hand, more beautiful than the right. Someone had sliced it neatly in two with shears, between the middle and ring fingers, then knit it back up again. It was broad across, big and flat with the scar marbling her palm.
It looked as though the pinky and ring fingers had lost whatever it was that made her grow; they were tender, small, a child's fingers stitched into the broad palm of an adult.
I wanted to press her hands between my palms. Not hard, but not delicately either; I wanted simple, firm contact, to feel her pulse rushing steadily in time with mine. They were unbelievably, perfectly beautiful. Beautiful, I mean, in that I can't tell you how beautiful they were, only the way I experienced them, only through the steady layering of metaphor and simile.
She looked back at me when she left the subway car at Spring Garden. One eye was ringed in red, the socket too big for the ball. We smiled at one another. Her teeth were perfect.
Afterwards, walking through the station on my way to somewhere else, it seemed that I was surrounded by beauty. A woman in two-inch heels exactly as tall as the eight-year old who walked in front of her. The usual phalanx of men pop-eyed with drugs and hard living. A man shambling along, picking at his fingernails, one shoe's sole stacked higher than the other. A girl with a mass of fake hair so heavy that it tipped her head back on her neck, so that she gazed out through the bottoms of her kohl-rimmed eyes.
At the 7-Eleven, I stand behind a boy with hair artfully styled to look like a nest, wearing a hoodie made to look like a prisoner's jumpsuit and jeans made to look like they house a pair of twigs. Just past his emaciated hip is a rack of TIME: America By the Numbers, it tells me, with Rockwell on the cover. Of course it's a white man painting America.
"Next," the quiet Pakistani woman behind the counter says, and smiles carefully at me when I put my milk on the counter.
Philadelphia was voted the ugliest city in America. I keep thinking about it, how ugly we are and what we mean by ugly. Did the girl with hands split and burnt and still surviving get to vote? Would the Pakistani woman at the 7-Eleven think to visit Travel & Leisure?
"When you see statistics," I tell my students, every semester, "someone's lying."
It wasn't until she stood up that I saw her left hand, more beautiful than the right. Someone had sliced it neatly in two with shears, between the middle and ring fingers, then knit it back up again. It was broad across, big and flat with the scar marbling her palm.
It looked as though the pinky and ring fingers had lost whatever it was that made her grow; they were tender, small, a child's fingers stitched into the broad palm of an adult.
I wanted to press her hands between my palms. Not hard, but not delicately either; I wanted simple, firm contact, to feel her pulse rushing steadily in time with mine. They were unbelievably, perfectly beautiful. Beautiful, I mean, in that I can't tell you how beautiful they were, only the way I experienced them, only through the steady layering of metaphor and simile.
She looked back at me when she left the subway car at Spring Garden. One eye was ringed in red, the socket too big for the ball. We smiled at one another. Her teeth were perfect.
Afterwards, walking through the station on my way to somewhere else, it seemed that I was surrounded by beauty. A woman in two-inch heels exactly as tall as the eight-year old who walked in front of her. The usual phalanx of men pop-eyed with drugs and hard living. A man shambling along, picking at his fingernails, one shoe's sole stacked higher than the other. A girl with a mass of fake hair so heavy that it tipped her head back on her neck, so that she gazed out through the bottoms of her kohl-rimmed eyes.
At the 7-Eleven, I stand behind a boy with hair artfully styled to look like a nest, wearing a hoodie made to look like a prisoner's jumpsuit and jeans made to look like they house a pair of twigs. Just past his emaciated hip is a rack of TIME: America By the Numbers, it tells me, with Rockwell on the cover. Of course it's a white man painting America.
"Next," the quiet Pakistani woman behind the counter says, and smiles carefully at me when I put my milk on the counter.
Philadelphia was voted the ugliest city in America. I keep thinking about it, how ugly we are and what we mean by ugly. Did the girl with hands split and burnt and still surviving get to vote? Would the Pakistani woman at the 7-Eleven think to visit Travel & Leisure?
"When you see statistics," I tell my students, every semester, "someone's lying."