Damaged Digits

Take off your dress. Take it off. Leave on the gloves.

No, you won’t swap them. Grey is your colour, grey like your eyes and the teacup storms in them.

It’s not meant to be easy. What in life which is good is easy?

Take it off as slowly as you like.

I will not change my mind.

Nothing you do surprises me. Nothing you have done touches me.

No, I will not help.

There is a place in the world for people like us, and that place is here - right here - in this place where the gloves watch us from the walls, fingerprintless strangers. They have eyes and skin cells, the eyes and skin cells of everyone who has ever worn them.

Fumbling fingers, I have known them all. The disguises they wear. What they look like naked. The hangnails, the split nails, the smoky yellow nails. The hardened cuticles. Every damaged digit.

There is shame it, of course there is shame in it. Why else would you be laughing? Why else would you come at 3AM? (They all come at 3AM.)

This? This is the color of my grated thumb, my severed fingertip.

Do you like it?

Damaged Digits

When you have finished, take off the gloves.

Take them off and throw them down. Your gauntlet.

Show me your hands.

My turn? No.

Dance.