They All Must Go

By Sam Logan

You used to love your fingernails. A weekly visit to the local salon for a manicure. A topcoat every few days. You treated them so well, like a mortician who preserves the hands for one last viewing. Now, you hate them.

One day you looked down at your hands and all you saw was your mother. You noticed your fingernails grow in the samelong, almond shape as hers. The realization sent a shock through your psyche, an emotional stab. You snarled involuntarily, possessed with disgust. What if you become like her?

You neatly trimmed the opaque, white free edge of the nail every few days in the shower. The maintenance was just often enough to mold them into a different, slimmer profile. The ritual kept the intrusive reminder of your mother at bay. Yet, with each trim the revulsion returned after less and less time, like a serial murderer who escalates to kill in quicker and quicker succession.

You used an emery board to grind the nail plate to its limit. A switch in tactics, a gravedigger trying to find the right shovel-angle to make headway with efficient strokes. Course-grit sandpaper swatches scraped the flat top of the nail to a fine dust. A wispy, thin cover of nail plate remained. Fingertips cherry-red raw and flared with agony. Nail beds, excruciating to touch.

Fingertips covered with sewing thimbles as a form of protection, like medieval helms prepared for battle. A fleeting memory of your mother at the sewing machine. She made your Halloween costume every year. You remember every stitch of the Ghostbuster tan flight suit uniform she spent months crafting. She even built the essential accessories, a life-size proton pack and functional ghost trap. A last-ditch effort to make up for past mistakes. It was the last costume she made before she abandoned you at ten years old. Your father no longer exciting enough to hold her attention. Or maybe it was you she was running from. The thimbles have lost their appeal, shattered by the reverie.

How to get rid of these troublesome nails? You sweat buckets as your internal monologue debates possible paths forward with hesitation. You settled on a double blade cigar cutter and spent a weekend constructing a vise-like, miniature guillotine.

You insert your left index finger. A rubber mallet rests in your right hand, its handle-heft grounds the moment in reality. The mallet crashes down, striking the guillotine and snapping off the fingertip below the cuticle and above the distal phalanx. A commercial grade, single burner electric hot plate is nearby set to maximum temperature. Quickly, you press the end of your finger to the heat. It sizzles and spits, cauterizes. A melting stench fills the air. You retch, again and again.

Finger by finger, thumb by thumb. One at a time you make a clean cut. Every clip is crisp and cooked. The sacrifice isworth it as a calm envelops your mind for the first time.

BIO:

Sam (he/him) emerged in 1984 from the depths of the Chesapeake Bay off the Maryland shore. He somehow made it to Oregon where he is a university professor and somehow convinced someone to let him teach a course about body horror. Sam Lives with his partner, kiddo, and Dune the dog.