Creative Nonfiction: Tributaries by Jamie Etheridge

Photo by Alex Diaz on Unsplash

Ever notice how the crescent of your thumbnail looks like a sunset at the beach? The falcate skin closest to the cuticle, a blush that fades into the thinnest line of a horizon, water and melding. I edge this space when I’m nervous, a childhood habit. The faint uneven grooves of the nail, its textural, tactile depth infinitely soothing.

My infant girl’s hands came out scratching, long jagged nails raking the insides of my thighs as they passed through, like a graffiti artist tagging an abandoned bridge. At night, I hold her in the crook of my arm and whispering lullabies while she wiggles her hand up into the sleeve of my shirt, a chick nestling into her mother’s wings. Sometimes I still rub the spot on my outer arm where her fingers buffed my skin raw. She’s almost grown now but that place remains mine forever, I carry it with me.

My hands have always drawn compliments; like birds gliding low along a shoreline. Long and lean, clear nails trimmed square, cuticles rounded and serene. My hands are pale white, undertoned pink, with faint freckles speckled across their backs. One time a woman at a party leaned in to whisper, “You have the most lovely fingers, long and tapered.” “They are my grandmother’s hands,” I respond, half drunk, unsure what else to say.

My grandmother’s hands were veined and holy. She wore long skirts and button-down shirts with the collar turned up, a crucifix on a chain. During summer visits, she shared her bed with me. At bedtime, she’d read from her Bible then sink to her knees, steeple her hands in supplication. Kneeling next to her, I was supposed to be praying, eyes closed, head bent in piety. But instead, I’d shift my knees on the hard wooden floor, stare at her hands and air trace the blue veins running across their backs, rivers coursing and diverging. She wanted to carry us to heaven.

I am grateful for my mother’s hands. Like mine, long and thin, almost skeletal, capable beyond belief. She taught me to craft, to cook, to crochet. She drove us to school and paid the rent with those hands, buried two husbands, ashes and dust, spilled six feet deep. She slapped me once, open palmed, the echo reverberated in my head for days. But I deserved it. We both apologized. She carried our family for years with her own two hands—and that carries a lot of weight.

S_ clenches her tiny hands in tight fists. She can’t let go easily. They relax, spread out only in sleep. She’s colicky and restless from birth. But then finally one cool autumn night, snuggled in the bed against me, she weaves her fingers through my stiff, unshampoo’d hair and peace. I hold still, scared to move for fear of waking her. She holds my head and is carried off to sleep.

The word metaphor means to carry, to bear something from one place to another. We carry and are carried – our lives traced on the backs of our hands, broken and tributaried. Each of our lives a palimpsest of experience, riverine, fracturing. Until finally joining, at the mouth of a cold, wide bay, flowing out into the vast ocean of our belonging.

Jamie Etheridge is CNF editorial assistant for CRAFT Literary. Her creative writing can be found in Anti-Heroin Chic, Bending Genres, Essay Daily, Identity Theory, jmww, Pithead Chapel, Reckon Review, X-R-A-Y Lit, and elsewhere. She is a Fractured Lit Anthology II 2022 prize winner and was a finalist for the 2021 Kenyon Review Developmental Fellowship in CNF; as well as a Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net nominee. Twitter: Lescribbler. Website  LeScribbler.com.