These hands? Not mine. My hands? Smooth and supple and brown. Not grey and clay. Light callouses from light work. Not oyster with meatballs. Liverspots? Fucking liverspots. Though not mine, the hands somehow respond to the grey clay lump behind my eyeballs.

His hands looked like this forty years ago. Twenty years before he died. By then, his hands had turned yellow and plastic. Far beyond grey and clay. Long, curved, yellow nails. These freshly-trimmed nails are longer than they should be on my supple brown hands. I've probably clipped a mile of nails from each damn finger at this point. Ten miles total. Not even counting my toes. More yellow and jagged with every inch. I can't get the thought out of my head. Those yellow plastic hands pulling blankets taught under a yellow plastic chin. Yellow plastic hands capped onto yellow plastic spindle arms that could snap if the hands pull the blanket too taut.

Subtracting my grey clay hands from his yellow plastic hands leaves a difference of twenty years. Twenty years. Seemed like a long time forty years ago. Back when these hands looked like they should. Are these really even the same hands? I've sloughed off or shit out every cell that was in them back then. Then again, the same is true of the lump behind my eyeballs. Is it the same soul?

Young hands. It's been so long since I've seen young hands. Long blue veins like aqua-glass tubes so close under the skin. The big vein splitting a couple inches above the wrist. Dropping down, branching out, coming back together between the first finger and the dirty finger. Young hands. Is there such a thing? The nurses' hands don't count. All their hands are like white, round loaves with five sausages sticking out. Albino lil smokies. Young? Younger than mine, sure. But all that fat and anger and thinking they know what is best for the world — it ages them. Thinking they are doctors, it ages their fat hands. The nurses get fat and deal with turds like me. I'm a turd. The nurse is the toilet. The doctor's the plumber. It seems bad now, but the plumber says this is temporary. One way or the other, he's right. If this bout doesn't end me, the real struggle starts in about ten years. Is the next ten years worth getting out of this bed? What about the ten after that?

First ten, I'll see where it takes me. After that, as long as these hands function, they'll do the dirty work. She doesn't think that's the right thing. Suicide. She thinks you go to hell. I don't believe in hell. I sure don't believe that her God would expect someone to go through years of Hell on Earth in order to avoid it for eternity. Surely He would not burn someone forever just for trying to shorten this Hell. Especially when her book, His book, doesn't prescribe Hell for dying at your own hands.

Hands. There they are. Grey and clay and oyster and meatball. Miniature meatballs that weren't there before. And wires. Black and grey wires. Some curled like ribbons pulled along a scissor blade. When we got married, I wrote her something about hands. I read it to her on our wedding night. In our consummation bed, on the top floor of the tallest hotel. It was all about our hands. How we would hold hands during prayers forever, even when our hands were wrinkled. I didn't know about grey and clay. I wrote of how, when the last of us made it to heaven, the outstretched hands of the other would be the first thing we saw through the misty clouds. I'm sure it was beautiful. Just like the hands that wrote it. I bet her hands are ugly now, too. They probably aren't yellow plastic. But they will turn that way soon enough.

I read it to her, and she cried. She read me hers. She felt bad because mine was better. It was my idea, though, that we should each write something to read to the other in our consummation bed. I didn't care that mine was better. I wanted us both to do it, because I wanted to make her feel good. I wanted her to make me feel good too. And I didn’t want her to feel bad that I had done something to make her feel good, but she hadn't done anything for me. With young hands, it feels good to make someone else feel good. That feeling fades.

That feeling, like the cells in my hands, has been replaced by something uglier. Something older. Hands and hearts. They do not age well. The heart feels good, the hands do good. The heart feels old, the grey clay hands shove food off a tray or push a call button or point in the fat face of the fat-fingered nurse whose fat throat rasps and rumbles with every breath. That nurse doesn't like these hands any more than I do. Fuck her, though. She has those feet. I bet the feet are fat, too. And until she turns grey and clay, those fat feet will keep carrying her fat ass out of here at the end of her shift. But until the plumber plunges me or roots out the line, I'll just rot here in my grey, clay puddle.