Stringing
By Marleigh Fann
When I was little, I always thought that my grandmother’s hands were older than the rest of her. Honestly, they kind of frightened me. Her knuckles were swollen, her fingers bent sideways like knotty young trees that had tried to reach the sunlight and given up. The backs of her hands were covered with thick, raised blue veins, as if a force beneath her skin was incessantly pushing them up. My family all said her hands were hard-working, strong. I thought they looked borrowed.
Now, I sit beside her on the screen porch on an old wicker bench as the eroded shingles above us flap in the late summer evening wind. The air smells like dark red roses and the fresh lemon pie resting inside the kitchen. A stained-glass window she made thirty years ago, when her hands were still young, shines a plum color in the sun. Outside, the blooms of the dogwood tree sway in the breeze.
A metal bowl of stringed green beans is balanced on her crossed legs. Her hands look even more weathered in action, each wrinkle holding a lifetime of careful labor. She snaps the ends cleanly with a small knife, pulling the string from each bean’s spine.
“If you don’t string it right,” she says, “it’ll be too tough to eat.”
I try to mimic her, but my fingers fumble. Cicadas hum in the trees, their song thick and slow, lingers just a bit too long. I watch her hands more than the beans. Every finger bending, wrist turning, noticeable vein winding through her skin like a snake in tall grass. Countless broken toys repaired, loaves of bread baked, grandchildren scolded and soothed. These hands carried the weight of my life before I could.
When she pauses, I place my hand beside hers on the worn teal cushion. The deep purple light catches us both. For a second, the porch is still and everything is quiet; the wind, the cicadas. Her skin is thin and mapped with veins, and mine should be smooth. But the longer I stare, the more foreign my own hands start to feel. A faint blue line weaves along my wrist. My knuckles look sharper, the bones closer to the surface.
I curl my fingers, a flicker of fear that one day I will move like this, look like this, look like her. The heat outside forces its way in, but she isn’t fazed. She presses her palm flat against mine. The blue line beneath my skin does not vanish, it perfectly aligns with hers. I do not move.
Her gaze meets mine. A small smile purposefully moves across her face, as if it has to travel through decades of time before reaching me.
She returns to the beans, but whispers, “You’ve got my hands.”
The cicadas start again, louder. The porch’s wooden frame creaks softly. Her knife snaps the next bean; I follow. I just keep stringing.
THE END
Author Bio: Marleigh Fann is a first-generation college student born, raised, and currently attending school in upstate South Carolina.