A pair once as well crafted as youth could fashion, with enough young untested muscle to pad the artistry with an untried, tentative masculinity: a perfect storm of potential.
Now near the completion of two-thirds of a life characterized by hard, unskilled labor, the potential seems realized, if amused at how. The muscle has swollen in the web, looking like excess, but in reality only just enough to perform daily duties. The half inch scar from a dull accident with a dull machete on a dull, hot afternoon, once a dull white, is now a duller brown.
The fingernails still bitten down from nervousness, from economy of time management, from distaste of white, from disregard for hygiene.
Stress shows on the inside edge of the thumb cuticle; a gnawed, picked rawness that gets tucked under the palm in certain circumstances.
They look strange when hanging in pictures, unnatural, uncomfortable with idleness, cocked at an angle inconsistent with the curve of the forearm, ready for they know not what, apt tools of a restless mind.
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