The Hand

It’s so close.

Stretched out on the table in front of her, much bigger than hers. It looks beautiful but unattainable, alluring yet repulsive.

She looks up for a moment and it catches her eye.

The human form captivates her above the beacon of artificial light to which her mind usually answers.

His hand is resting on the table. It’s dusted with hair fine enough not to take primary hold of her attention, light enough to blend nicely into his blotchy, peachy skin, present enough to establish the hand as male. The fingers are longer than hers. For a moment, the comparison between this pale, longer, wider, sinewy hand and her own strikes her.

She knows the rest of him is conventionally attractive. His hair is a red-brown color with a drop of gold—the kind of red-brown that could have been carrot-red in youth before maturing with age, while still managing to keep its bright essence.

Studying his hand for a moment, she knows it’s attached to an arm whose veins are raised gently against the surface of the skin. Not harsh, jagged lines desiring to burst out from under the skin in its blue-purple-pulsating glory, nor a straining, pumping vein hidden underneath a pelt of fat, skin, and hair. The veins descend his arm inconspicuously, only noticeable when the arms are in use.

The hand resting on the table is relaxed, but, as the discussion continues, it moves, fingers bending over themselves and stretching out, an endless series of tensing and relaxing, the veins adjusting accordingly by popping or receding.

She glances at her own hand.

It is darker, smaller, and angular against the silver keys of the keyboard, with darker, sparser hair, growing irregularly. Like the color of coffee and cream, but marred with lighter and darker tan lines.

His hand comes back down onto the table, stretched out over the assignment. It’s only a few inches behind her metal monitor. She looks again, perhaps wondering how their hands would compare to one another side by side. Her eyes flash for a moment before looking back at her glowing screen and typing furiously for a moment, recording some analytical gem the hand’s owner has uttered.

Maybe, just for a moment, she had considered overlaying her own shorter, darker, child-like hand over his to see where her fingers ended and his continued, where his were wider or longer than hers, to feel the contrast of the abundant, softer hair against the prickly, sparser hair.

She could have thought to turn the hand over gently, wrist up, blue vein pulsing, to set her palm within—an unfinished brown blot within an expanse of milky-blotchy-peachy-ness.

Perhaps this was truly a moment of the unadulterated curiosity of an innocent comparing itself to the mature… before being repulsed in a wash of indignation. Why should such a hand be seen as beautiful? Why not her own?

The hand knocks on the table and she turns off her shining silver screen, passing her assignment over to the hand. She gets up, packing away her things with the rest of her classmates and, before turning to leave, faces the hand’s body. It turns to meet her eyes with a polite, if dismissive, smile: the mirror of her own expression.

As she walks to the door, she tosses back a response to the hand’s parting wave, “Have a nice weekend, Professor,” before passing through the doorway.