Capital Furs

I was born with red-stained hands.

The doctors were baffled. They tried, with different chemicals, solvents, mixtures, and medications to wash my hands clean again, but they stayed scarlet, the deep red of poppies and robin's breasts. My family was deeply embarrassed. They tried to cover it up, give their child a sense of normalcy and propriety, but to their bewilderment, the red would seep through somehow. They'd look away and when their eyes fell back on my hands, the gauze or the gloves or the mittens would be the same fresh-blood color. Leave the cloth on longer, and it would disintegrate into flimsy shreds that would fall away and slough off like old, dead, carmine snakeskin. My family began to experiment simultaneously with the doctors. While the latter continued to concoct their cocktails of pills, creams, and liquids, the former searched for any material, any substance, that could hide their daughter's dire affliction and burning-flame shame.

Despite being kept in seclusion, my mind was a shining bright ruby, hard and glittering and sharp when cut the right way. Having read voraciously and quickly (so as not to destroy or mar the pages) and done my own experiments, I understood the potential paths of my life unfurling before me. Anything, absolutely anything my hands touched long enough would turn red, and then, would begin to corrode, and fall apart. They might put me in a factory for the rest of my life, when they realized there would be no way to "cure" me, so I could turn objects red for a living. They could give me away to the military, attempt to isolate the compound that suffused my touch with vermilion venom, or to make me a weapon, of corrosion and extermination.

But there was so much more of me, so much more to me than these hands. Perhaps there were others out there, a man with blue fingers, a woman with a forest green touch, and a child just born with deep violet fists waving in the air. We would not be affected by each other's touch. We would colour the world; destroy it and make it in our own images.

I remembered feeling alone. Deep down terrified. Despair eating away at the edges of a hidden hard ball of fear, knowing that when the sorrow consumed it, my hands would turn on me, wielding a razor to get all the red out for good. I stared down at them, my red-stained, red-staining appendages, and teetered on the edge. On the one hand, there was nothing but woe and doom, to be an outcast and freakshow all one's life, singular and suspect, staining and corrupting everything I touched until the end of this miserable existence. On the other hand, there was the slim possibility that there would be others, who could be like me or who could love me or who could do (dare I hope?) both. A life of agony, or a life of tentative happiness.

Twining my fingers together, I knew both paths of shame and triumph would be there together, vying for my fate, red against red, rage against passion. As soon as I came to this realization, something inside me shifted.

One morning, before my eighteenth birthday, I woke up to find my hands plain, fleshy, and powerless. Instead of a feeling of elation, there was a silence and a knowing. Nothing had really changed. The futility and possibility of life still stretched before me, endless.

Copyright F.C. Estrella 2009

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