2006-12-06 || 11:00 a.m.

|| like jesus in a way if you think about it. ||

you most likely have a nail lodged in the palm of your hand.

you come home very late and stand in the doorway of the bathroom. i am washing my face or cleaning out the litter box: late-night activity. you say you hurt yourself and reveal the blood badge from under a piece of duct tape, your preferred mode of wound dressing. you're not sure what happened, you say. you were using the nail gun, but the nail could have hit your hand and then fallen to the floor.

having a phobia of nail guns, i am keenly aware of the velocity and power of them and how it must feel to be shot with one. i know when a nail shoots toward your hand, it's going to stick. you know this, too, but you won't admit it because there's not much pain and you can't feel it. you can't see it with your x-ray vision.

you conduct a battery of tests to determine the possibility of nail. you push down hard on it. you stare into the pin hole hoping for a glint of metal. you move your hand up and down. and you hold your hand three inches from the long magnetic strip holding knives in the kitchen.

"there's no attraction," you yell over your shoulder triumphantly.

these things tend to happen to you. you're still alive. you fall asleep that night and there are no nails in your dreams, no smoking-gun analytics, no physics equations pointing to the great likelihood that you have metal commingling with tendon and bone and nerve and vein. you sleep soundly. your hand curls into a lazy fist as you dream.

you are on a trip in a foreign city. you call me at night and bring up the nail. you say you're still not sure. you say you pressed the palm of your hand real hard again but couldn't feel it. you expect to feel it. you expect to see it if you stare hard enough at your palm. and there's nothing. you don't think it's in there but you call for primary care providers. you can't feel anything but you talk about insurance. you say you'll get it checked out on friday.

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