It was a lovely place--she walked into it without thinking, scarcely noticing, and then there was someone singing from the garbage can on the corner; there were shoes clicking the sidewalk like drums. It was bright, verdant, crammed with blooms; the overgrown hair of her limbs exposed as dandelion shoots.

It no longer mattered if she liked the smell of flowers--sickening lilacs did not weigh upon her, roses did not blush with valentine cliches--what mattered was their abundance (the bees noisily between petals); they banged spontaneously from the earth, clashed with roadways, stole into a vase on someone's table. Stole, even, into a vase on her table.

And she found she had hands.

She had never noticed them before; they had picked up boxes, moved chairs, held pencils; they had been there, of course. She knew they had. Yet she had not observed them, had not held them, had not felt the grooves in their tips as she ran her fingers across the cherry table, the potato, the knife.

Here they noticed petal, dirt, stem; perhaps they touched, yes, she touched his skin. That was it; she touched his skin and felt muscle and a solitary hair below a shoulder blade and a mole and a scar. She opened hands that needed to be hands--hands that could make themselves necessary, give gifts merely because they needed to give gifts--and they danced across his buttoned-up flesh, mapping ingrown roots & stifled seeds.

Fluttering along his spine, they laughed as feathers laugh. Without a hiss or whinny, they tripped upon a knoll of sinew bound in a thousand simple child's knots. Seconds after they--these hands that grasped forks as scepters, caressed hair like a crown--had begun (gently, gently) untangling him, he lifted his head to turn and snap,

Do you mind?