As a nail biter since the age of three, I've never clipped my fingernails before. I mean I have immaculate toes and I've been taking care of them since I was maybe eleven, the age it started becoming uncool for your parents to care about you or touch you. But with regards to my fingers, those nails have been chewed down to the quick for the past eighteen-almost-nineteen years. Of course I had short periods during which my mother plied me with an assortment of BITE-B-GONE or CHEW-NO-MORE products but I always developed an immunity to them relatively swiftly and my nails were back to their usual haggard nature. So it's quite a big deal for me to have not even touched them for the past two months.
It seems like such a simple thing, but I'm constantly in a panic over every little detail of these newfound extensions of my body. They seem so tough, but the slightest bend in the right circumstance is the most painful thing in the world. They also get DIRTY! Like nobody seems to talk about that. You always hear about 'breaking a nail' and how inconvenient that is, but at no point in my life have I heard the woeful tale of the dirt under the nails. It's constantly there. Like every twenty minutes I have to stop everything or this unsightly build-up is just gathering there, waiting for somebody to come along and notice how poorly I groom myself. Why does no one speak of this? Is it some sort of fingernail-owner taboo? Is there maybe some sort of network of catacombs where all the anguishing fingernailians convene to bemoan the soiled state of their prized digit caps?
Like sure, I remember watching my brother getting his nails inspected in Cub Scouts but that made it seem like he just had to wash his nails out once a week. If that! If you only have to scrub out your nails once a week to keep them pristine, you'd have to imagine just letting them be for a couple weeks would still leave them looking at least decent. Only after maybe a month or so of serious neglect would they end up looking like rusted bear traps. But no, regular intervals throughout the DAY. All of the days. Always and ever.
I feel now--being as I've taken a sentence that I'd already written and made it into the title--that I should actually write a short story about the Woeful Tale of the Dirt Under the Nails. It sounds like a Nate the Great story or something of the like.
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Day 749
For the forty-eighth week in a row, the sky was a dark, disquieting stockade stretched out low over the rolling flesh hills of the Index Finger Plains. The Dirt silently scanned the horizon from his vantage point on the tip of Finger Nail Ridge. His brow furrowed, he sighed at yet another day of inevitably fruitless scavenging. Yet another day of boiled water and dry grass. Of isolation and hopelessness.
The Dirt slowly descended the outcropping of rough skin to his shallow cave under the thin, jutting portion of the Ridge and meditated for the four thousandth time on how exactly it was that this had come to be his existence. Because it wasn't a life. A life has purpose and fulfillment and some sort of hope for the next day and the next. This was just being for the sake of satisfying some cosmic need to fill a void. The Dirt had no family, no friends, no memory of anything. Anything but occupying the den under Finger Nail Ridge and looking out forlornly over the miles of flesh the spanned out to the south.
He'd dared to venture out over those miles once. He had braved the treacherous peaks and valleys of the Knuckle Range, traversed the sparse and bizarre grasslands of the Fewandfarbetweenhair Fields, and stopped only when he'd come to the intimidating expanse of the Backhand Woods. Had he known, the arduous journey through those woods would have brought him to the unfathomable breadth of the Forearm Wilderness and to even further regions and territories of untold enormity.
But The Dirt was just The Dirt and so he'd returned to his home under the Ridge and carried out his meaningless existence.
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The narration would then follow The Dirt's activities for a few more days. A series of strange and unfamiliar experiences would encourage him to once more strike out to discover some sort of answer to his questions. He would happen upon the Thenar Space and marvel at the landscapes found in the Digitus Medius Region, almost identical to those he had just crossed. And then...
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Day 991
It was uncanny. The Dirt was almost annoyed at how similar this place was to the Plains. As though just over the next embankment, he would see the familiar smooth slope of Finger Nail Ridge and the rocky incline down to his den. The thought percolated and festered in his mind and a dull rage rose up in his stomach as the expectation began to feel more and more real. Nearing the crest of the last hill, he closed his eyes in preparation for the sting of disappointment and glaring sense of futility. He felt his feet stop moving as he stood at the top of that hill with the cool air blowing against his closed eyelids. The silence was penetrating while he let his reluctant anticipation build.
But then he heard a voice.
The Dirt's eyes snapped open and his mouth dropped at the scene spread out before him. It was Finger Nail Ridge but it was speckled with dirt. There were maybe six or seven of them and they looked exactly like him. He took a step forward and the voice called out again,
"Mom! Do you see him? Who is that?"
They were a family. A family of dirt. He began to run now as one of them began to usher the others down under the Ridge to what must be their own den. Tears in his eyes, The Dirt was sprinting now. He'd never imagined that there might be others like him. That there was dirt out there with stories and interests and lives worth living. The tears turned bitter for a moment as he realized everything he'd been missing out on, but then flowed stronger and more sweetly as he filled with hope for the future. The children had all filed down into their home now, but the mother and father stood guarding the bank, eyeing The Dirt suspiciously as he neared them.
He skidded to a stop maybe thirty feet away from the couple, breathing heavily and anxiously wiping his tears away.
"Hi," he breathed.
The female dirt offered a cautious "Hello..."
The male wrapped his arm around his wife and stepped forward defensively as The Dirt straightened and moved to approach them.
"Now you just stay right there for a moment, Stranger."
"Please," begged The Dirt, "I just want to say hello. I've been alone for as long as I can remember. I've just wandered here and never could have imagined I'd meet anyone who looked just like me. What is this place?"
The couple glanced at each other and back to The Dirt.
"This is Finger Nail Ridge, the northernmost point of the Digitus Medius Region. Where do you come fr-"
And just then, the air erupted with the thunderous clangor of earth hitting earth as the Finger Nail Ridge that the Dirt had occupied for so long descended from the sky and scraped violently along the length of this miraculous new Finger Nail Ridge. The Dirt stumbled back in paralyzed horror at the nightmare playing out in front of him. As his upside home completed its crisscross of the dirt family's, it began to lift away from whence it came. The bloody, mangled carcasses of the family clung to the ascending Ridge and The Dirt watched the promise of a new life disappear into the sky. In a matter of minutes, purpose had been handed to him and yanked away again. And so filled with anguish and unspeakable hopelessness, The Dirt crawled down into the cavern that had once housed the answers to all his dreams but would now stand to serve as a reminder of the atrocity he had just witnessed and would forever question. He was nothing more than dirt under the nails.
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Well...it's not quite as eloquent as I was hoping it would be. But it's the story I imagined from the beginning so it works for me. Sorry if it was a bit of a bummer. It does have "woeful" in the title.
Once again living up to my name,
-Sad Blogger
Episode 2 - A Bucket of Beeps
11 years ago