Moonlight reveals but a fraction of the severity of texture on my hands and arms. To look at me, you would be able to feel me, as she feels me now. There is only one part of me that has not the scaling, dirt brown thickness. That is the part of me that is within her, alive and on its own.

  I have rhinoceros hands. And arms. And stomach, back, legs and feet. I've become this way from merely living. All my life I have held dirt and mud and all manner of earthy substance and have brought it to my parts, smudged with glue and doused with water and rain and spit.

  When I was much younger-I am not old now, though to look at me unmoving you would think me extremely old-there was a time in which I was working to remove the accumulation of this leathery coat. I felt it was not, should not be, a part of me and therefore didn't want to share it with anyone, or more exactly, thought that no one should be made to suffer its effects. I tried all manner of peeling, sanding, scraping, and smoothing in order to lessen its visual and tactile severity. All to no avail, though. Everything that I engaged in brought more of the stuff to me. So I gave up, I let go.

  I learned to like the sensation of holding handfuls of dirt and debris and mixing it with glue and sometimes my own saliva, kneading it and squashing it between my fingers, and finally spreading it out myself on my own body. Oh, to feel it hardening, still keeping its gluey elasticity, tightening itself over my own original skin until it embedded itself in my pores and within its own cracks and fissures. It became my armor!

  As I push and nudge against her own smooth and supple skin, here in the very early morning, I can see the softness becoming red with the abrasiveness. Her eyes are open and looking right at me. An acceptance of what I have to give is what she is exhibiting through her eyes. To be sure, she can see who and what I am and how I look, and still she moves with me. We part our lips to kiss and, with a flick, my tongue touches her lips, its soft wetness almost a shock to her. But it is not a shock, she knows who I am and what I am about, my tongue being an incongruity similar to that other part of me that is inside her, the part that is hidden when not in use and hidden when in use so that it has never known the accumulation that the rest of my body has known. And she knows me through this part.

  Still watching me, she wraps herself tighter to me. I know that this must increase the friction between our surfaces, but I continue because it's what she wants. And I want it as I move us more rapidly to our conclusion. We finish and there is only heaviness of breathing in the silence of the moonlight. I stand to look at her laying there, body bruised and scraped, sweat mixed with crumblings of my hide on her rising and falling torso, and she appears used. As I stand there against the night-lit curtain, air touching me through the cracks and crevices of my rhinoceros skin, she is still looking at me with eyes I know through which she is somehow, miraculously, fulfilled.

  I wonder how this can be and how I can have such good fortune to have been able to give what I can to this other. I wonder what the next moment will hold, and the next and the next. As I wonder all that I can wonder, she rises, comes to me and brings me around to face the moonlight-she now can see the full extent of my bodily texture-and there is a light on her face and body that does not come from the moon, does not come from me, but is of her own.

  As she lifts her hand to my chest, I notice that in addition to the look of fulfillment in her eyes, she is smiling and she begins to gently peel the layers of covering back above my heart.

  There, beneath the baked soil and clay which she carefully removes in small, brittle pieces, is a beautiful, luminescent blue! I look back and forth between my body and her eyes as she reveals more and more of this new, incredible me, not daring to believe what I truly am seeing.

  The air is sweet on my new self! I can see the the glowing blue reflected in her eyes as she looks up from her performance to check on me to make sure I am all right with all of this that is happening. Of course I am all right and as the moon becomes the sun she finishes, the two of us standing amid the mound of cast-off clods of second skin, holding each other tightly, the glowing blue evolving to a radiant pink enveloping us both.

I Have Rhinoceros Hands

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