Small Hands
by Shellie Zacharia
She had small hands. Like doll hands her old lover used to say. He had big hands and a need to hold her tight.
She bought the guitar in a store of random items: guitars, bongos, bergamot and sandalwood soaps, chessboards, suitcases. The shop owner called her “Baby” and said the olive oil hand lotion would help her play better. “For you, Baby,” he said, “I will sell it to you for half.” He meant the lotion, not the guitar. She bought the guitar because it was forty dollars and the color of honey. She did not buy the lotion and later wondered if she could blame anything on that.
She had trouble with the C-chord. Fingertips cut by the strings, sharp stings like slaps, she worked to curve her hand around the fretboard, fan her fingers, press hard. She decided she would play all songs with D and G and E. Maybe A. She would forget C.
Her singing voice caught above a whisper was strained, awkward, though still on key. She tried what she thought were sultry, red-trimmed vocalizations, which sounded like Spanish vowels. She considered it best to hum. Some nights, her fingertips to her lips, she felt caught up with the feeling of bees, with madness. Possibility. Failure. It depended, really, on the number of sips from the whiskey bottle. How well she played. How good it sounded.
Shellie Zacharia’s short fiction has appeared in Backwards City Review, The Pinch, Coal City Review, Tusculum Review, Juked, Flashquake, Verbsap, and elsewhere.