Peter drove with one arm laid out the window. Rising and falling, fluttering, Peter’s hand wallowed in waves of accelerator thermals slipping past the bigfaced Buick. The only thing visible in the side mirror was a beaky hand puppet jerking and diving on a golden background.

Forty-two years away in Yugoslavia, a three year old bound for the village of Smizani played the same game, boxing crisp air, foiling his hand till buffeting winds blew back his tiny arm. Holding it out at right angles to the truck in order to see if he was strong enough to snatch it back safely before an oncoming vehicle could prune it away.

"Spiro, make your son stop that, please. It’s dangerous." His mother’s tone was severe but a smile flirted with her mouth like a butterfly considering where to light. "Lamb, without those little sticks you wouldn’t play piano very well, so best to keep them inside. Understand me." Her sternness made him giggle.

Never could play piano. Hands—perhaps they were the ultimate expressions of inspired creation. The thumb. Opposition posed as the fundamental advantage. Enterprise rising from a malformed claw. Was that what separated man from animal? Peter was unsure. How separate are we? Is it divine or damning for a species to be able to enunciate with form, to confuse through means of speech that which, with another nature, would be inarguable?

From his perspective there was little leeway to judge objectively. His hands possessed him as much as he possessed them.

Heat waves shimmered above the blacktop county road. At the trough of each shallow dip in the roadway he could see the ripples waiting atop the rise ahead.

During a piano lesson his mother noticed the spots. Two half inch rounds, one in each palm where it appeared a rash was forming. Peter was eight. Unguents, plasters, herbal oils, nothing would eliminate the angry welts. Angela worried about these unyielding sores. She’d knitted her son a pair of fingerless gloves so that he could play without getting the irritations dirty.

"Why in heaven's name won’t those places in Peter’s hands close up?" she worried aloud to her aunt. "Look", she thrust her own arms out. "Nothing I try affects them. What kind of cut can stay open like that without getting infected?" She was on the verge of tears.

A siege of life lasting nearly a century had left the old woman's body a ruin, but her mind had ceded little to the passage of time. "Perhaps it doesn’t find its beginnings in sickness. Peter is a special child. Let go of your motherly nature. Stand away and see what becomes of these raw places. Scabs may come, perhaps not, but if the boy suffers no more than is on his hands now, leave it be." She winced at a pain thrusting into her left leg. "I have seen much in this life that offers no explanation for its being so. Minnows falling from the sky. Neighbors murdering each other. Fire on a river. There were reasons for all of it, but I did not know them. Some things never choose to be known"

And that was how the problem of Peter’s hands remained. Forgotten. Gloves were fashioned and became fixtures of the boy's life so that, as with all ordinary things, his needs were accommodated and nonexistent in the same moment.