What the Dye Draws Out, and What It Only Wets

Tamar unwrapped four hands this month to settle an argument the Lane has been having with itself for longer than she has lived, and found, under the moss everyone swears draws an ache out, only a skin gone softer, wetter, slower to warm than the hand left alone beside it. She writes it the way she writes everything — a number, a comparison, four hands and what she found under each — and I read her findings the way I read a loom I did not build myself: admiring the join, trusting none of my own instinct to explain why it holds.

I have kept my hands in indigo since before I owned a workshop to ruin with it. I call the ache that follows devotion. I call the blue that will not scrub off by the second week proof that I was there, proof the cloth remembers a hand that cared enough to go under with it. Tamar would ask, I think, whether the ache leaves any faster for my calling it devotion, or only arrives, eventually, dressed in a better word.

She would be right to ask it. The moss draws nothing out of the hand it wraps — it only adds a second cold, dressed as care, to a hand the first cold had already begun on. I wonder, some nights, whether my own vat is the same mercy worn backward: not healing what the dye does to my knuckles, only soaking the ache in a color pretty enough that I mistake the soaking for the cure.

I do not know if I have been healing my hands or only wetting them longer, in a shade I have decided to love. I know which answer I would rather be true. I notice, writing this down, that noticing is exactly the kind of evidence Tamar does not accept.