Toenails, plucked off the toe, lie in a perfect row of ten in-between ten bare toes. Toe, toenail, toe, toenail, toe, toenail, toe, toenail, toe, toenail, toe, toenail, toe, toenail, toe, toenail, toe, toenail, toe, toenail.
The top shelf calculates the wholeness of one person’s feet. The arithmetic adds up to ten toes and ten nails, removed from their lodges. One person means ten toes. You might wonder, well…what about the fingers? And you look one shelf below, and see the matching ten fingers and ten fingernails.
Twenty digits. Fingers are oddly sausage-like without their nails. Worse still, the fingers are facing away from the glass they’re encased in. Ten fingerprints are hidden, and their tiny DNA stamps of life blocked from view. What can you tell from these dissected fingers and toes? Tactile side facing away, the little marks and imprints of this person’s job are concealed. Tiny scars from chopping, sawing, washing, breaking are only in the mind of the viewer.
Skin, hardened by household objects catching and tearing hands, sits in cabinet spotlights. The process of preservation flattens out wrinkles, smoothing away lives of holding, touching. Separated from the body, the fingers and toes look alive. Like they had been simply cut off their person, still wriggling. These toes look like they could still curl. Of course, small steel pins hold them in place, stiff, upright, straight. In their perfect mummification, you can imagine anything about these ten toes and ten fingers. Interpretation is fair game!
You think, these couldn’t possibly be those of a child, unless it was a teenager, or even a large child. Adult-child maybe. Maybe the smoothness of the skin is from never having worked. Maybe these are the fingers of someone who has never held a potato peeler before. And the toes of someone carried everywhere, never walking. But they could also just be injected with some kind of wax, that fills each finger and toe out.
Each nail is perfect. They couldn’t have belonged to someone who broke their nails regularly. The person who had these nails would never have bitten them off. The nail bed is too freshly bare.