Why I Love The Hand Lady

Please, let me tell you about my sexual exploits. It won’t take long!

I am very in love with people who seem to always be at home. I am! I like how you never see them on the street.

Hey, is there a dog in your life right now?

Sure hope so!

Hey, has anyone ever given you their hand as a gift?

I knew a woman once who had so many hands, she was called the Hand Lady. You could walk in and out of her home and feel like you were being waved at. What a lovely feeling. I love that woman. I love how she collected hands, keeping them tidy but never offering her own.

The Mail

Having sex with the mailman doesn’t get you your mail faster, is what Mother used to tell us.

That was her advice to us growing up.

We were not sure what she meant.

We had sex with the mailman anyway.

All of us, one by one, as we got older.

His name was Dale.

We didn’t know much about him, other than his sexual practices and tics. We kind of built a story up in our heads, each of us independently, that he was a secretly happy man. Sure, he was morose yet steady in coitus, but we imagined him being a very vigorous man outside of the bedroom. Well-dressed and well-coiffed. Ready for bright and distant lands like Vegas. Holding the nyloned legs of pretty girls in his bejeweled fingers.

Mother and Pop were immigrants, and were always very sacred when it came to people conducting their business. People at work were to be treated with a holiness and reverence. Having sex with them was blasphemous.

So we decided to not call it having sex.

It was our little secret phrase between us.

We called it getting the mail.

Shane Kowalski is a writer in Cornell University’s MFA program. Before that he worked in a public library for ten years. His pieces have appeared in Passages North, Ohio Edit, Hobart, NANO Fiction, and elsewhere.