My hands were made for killing.

I got them from my grandfather who got them from the war. Repairing heavy machinery in the jungle, he learned to wrench and repair. His hands hold a soldering iron more easily than a pen. My hands now.

I keep my fingernails long and sharp. I keep a blade close at hand. My grandfather’s hands were given to him by the men that put a bag over his head and shipped him across the ocean. My grandfather’s hands held a soldering iron in a cramped room on an assembly line. Inhaling the lead. Guards at the door.

When I was a boy I hoped my hands would look like his, rough and callused like tanned leather. My grandfather made cabinets with his hands. He stacked the rough hearthstones to make the chimney of the house he built for his family. They lived in a trailer at the edge of the property. They waited for the day that they could move in. The bank took the house before that day came. His military pension did not pay the bills.

When I asked what he did for work, my grandfather told me that he made music boxes. In reality, he made missiles. That was the first sign of his Alzheimer’s. Before I was grown, his mind had declined.

I never had the opportunity to know him as an adult, but he gave me his hands, and they were made for building music boxes.

“The air police almost caught me sitting on jet, but I’m too fast for them”

— Norman Schroeder