Nail-gazing

Seven months ago, I lost a toenail to a dishwasher unloading accident involving one calamitously dropped glass Pyrex baking dish, a night of excruciating pain, and a paperclip heated over a candle to release a tide of pooled blood. The nail didn't die right away. Instead, it went the way of Terry Schiavo: massive internal hemorrhaging, then a vegetative state that persisted for another month, while I stubbornly coated the deadened husk with layer after layer of glossy purple polish and insisted it was still functional. Then one fine day, I decided I'd had enough of the charade and peeled it off from root to tip, exposing the raw, puckered reality underneath. I spent the record-high heatwave summer in Texas wearing closed-toed shoes and cursing fate.

But waking up every morning and padding to the shower, I'd also quietly observe the strange miracle that is the regeneration of living tissue. Nails, I discovered, don't grow back at all like I'd imagined. There is no dainty moon-shaped sliver of starter nail that patiently, concentrically expands like the rings in tree trunks. Instead, the flesh on the face of the digit quickly hardens into what Nabokov's Aunt Maude in Pale Fire calls "scarf skin." Then, slowly, agonizingly slowly, this fibrous tissue fuses into a yellowish chitinous pseudo-nail, more reminiscent of a jagged tusk or claw than the delicately polished, glassy substance coating the human fingertip. The pseudo-nail expands like a fungus, colonizing the digit and threatening to take over the other, healthy appendages. But then some strange alchemical twist occurs, and the erstwhile misshapen, evil scrap of cells gets smoothed out by an unseen hand, until, square millimeter by square millimeter, it begins to resemble something human.

Seven long months have gone by -- friendships have begun and ended, unexpected turns of fate brought strange victories and stranger surrenders -- and all there is to show for my recent cellular reconstruction project is a slight horny protuberance, the vestigial remains of the fungus-like pseudo-nail, which I am now loathe to snip off, signaling as it would the ultimate act in a riveting drama of life, death, and rebirth. The new nail is glossy and pink, as smooth and innocent as a newborn babe. I don't quite trust it yet. It has a lot to learn.