Shawn Huelle

untitled (life and death and toes)

He was hooking the curved edge of the file under the nail of his left big toe, or the "nose toe" as his girlfriend called it--a name he understood in his gut, but not in his head. He was hooking the curve under the nail and preparing to drag that curve through the white part of the nail and hopefully, thus, clean it. One time, he and a good friend were talking about toenail gunk, and he reminded his friend that said gunk was made mostly of sloughed skin cells and therefore smelled, necessarily, like death, rotting flesh, one's own death before one's own death. We die a little every day, or we start dying the moment we're born, people said, but he knew it wasn't exactly true, particularly if we continue to grow until we're approximately 18, making the entrance into adulthood (as it were) the entrance into death. He pulled the hooked end of the file from left to right, but pushed in too hard toward the middle--overanxious to smell his own demise--and poked the file into the quick of the nail, causing his toe to bleed, and filling his nostrils (though "filling" was an exaggeration) with the metallic stink of life.