Like a Sore Thum…b

Bryan Betancur

Gismelda found a severed thumb in the grocery store. A dirty, distended thumb, hidden under a head of lettuce she had picked up to examine. She set the lettuce down with the care of a bomb tech defusing an explosive device, then quickly pushed her cart away. She wandered the market with no clear purpose, stopping to search for items on her list but seeing only the gruesome thumb. “Vámonos ya,” she whispered at the end of every aisle. But she didn’t leave.

For reasons she couldn’t yet understand, Gismelda returned to the produce section. It was still there: a discolored thumb that made her think of a bruised Vienna sausage. A glowing warmth radiated through Gismelda’s stomach like sourdough rising in an oven. A low-voltage current tickled her thighs. She gasped. She hadn’t experienced sensations like those since her wedding night, when Inocencio took her virginity. Inocencio, who expertly navigated Gismelda’s body while swearing he was also a virgin. Inocencio, who years later lost his left ring finger in a factory accident and exclaimed, “Mira, Melda, God don’t want me wear a wedding band no more!” Inocencio, who abandoned Gismelda because she couldn’t give him children, then returned ten years later, como si nada, as if it had been ten minutes. Inocencio, the man who broke Gismelda.

u u u

Gismelda took the thumb out of the freezer. As usual, she laid the finger in the palm of her hand to feel its frigid solidity permeate her skin, then placed it in a bowl filled with ice. She carried the bowl to the dining table and set it just beyond the newspaper, dictionary, and notebook. When she immigrated to the US, Gismelda habitually read the newspaper to improve her

English. She looked up words she didn’t know and wrote their definitions in notebooks that she reviewed before bed. Inocencio was relentless in mocking his wife’s assiduous studying. “Diablo, Melda, who you know understand this words?” He spoke in a booming voice that rose and fell sharply like the trombone solo in “Idilio,” Gismelda’s favorite salsa song. “We are gente humilde, not rich doctors, entiendes?” When they first met, Gismelda found Inocencio’s bony frame and long face unseemly. Cencio looks like an elegant spatula, her mother once noted. But the man’s voice was mesmerizing. Gismelda fell in love with that voice, married that voice, endured the violent sentiments that voice expressed so effortlessly. “You think you so smart, carajo!”

Long after he abandoned Gismelda, Inocencio’s voice remained trapped in every room, every nook and crevice. It echoed from the bottom of coffee cups at breakfast (“A good wife gives her husband babies; es una obligación moral!”); it vibrated against Gismelda’s feet when she descended the creaky staircase (“Maldita sea! Don’t be stupid, there is no other woman!”). The house exhaled the voice slowly, tortuously. For years Gismelda feared it would explode from inside the bedroom closet to mock her for gaining weight or pour out of the shower head to criticize her for having hips too narrow to birth a child. And when Gismelda finally experienced fleeting moments of peaceful, restorative silence, Inocencio had the gall to come back, como si nada. Gismelda couldn’t allow him to saturate the house with his voice again.

Reading the newspaper took on new meaning when Inocencio returned. After that dreadful night, Gismelda’s notebooks resembled police blotters more than bilingual dictionaries, and what she once looked forward to with enthusiasm began evoking nightmarish anxiety. She couldn’t seek solace in the handful of women who called themselves friends but had always insisted that Gismelda accept Inocencio’s discourtesies with Christian sufferance. God has his reasons, Melda, leave your life in his hands! The women’s platitudes never evolved into genuine sympathy, not even after Inocencio

left and Gismelda descended to an emotional breaking point. God is the only man you need in your life! Why didn’t they tell her she was worthy of love and physical affection, that she could find happiness in another relationship?

With no support system to offer comfort, Gismelda started bringing the thumb to the dining room to provide some semblance of human company while she scanned the headlines for stories about missing persons. At first, she was wary of taking the thumb out of the freezer. Having it in view while reading the newspaper reminded her the police could knock on her door at any moment and press her into revealing incriminating details, not just about the severed finger, but about the night Inocencio returned. Worse yet, the thought that someone could be desperately searching for the thumb forced Gismelda to confront the possibility that a woman might appear unexpectedly looking for her missing…husband? lover? father? Did a woman long for Inocencio — his bellowing voice and macho mien, his handiness around the home — in the same way the finger’s owner surely missed the myriad applications of an opposable thumb?

The thumb’s daily, reliable appearance at the dinner table eventually assuaged Gismelda’s misgivings. She looked at the finger whenever she became too nervous to read the newspaper, and its nonjudgmental silence consoled her in a way no one else in her life could. She convinced herself that the thumb came into her life for a reason. Somehow, a stranger’s incompleteness would allow her to feel whole again.

Gismelda folded the newspaper and glanced at the thumb. “Thumb,” she said softly. She wrote the word in her notebook, studied it. The term reminded her how much she struggled to learn English. In its endless silent letters and curt phraseology, English seemed to her a language of forced reticence, of feelings implied but left unspoken. Inocencio never became fluent in English, and Gismelda suspected it was because his trumpet blast voice was too loud to conceal letters, too unruly to be hemmed into lexically frugal clauses. The longer she contemplated thumb, the more she felt drawn to the

silent B by inexplicable feelings of kinship. She empathized with the letter, lamented its unfulfilled desire to communicate, its muzzling by arbitrary rules of pronunciation. The B was condemned to live unperceived, ignored by those who heard the word thumb. Gismelda wouldn’t let the letter remain unacknowledged. The B spoke to her despite its silence, rebelled against its imposed hiding. It stuck out like a sore thumb. “Like a sore thumb.” Gismelda said the idiom several times, raising her voice slightly with each repetition. “Like a sore thum…b.”

u u u

Gismelda placed the thumb in its usual bowl of ice and carried it to the dining room. It was the first time she took the finger out of the freezer for a task other than reading the newspaper. She surveyed the objects she had laid out on the table earlier that day. The newspaper, dictionary, and notebook had been replaced by a flashlight, shovel, and ring — the wedding band Inocencio refused to wear after the factory accident. Gismelda sat down, lowered the bowl next to the ring, and waited.

She had monitored news about an approaching storm for several days. Meteorologists warned that a violent tempest would batter the region with torrential rain and high winds, while the governor urged residents to take precautions against falling tree limbs and prolonged power outages. Don’t forget husbands who return unexpectedly, Gismelda thought while reading the weather reports, residents should take precautions against husbands who appear after ten lonesome years looking like soaked scarecrows seeking shelter from the storm. The last time a weather event of that magnitude swept through the region was the night Inocencio returned. Gismelda had been woefully unprepared then, but nothing would surprise her tonight.

The lights flickered — the universe communicating to Gismelda in Morse code that closure was at hand. A roaring peal of thunder reverberated through the room. The house went pitch black. She knew her town would

be one of the last to have power restored, which meant a week of infernal midsummer heat with no AC, no ceiling fans. The food in her fridge would spoil, the thumb would rot. The storm would bring an end to her daily readings with her inanimate companion. Yet it would also allow the finger to serve its greater purpose.

She turned on the flashlight. A luminous beam shone like a spotlight on the wedding band and bowl. Gismelda picked up the ring with the same mechanical, emotionless fluidity she had used to solder metal parts in the factory where Inocencio lost his finger. She pushed the thumb through the ring, down to the knuckle. Satisfied the band wouldn’t slip off, she pointed the flashlight toward the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. Rain pummeled the glass in thick sheets, propelled by a howling wind. Gismelda took a deep breath. “It’s time, thum…b.”

The shovel entered the ground with a soft, wet squish that reminded Gismelda of the ease with which the kitchen knife penetrated Inocencio’s abdomen the night he returned. She dug up enough dirt to uncover the cadaver’s decomposing left hand. It was unrecognizable save for the missing ring finger. Gismelda retrieved the thumb from her pocket and held it up to the moonlight. She considered making some ceremonious remarks about the mystical bonds that connect all of humanity and the ineffable forces that shape our destinies. Instead, she set the thumb down between the corpse’s middle finger and pinky, then declaimed in her best impersonation of Inocencio’s foghorn voice, “Vaya, Cencio, look at that wedding band. It sticks out like a sore thum…b.”

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Back inside, Gismelda left her soaked clothes in a heap by the door. She switched off the flashlight to let the darkness cloak her nude figure. Her skin was warm to the touch, her body felt soft, light. She sensed that she had peeled off more than mud-caked garments; she had unburdened herself

of shame and sorrow accumulated over four decades. She flicked on the flashlight and headed toward the bedroom. And she sang. Loudly. She sang “Idilio,” loud enough to drown out the cacophonous storm.