Time on My Hands KATE FALVEY

Kate Falvey

Time on My Hands

Rings I have known: Cheap heaps of fused faux stones, relentlessly turquoise, blotched with dark declivities;

a real aquamarine once, tremulous, absorbingly inadequate with a split silver band and a sparkle of guilt (all gifts robbed from the store of my mother’s wishes and my father’s steadily employed pride); a sterling fish with a peace sign braided in; a poison ring painted with white-bewigged ladies, plotting something dire at court. Tiny drippings of hearts and daisies dyed to match piddling earrings that itched my uncertain lobes. And, ornate and globular, a kind of liquid-looking blue-lipped pansy-flower thing. This was the era of lava lamps and strobes. Later, a dim brown cameo, oblong and morose; the requisite shamrock tossed winkingly onto a slice of Connemara marble (a real Dublin shop and the cost of a meal); a white gold wedding band found on the strand embossed with initials they weren’t my love’s which served as a herald that all would be lost.

Lately, I’m given to tiny indulgences like amber and peridot wings for prayers to close these fingers on some real, unassailable thing.