Thumbs

His right thumbnail was chipped and jagged, cut short by nervous assaults of his teeth. The flesh around the heel of the nail was split, and a diluted mixture of blood and pus occasionally trickled down his thumb, toward the deep-set lines scarred over his knuckle. A small patch of long white hairs curled out from the soft, meaty space between thumb and fore-finger. His fingers were long—longer than his palm, even—and patches of white hair curled on these fingers, save for the middle. On this finger, a long scar—not quite fresh enough to bleed, but fresh enough to still ache and throb—which stretched from knuckle to knuckle, had scraped off all the hair. The nails on these fingers were in much the same condition as that of the thumb. The left hand was identical, save for the lack of scarring on his middle finger, and for the lack of ring finger. It was missing from about the same point as where the ring is worn. This injury, though, was old. He still remembered the day it happened, and as he sat there, he rubbed the stump, and watched the event of that day spread open before his mind’s eye. Saw the door falling, the rock which would act as anvil to the door’s hammer, and heard the crunching, felt the almost burning pain race through his hand, up his arm where it stopped, leaving a chilling numbness in his hand.
He leaned back in the small wooden chair he was seated in and took a deep breath. He was then doubled over as a fit of coughing tore through his slight, worn frame; ran the back of his rough hand across his lips, and spit on the dusty floor. The spit was thick and red. A large beetle scuttled to the spit, clambered on top of it, and examined it, questing for any sustenance it could find. The man watched disinterestedly from behind thick bi-focal lens glasses and muttered to himself as a slight cough passed through him, setting his form quivering again. He laced his remaining fingers together and squeezed his hands tightly; knuckles glowed white in the gloom of the dank room, and the scar on his middle finger opened again. Blood oozed slowly, as though wakened from a profound sleep, and coursed between his fingers and into the cracks of the dry, aged hands. Sniffling, he loosened his clutch on his hands enough that his thumbs were freed from their tight chains. Slowly at first, as though testing his old, weary joints, he spiralled his thumbs, first right over left, then left over right, and repeated the process, faster with each passing spiral. As he increased the speed of his motions, a sob shook his shoulders; a tear trickled down his cheek, crossed his nose and dropped off its tip, landing on his middle finger, on the scar; the blood mingled with his tear and coursed, diluted, more quickly across his entwined fingers.
He continued, spiral upon spiral; continued as he waited. Waited for the body lying at his feet to cease convulsing.