As a boy he loved to lick his own fingers. He stirred sugar into glasses of water and poured the mixture over his hands. It didn’t take him long to discover a simple rule: the faster he moved his hand under the water, the sweeter his fingers tasted. As he poured, he experimented with new forms, flapping his hand like a pigeon’s wing, trembling like the floor of his mother’s station wagon, lapping his fingers like tongues over the heart of his palm. He learned to love watching himself. Licking, he discovered his hand: the crevices between fingers, the crust along his right thumbnail, the unhealed sore on his left wrist.
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Watching him disturbed her–he was never satisfied. The spoon clinked bleakly against the glass. Water lapped onto the counter. “Drink it already,” she begged. “I can’t stand watching you.” She learned to leave the kitchen each time he dragged the C&H bag out of its cabinet. From the living room, she’d hear the spoon clinking against the glass for half an hour at a time. After a while, she stopped noticing. Those 30 minutes, that was time she could use to talk on the phone, or, later, to steal away to her bedroom.
In bed he tapped his fingers lightly along their ribs, brushed his wrist against their knees, drew pinkie circles on their stomachs. The courtesy of his hands taught them something: other men didn’t really touch, they grabbed. His tongue swept across their ankles, and, when they were ready, he knelt on the floor, hoisting their legs over his shoulders. There he was, where they wanted him to be. Down there most men were windshield wipers–they could vary speed but not direction. But he was artful, capable of changing speed, direction, emphasis, texture, shape, pattern.
They tried to reason with him. They only needed the sandbox for an hour between noon dismissal and nap time. He covered his mouth with his hands. Behind his fingers, his jaws were moving. The mothers sat in their plastic lawn chairs, separating their children on the jungle gym from the old man in the sandbox. The children ducked between their legs to wave at him, and to make faces.
The mothers noticed their own children first. One of the boys vomited on the sidewalk; sand poured with snot from a girl’s nose. All the children were swallowing it now. A few of them were coughing. He opened his mouth, to warn the mothers, but no words came out. One woman screamed when she saw the print on his tongue. The others screamed in sympathy before they even turned around. They grabbed their children by their elbows.
