Fiction | July 22, 2017
No Shadow of Turning
My grandfather, the Reverend Thomas Argyle Faith, lost his right thumb when he was sixty-five trying to save a cow in labor. After that he used his index and middle fingers to write his sermons, the conviction of his strong, boxy penmanship compromised by an imbalanced teetering to the left. I tried to write my name this way to see how it would feel, the difficulty of the task further increasing my awe of him. I would look through his bookshelves, finding slips of his notes in his many Bibles and volumes of theology. I could tell by the handwriting when he had read them, before or after the loss of the thumb.
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