The Man with Dirty Hands

A man with dirty hands patronizes my library and checks out every book I want to read before I get to it. How do I know it's a man, you ask. Here is my indisputable proof: I opened up my library book and a large, flattened spider slid out onto my shirt. Only a man would do that. Sorry guys, but I have brothers, a husband--and my father once slammed a roach in a missalette at church and put it back in the holder. My dad and I laughed for the rest of service, we kept thinking about the next person who'd open that book. But I digress.

This man, this library patron, has pizza thumbs and mustard fingers and is bleeding. I know this because of the stains he leaves behind. Also, he picks his nose. He reads literary fiction, but he enjoys children's literature as well. I used to think maybe he was a professor, until the books I checked out started showing up with greasy thumbprints along the sides of the pages, as if he'd leafed through the books many times. Now I think he's a self-educated mechanic. Or a writer who reads while eating, bleeding and picking his nose after changing his toner cartridge.