I shouldn't be awake, but the joints in my hips won't let me lay flat for more than four hours before the ache starts blooming, like a damp rot in a floor joist, and I find myself sitting here in the kitchen with the light over the stove hummin' away. I keep looking at my left forearm, just past the wrist where the hair gets thin, and there's this patch that started out the size of a pine knot but it's changed its hue lately, more of a charred charcoal color now. I keep tellin' myself it's just a callus, a real thick one from leanin' into the lathe for fifty years, because you get these localized hypertrophic reactions when you've been working the same way since Eisenhower was in office. It’s just the skin toughening up against the world, which is what we all do, right? You build a shell. My wife, Martha—she’s been gone six years now, and the house still feels like it’s holding its breath waiting for her to come home—she used to say I was too stubborn for my own good, but that’s just the way a man gets when he’s spent his life making sure things are square and level. If it ain't square, you make it square. But you can't really plane down your own skin, can you? I used to spend my summers out in the yard, no shirt on, just the sun beating down while I worked on that big gazebo for the Miller family over in the hollow, and I suppose the ultraviolet exposure was significant back then. We didn't think about it. We just thought about the grain of the wood. White oak is a funny thing, it’ll rot from the inside if you don’t seal the end-grain properly, and sometimes I think people are the same way. We look fine on the outside, mostly, until we don’t. It’s gotten darker this week, almost a deep purple-black, and the edges are irregular, not like a normal callus at all if I’m being honest with myself, which I’m TRYING to be, even though it’s hard when you’re seventy-eight and the only person you talk to most days is the girl at the Co-op. She asked me about it yesterday when I was buying a new box of galvanized nails—I’m fixing the back porch, or trying to—and she pointed at it and said, "Mr. Henderson, that looks like it hurts." I just laughed it off, told her it was just wood stain and old age. I felt this surge of... I don't know, maybe it’s what the books call 'displacement,' where you take all that fear and you just shove it into a different box. I told her I’d rubbed some linseed oil on it and it’d be fine by Monday. I lied. I lied to a twenty-year-old girl because I didn't want to see the look in her eyes if I said I didn't know what it was. I remember my father had hands like leather, and he always had these spots, but they were just "liver spots" as he called them, benign senile lentigines, nothing to worry about. But this one on my arm, it’s raised. It feels different. It’s got a texture like the bark on an old shagbark hickory, real rough and uneven.