I can define my own sense of poverty. It's not the right word, poverty, because poverty is the lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts. I have comforts. I still have electric and cable, still have this here machine a-whirrin'. There's still enough dinners for us until the kids get picked up for the weekend. There's no gas in the car, but, well, there's never any gas. I am waiting for the time when we can pour piss and shovel nail clippings to get to the mall.

But whatever it is, here it is: I am looking at a small pile of translucent ovals. They could almost be the inside linings of delicate shells, if they had a luminescence, a sheen. One side is shiny, whiter at the flat end than the rounded or jagged end, and the other side is rough, sandpaper, like the inside of a coconut after you've discarded the meat because it doesn't taste like the flaky stuff you get at Cold Stone Creamery. They're light, but still have weight to them, almost the hue of pale sweet corn, complete with what could be the teardrop of a kernal at one end. When you pile them up and drop them, they sound like so much uncooked rice, an almost comforting tinkle of beans. These little slivers are what is left of my artificial nails.

They look so much like real nails that they don't look unreal until they're no longer attached to my fingers. When I am fortunate enough to get all 10 off in single solid pieces, I play with them before I throw them out. I try them on as tooth veneers, being of similar shape and color (even with the smallest rusty line of dirt I may have missed in my cleanings, they are far whiter than my teeth). It's not like I don't know where they've been. I run the now soft and revealed pads of my fingertip along the insides of them to feel the ridges of nail that came away when the fake ones were removed, leaving me with all these white stripes of not-yet-dead-no-longer-living tissue that I promptly sand down in an effort to hide the fact again: I can not afford to get them filled and one by one, air is getting under them and they're chipping, and by god, they make my hands feel ugly and cheap.

Now, I could just as easily pay the dolt that put them on to take them off, but the process is pretty much the same: you find a thinner weaker section of the nail (the sides of each nail are usually tapered to be so, in an effort to look like a normal nail) or a place already cracked or showing real nail meat, shoving something long, thin, and metal (since that's what all nail accessories seem to be) and prying it off the living nail. The pressure created is amazing. I mean, they put this powder, acrylic, I think, mix it with acetone, dab it on your finger (which has had merely an elongated tip super-glued on), and roll it around until it hardens on your newly sanded and primed fingernail. They weren't made to come off, ever. I have gotten pretty good at it, though. The trick is to mental yourself through the thickest part of the nail, the center, because that's where the pain reaches its crest. Then, if you're lucky, you will not pull so much of your own nail off on the downstroke that it bleeds and you have this tear in your finger that, while healing really fast, hurts every time you touch something.

Don't get me wrong; the guy at the "salon" would have done the same thing, inflicted the same damage and pain. He may have used a nail tip to free the fake nail with less pain, as they are slimmer than any nail file, but I would have had to *pay* him, hence the reason I had to rip them off in the first place.

Part of it is that I have fake nails because I am a chronic bite-them-until-there's-nothing-left, then-nibble-on-the-entrails sort of nail biter, and it's the only way my fingers will ever look delicate, womanly. Considering the craft they create, one would think achieving the affect would be enough, but NO, I must have them perfect. When I have the money, I get them filled religiously. When I paint them, I do it flawlessly, or leave them naked. I still put them in my mouth and touch teeth to them, exhilarated to have cheated the training of my mind and fitted myself with nails that don't really break. Much.

That is, until I tear into them with a voracity of an animal knawing itself out of becoming the boullion in someone else's stewpot. I think it's responsible for at least one chipped tooth. Still, I can't seem to leave them alone if it means several weeks between me and the ability to remedy the problem.

It's weird, being able to touch thing with naked fingers. I can't pop pimples, which unnerves me, nor can I massage my own scalp. I have rendered myself utterly defenseless, and I couldn't even grow my own claws.

Back to the poverty part. Well, I won't go too far with that. I am applying for unemployment, my part time job can't get me hours because the kids need me to get them to and from camp, the electric bill is past due and it's $300, the kids have nosebleeds from the A/C, I'm going to have to ask him for even more money if the kids expect to go to the pool tomorrow, my checking account reels deeper and deeper into the red digits. This will all go away after the fall, when I go back to teaching where I belong, not this world. Next summer, this won't happen, because my income will defer over the summer. But this, this royally sucks.

I chewed off my nails, I guess, to remind me of one less thing I can't do right now.