On The Evaluation of Hazardous Materials

by Anna Kahn

When I was eleven, my father wrote promising me a set of golden fingernail clippings. No explanation as to why. Sure enough, twelve slim crescents arrived by post, each as long as my thumb. Mother wouldn’t be in the room with them, so of course they numbered among my more treasured possessions. My father’s letters never mentioned them again.

At twenty, in a period of impecunity following my parents’ slow and separate deaths, I had the clippings assayed by a tiny man with an enormous eyeglass. He declared them god-waste and therefore hazardous. He attempted to confiscate them for disposal. They leapt into my hand, as I had trained them to do in the many bored hours of my childhood.

His eyes, his eyes, huge with fear (one, obviously, glassed huger than the other).

I let the clippings skitter up to form their chain around my neck.

You can’t keep them, the assayer said, they’ll choke you, and I said, good, let them, and he said, but they won’t kill you, they’ll do worse, and I said, I know, although I didn’t.

Much worse, the assayer said. You’ll go mad.

Out into the drizzle went I with my godly remnant neckchain. Into the flow of the pound of the pavements, into the beast of the hardworking street. Mad? Choked? Neither. The drizzle neither steamed off nor soaked into my skin, and the girl on the corner sold me a pastry, and as yet, thus far, I breathed unencumbered.

Anna Kahn is a Manchester-based writer who has performed their work everywhere from festival main stages to tiny pub back rooms. Their superpower is that even people who they have only recently met will tell them all sorts of secret things, which might sound dangerous, given that they are a writer, but which is generally safe.