Warming Cold Hands

You come in from it and your hands aren't quite yours anymore. That's the strange part — you look down and there they are, red going on white at the fingertips, the knuckles stiff, and when you try to work the buttons of your coat the fingers move a beat late, clumsy, reporting back from a distance. The cold has got right into them. Not a surface thing you can rub off but a deep chill that's climbed up past the skin into the joints, into the small bones, so that the hands feel thick and slow and half-asleep.

You go to the stove. It's throwing its heat out into the kitchen, and you can feel the warmth on your face from three feet off, a soft pressure against the cheeks. You hold your hands out toward it, palms open, close but not too close, and wait for the ease.

The ease doesn't come. Not first. First comes the ache.

This is the thing nobody warns you about as a child and everybody learns: that warming a truly cold hand hurts, and hurts worst just as it's being cured. The blood comes back into the frozen fingers and it comes back burning — a deep, throbbing, pins-and-needles ache that starts in the fingertips and spreads down into the palm, an ache with heat in it, almost unbearable for a moment, the nerves waking all at once and complaining bitterly about it. You want to pull your hands back. Sometimes you do. The relief you came for arrives disguised as pain, and you have to hold still through it, keep the hands to the heat, and let the hurt do what the hurt is for.

You turn them over. The backs now, then the palms again, the way you'd turn something cooking, because a hand held too still and too close to the stove will scorch on one side while the other's still cold — and there's a particular danger in numb fingers, that they can't feel the point where warm tips over into burning, so that people with hands cold enough come away with a red mark they never felt made. You keep them moving. You keep a hand's breadth of air between skin and iron. You feel for the heat with the parts of you that still report honestly.

Slowly the ache changes. The throbbing spreads and thins and softens, and underneath it something better starts — a tingle, then a spreading warmth, then the return of ordinary feeling, the fingers remembering they're fingers. You flex them and they answer now, closer to on time. The stiffness in the knuckles loosens. The white patches at the tips flush back to pink. There's a looseness coming into the hands, a suppleness, the deep cold finally giving up its hold and letting the warmth down into the joints where it was hiding.

You cup your hands and hold them a moment against your own face, and they're warm enough now to give some of it back, warm enough that your cheek feels it. You breathe into them, the old animal thing, palms together, and the warm breath pools there and the fingers drink it. The last of the ache fades to a pleasant, spent heat, the fingers tingling faintly, the blood moving free.

It's a small mercy and it costs a small suffering, and the two come so close together you can't have the one without passing through the other. The warmth was always waiting in the stove. But the frozen hand can't take it clean — it has to hurt its way back to feeling first, has to ache exactly where it was numbest, the cure and the sting arriving in the same fingers at the same moment, until at last the pain wears through into ease and the hands are your own again, warm, and working, and glad.