Resinating digits

"No way... I can't believe I missed that." J stated matter of factly as the three of us hovered over the morbid find. He scanned his hand across the asphalt and magically invoked a sprig of alder to inspect it further. The dried white tip of the finger bone was bleached by the sea, with slivers of sinewed flesh barely holding an oval of fingernail. A small remnant of skin pulled taut and dried reminded me of walking the beach after spawning and seeing the dead humpies lying in the sun.

"I'd guess it was a right pinky by the angle." He picked it up by the bone end, his other hand produced a ziploc bag expertly snapped open with a flick of the wrist, and dropped it in as if he'd been CSI unit trained or something.

He hadn't been trained in anything more than his own form of amateur taxidermy, which mostly consisted of a series of small insects. Kodiak really isn't the hotbed for etymological discoveries, aside from some monster brown spiders that appear in sinks and bathtubs in the spring, not much exists larger than a dime... but he had a pretty good collection of what you could find. Little tiny resin cubes of black beetles, snout beetles, creepy sand fleas, moths, an inchworm, a ladybug and the biggest of all a monster dragonfly sat in a row on a shelf above his desk. We used to tease him incessantly, but being J, you couldn't really tell if he even caught you were talking to him most of the time.

His family moved in to town from Chiniak, when we were in the fourth grade. His dad had a job with fish and wildlife and spent most of his time outside with the fish and wildlife, so we rarely saw him. His mom was a toss-back from the 60s, and as their first child, she named him J, just J, "There was something cosmic about the letter..." she'd say.

He resembled closely Moose from the Archie comics, or Dauber from Coach for a more recent reference. Large, oaf-like, and blond, he didn't get picked on much because of his size... even if he was a little slow on the banter. (He says that happened when he got hit in the head by a block when the crane slipped a couple years back... me and Four remembered him from elementary school however, and not much had changed.)

He is a gentle giant though, the only time we've ever seen him get really fired up was after he'd had one too many harassing substitutes freshman year. Each year it was the same drill the first day of roll call, he expected it... "J, no it doesn't stand for anything. Just J." Mid-year a vicious cold had traveled around the teacher's lounge and sent our English teacher home for a week, the third sub was this mousy brown haired lady who other than her wardrobe didn't seem much older than the girls in the class. She pushed her thick brown owl-like rims up and down when she hit his name, and asked "J... now what does that stand for?"

"Nothing. It's just J," droned J.

"James, Joseph, Jack, John, Jacob?" the sub listed off in a Rapunzel-like lilt.

"No. It's just J," he replied irritated.

"Jebadiah, Jeremy, Jason, Jermain?" she continued, "Johan..."

"J. It is just J.... Just Fucking J." he stood, hit the desktop and clattered back down in an earthquake.

A silence rippled through the room at the shock, as the mousy sub shrunk below the lectern. The quiet was quickly followed by a volley of people chanting "Fucking J", Four and I laughed ourselves out of our seats and somehow into in-school suspension that day.

"So F-ing J, what are you going to do with the finger, shouldn't we take it to the cops?" I asked.

"Nah," said Four, "people lose fingers here all the time, I'd bet they'd just toss it in a pile with all the other lost and found stuff. Let's see if we can find where it came from ourselves."

So as we parted that evening, J took the finger back to his desk, painted it with a resin lacquer to seal it, propped it into place with pins and poured it into its own cube cast.