Bill and Helen.

No writing prompts today, so I thought I'd revisit a couple of characters I started scribbling about a while ago. I had some ideas about them in my mind, but hadn't really decided what I wanted to do with them, or where they belonged.

Bill

It had been a long time since Bill had examined any part of his body with particular care or interest, so it was fairly uncharacteristic of him to be marvelling at the wonder of his hands at 3:32 on a Wednesday afternoon. Over the course of the last hour, he’d watched as they had changed from their standard thick pinkness to paler rose, even turning to white on the ridges that formed as they pruned in the water. The crests and hollows were tiny mountain ranges creasing all over the digits, and the longer he stayed in the bath the tighter the ridges became.
Bill mused that he finally understood why infants seemed to be so fascinated with their hands; they really are miraculous, aren’t they? Capable of so many intricate movements, comprised of skin and sinew and bone, with all those wondrous textures. From what he could see of his toes, myopic as he was, they also seemed to have undergone a similar metamorphosis, as had his elbows. He could only speculate as to the state of his scrotum, but since that part of his anatomy had not been visible to him for several years, he couldn’t confirm his imaginings about it.


Helen

Gnawing on a piece of overcooked pork chop, Bill gazed intently at the woman sitting across from him at the dinner table. A fairly attractive lady in her late fifties, Helen Ivanchuk (nee Wallace) still wore her hair in the same style she sported when she and Bill first met, nearly forty years before. He’d always disliked the hairstyle, but never had the heart to tell her so. He thought the bland, shoulder-length bob made her look rather horsey as it accentuated the gaunt length of her face, and the ash dye she used washed all the colour from her skin. Unbeknownst to him, she hated the hairstyle and had been longing to change it for years, but since her husband had complimented her coiffure once several years ago, she assumed he liked it the way it was and so had kept it the same, lest an unexpected shift in appearance alienate him further.