[ESSAY]

[10/22/25]

Nails in the Coffin

by Adam Galanski-De Leon

My mom learns a lot of things from the nail salon. Like one time she told me she saw my high school abuser who stalked me and sent me death threats after I broke up with her. “Her mother died,” she told me. “Oh,” I said, lost in rotten memories. “Everyone at the salon hates her,” my mother added.

She called me a few weeks back to tell me she saw my brother’s high school girlfriend. The one who cackled every time she laughed. Every time we talked about her, we always impersonated her laughter and talked about how abrasive it was. My mom told me she heard a woman talking about how she teaches swimming lessons at the rec-center. She thought that sounded familiar.

That girl’s mom was a swimming teacher. She heard the mother refer to another woman by the old girlfriend’s name.

“It looked just like her,” my mom told me, “But her mom talked to her like a child. Like she was two years old or something.”

“It’s okay, it’s just nail polish,” the woman had said, “We just need to sit still for ten minutes baby. It needs to dry sweetie. Nail polish needs to dry. Just ten minutes. Try to sit still honey. I know it’s hard. You look so pretty, sweetie. We’re almost done. Then we can go home! Be patient, sweetie.”

“I don’t know what was wrong with her,” my mother told me, “She must have suffered some brain damage or something. She was a totally different person.”

She was at the nail salon when she learned about that kid my age who never left home and didn’t work, or do much of anything, and one night he shot his dad in the face with a shotgun and chopped his body into bits and then called the cops on himself. She was at the nail salon when this drug addict guy’s mother thanked her for always letting him hang out at our house as a teen. It gave him a place to go to stay out of trouble. “He always loved playing with your son on the trampoline,” she told my mother. “We’ve never had a trampoline,” my mom explained.

When she is in Chicago, she asks my wife if she wants to go get her nails done.

My wife and her friend were getting their nails done recently and the techs were both speaking in a different language. Her and her friend thought they were talking shit about them, so they started talking in Spanish together. “I forget we can do this too,” they laughed.

My buddy’s brother-in-law is Afro-Latino and a lot of people don’t realize he speaks Spanish. Two guys were saying racist things about him on the NYC subway, not thinking he’d understand, and he whooped their asses in front of a whole train car.

I met this anti-racist punk skinhead dude once who would get his nails done. He was fifty or so, covered head to toe in tattoos. Grew up in Atlantic City and was in prison for a while for stealing cars. Got out in the 90’s and told a Chicago tattoo shop that he could tattoo even though he couldn’t and he started ruining people’s legs and arms until he learned to do it right.

When I first met him, he had just legally changed his name back from Joe Schmoe to Joey the Sauce, because his previous name was associated with a news article of him drunk driving and farting on a cop. He’d gone back to DeVry University for some sort of technological studies and was creating battle bots to fight in a competition in some South American country where Mennonites built him a house for free. I was at his apartment at like 11 A.M. and he had killed a handle of Jack Daniels and wouldn’t stop showing me his manicure. He said I should really consider getting one. He used the bathroom with the door open and explained to me that since he took out his gauged dick piercing, he now has to sit down every time he pees. Then he started driving me around the city, almost crashing the car multiple times.

He took me to an indoor sky diving place and was trying to get the guy that worked there to let us cut the line and skydive, but the guy saw how drunk he was and kicked us out. “He usually lets me do that,” he explained. “He’s my friend.”

We were drinking in some random alley when I decided to go home. I saw him on the Rock Island Metro a few years later. He became a sky-diving instructor in Ottawa, Illinois. He quit tattooing and got himself a little trailer to travel around in. I never saw that guy again.

My mother was in the nail salon talking to the mother of this guy I used to know. He worked at a pet shop and was stealing money from the business. On the side he sold rare coins on eBay which he didn’t actually have in real life. Him and this guy who used to slam baby squirrels in window panes and beat up kids in the park ditched their outstanding court dates to steal his parents’ car and tried to drive down to Miami to start a new life as car mechanics. Somewhere in the Carolinas they got pulled over for speeding and instead of stopping just gunned it and got in a high-speed chase and ripped off the highway into a cornfield where they were arrested. They went to jail for a while and got out and then were arrested again for selling weed.

“They don’t live in town anymore,” my mother told me.

“Nice,” I said.

My mom took my grandma to the nail salon.

“Trump got shot in his right ear today,” she told her.

“Should’ve aimed a little more to the left,” said my grandma.

I thought that was pretty funny. I think my grandma should own a gun.

She once told me if she won the lottery, she’d spend it on surgery to make herself taller. I told her I like the height she is. I like to hug her and feel her head against my chest.

I remember the first time I hugged my mom and my chin rested on her head and now for some reason I want to cry.

ADAN GALANKSI-DE LEÓN is the author of the story collection The Laughter of Hyenas at Bay (Raging Opossum Press), and the novel, Szarotka (American Buffalo Books). He lives in Chicago,IL with his wife, daughter, and four cats. Adam maintains a website at http://www.adamjgalanskideleon.com.