Dave Kowalski's hands were the color of old pennies now. Not the bright copper of a new quarter, but the dull, oxidized brown of something that had been left out in the rain too long. He looked at them while he watched TV and tried not to think about what they used to look like.

They used to look like his father's hands. His father had been a steelworker at the Jones and Laughlin plant on the South Side, and his hands had been big and calloused and strong in the way that hands are strong when they have spent forty years doing the same thing over and over again.

Dave's hands were different now. They were stiff. The skin was thick and cracked and gray, and his fingernails had fallen off one by one, replaced by something that looked like keratin but felt like stone. The doctor called it "industrial keratoderma." Dave called it rust.

He had worked at the steel plant for thirty-five years. He started at twenty-two, right out of high school, because that's what you did in Pittsburgh in the seventies—you went to work at the mill and you stayed until your body broke or the mill closed. His body had broken first.

The first symptom was a numbness in his right thumb. He noticed it while he was welding, which was ironic, because welding was the one part of the job where you needed your hands to feel everything. He told his supervisor, who told him to see the company doctor, who told him it was nothing, just temporary nerve damage from the vibration of the equipment.

It wasn't temporary.

Over the next five years, the numbness spread. His fingers went next, then his palms, then his wrists. The skin thickened. The color changed. His hands became something that didn't quite belong to a human body anymore—something between flesh and tool, between living and not.

He stopped welding. Then he stopped working on the line. Then he stopped going to the plant altogether, because the disability paperwork had taken so long and the checks were so small that he might as well have been retired.

Which, in a way, he was.

Now he was fifty-eight and he sat in his apartment on the East Side every day and watched the news and tried not to think about the fact that his hands could no longer grip a coffee cup properly. He used both hands to hold it, cradling it like a baby, because his fingers wouldn't close all the way around the handle.

Dr. Park was his primary care physician. She was young—maybe forty—and she looked at Dave's hands with an expression that was equal parts professional interest and personal discomfort.

"It's progressing," she said, examining his left hand with a magnifying lens. "The keratoderma has spread to your knuckles and the base of your thumb. The nails on your left hand are almost entirely replaced."

"I know what it is, Doctor."

"I'm sorry. I meant to say that there's no treatment."

"I know that too."

Dr. Park put down the magnifying lens and looked at him. "Dave, have you considered— I mean, there are support groups for workers with occupational illnesses. There are—"

"I know what there are, Doctor. There's a support group that meets at the community center on Thursdays. There's a lawyer who does disability cases on Smallman Street. There's a pamphlet at the pharmacy about hand exercises. I have all of them."

Dr. Park nodded. She didn't know what else to say. Neither did Dave.

After she left, Dave sat in the examination room and looked at his hands on his lap. They were heavy. Not physically—he hadn't gained weight, if anything he had lost it—but they felt heavy, like they were anchored to the earth by something invisible.

He thought about the plant. He thought about the heat and the noise and the smell of molten metal, which had once been beautiful and was now just a memory of something that used to be beautiful. He thought about the men he had worked with, the ones who were still there and the ones who weren't. Old Joe had killed himself last year. Ray had died of lung cancer two years before that. Mike had moved to Florida and probably forgot Dave already.

Dave stood up and walked to the window. From his apartment, he could see the Allegheny River, gray and slow and carrying the runoff from a hundred factories downstream to the Ohio and then to the Mississippi and then to the Gulf and then, eventually, to the ocean.

His hands were part of that runoff now. Not literally, but in the way that everything he had touched at the plant had been changed by it, just as he had been changed by it. The steel had shaped his hands, and his hands had shaped the steel, and now both of them were rusting.

He went to physical therapy twice a week. Dr. Park's sister was the physical therapist, and she was patient with him in the way that family members are patient—with a love that is real but tinged with resentment.

"Open your hand," she said, and he tried, and his fingers opened slowly, reluctantly, like doors that had been rusted shut.

"Good. Now close it."

He tried to close his hand into a fist, and his fingers curled partway and then stopped, stuck at about seventy percent closure. He could feel the resistance in his knuckles, the way the thickened skin and the hardened tissue fought against each other.

"That's it," his aunt said. "That's all we can do for today."

He went home and sat in front of the TV and watched a baseball game he wasn't really watching and thought about the fact that his hands would never be able to hold a baseball properly anymore. He had thrown a fastball in high school. He had been good at it. The coach had told him he had a future in the minors if he wanted it.

He hadn't wanted it. He had wanted to work at the plant like his father, because that's what sons do in Pittsburgh—they become their fathers, and their fathers' fathers before them, and the steel becomes part of their blood and their bones and their hands.

Now the steel had become part of his hands in a way he hadn't expected. Not the romantic kind of steel that poets write about, but the ugly, slow, inevitable kind that eats you from the inside out and leaves you sitting in front of a TV with hands that can't even hold a coffee cup the way they used to.

His daughter Maria came on Sundays. She lived in Philadelphia, two hours away, and she came every Sunday like clockwork, bringing groceries and cleaning supplies and a sadness that she tried to hide behind cheerfulness.

"How are you feeling, Pa?" she asked, setting down a bag of oranges on the kitchen counter.

"Same as yesterday," Dave said.

"Same as the day before that?"

"Pretty much."

Maria opened the oranges and put the segments on a plate and brought them to him. "Eat something."

Dave picked up an orange segment with both hands and put it in his mouth. It tasted like orange. That was something.

"Pa, have you thought about moving? Maybe to Philadelphia? I have space, and I could set up your room—"

"I'm not moving to Philadelphia."

"Pa, you can't even—"

"I know what I can't do, Maria. I don't need you to tell me."

She looked at him, and he saw the worry in her eyes, the same worry that Dr. Park had, the same worry that his aunt had. Everyone looked at his hands the same way now—with a mixture of pity and fascination, like they were a museum exhibit or a medical curiosity.

"I'm fine," he said.

"You're not fine."

"I'm alive. That's more than some people can say."

Maria didn't answer. She cleaned the kitchen while he watched, and he felt the rust in his hands like a second skin, heavier than the first.

That night, he dreamed of the plant. In the dream, he was twenty-two again, standing in front of the molten steel with his welding torch in his hands, and his hands were strong and fast and beautiful, and the steel sang beneath his torch like a song he had helped write.

He woke at three in the morning with tears on his face and hands that couldn't even wipe them away.

He sat in the dark and listened to the city outside his window—the traffic on the Parkway, the distant hum of the highway, the occasional siren that meant someone else's life was falling apart somewhere in Pittsburgh.

His hands rested on his lap, gray and stiff and heavy, and he thought about the fact that they would never be his hands again. They belonged to the plant now, to the steel and the heat and the thirty-five years of work that had shaped them into something that was no longer quite human.

And that was okay. It wasn't a good thing, but it wasn't a bad thing either. It was just a thing, the way rust is just a thing, the way bone is just a thing, the way a man who has worked at a steel plant for thirty-five years and can no longer hold a coffee cup is just a thing.

Not heroic. Not tragic. Just a thing.

He went back to sleep with his rust hands on his lap and dreamed of steel singing.