Feet of Endurance

Her fingernails are freshly cut, the chipped nail polish shaved away, restoring a sense of wholeness. In this state they can only scrabble over the build-up of dead skin on her toes, the ball of her foot, the heel. Useless. Instead the girl must dig the blunted points of the scissors into the down-side of her big toe.

It is easy to picture her future-old feet. Still supporting her entire body, which will have gone stale, the kind of stale which softens rather than stiffens. Her feet will be widened by her growing weight, weight now just under control but which might bubble over, or perhaps the legitimate weight of a future pregnancy. They will barely be able to fit into the porridge-shoes old women wear. She cannot wait to inherit them. To come down from her current mountain peaks and finally slip into something more comfortable. Her shoulders caving inwards to her chest and her spine always at an angle, could she hunch over sufficiently to file down her then-cracked heels? Perhaps it would be easier to simply fill-in the now-breaking skin with plaster or cement or beeswax. Something to grow with.

As she digs, she imagines uplifting an ice core of her old self: here is the skin that I had on when my husband died, here is the skin that I wore at our wedding. Here is a lost mole, and the small piece of glass she will have always meant to remove. Scraping until she finds the feet her mother bought such tiny and impossible shoes for, made from velvet or for ballerinas. She could give these stored treasures a new lease of life, let them walk on the ground for the first time.

In her current excavations she strikes pain for the first time. Fresh, pink skin emerges and she, triumphant, quickens in her hacking at herself.

At her next outing she walks gingerly – heel-toe, heel-toe – rebuilding, undoing, obscuring.

previously published in The Dial, Queens' College, Cambridge 2016