In This Body: Summer Feet
“My ex noticed when I started to change my feet for another dude”
Our monthly column "In This Body" is comprised of true stories about sex, gender, the body, and love, written by Fiona George, for NAILED.
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My soles were tough and black with dirt and sticky hot asphalt. Summer and my feet. The end of the school year, slipping off flip-flops under my third grade desk. Not giving a fuck about the way wood chips poked my toes because I knew if I just did it, I could let myself get used to it for the day. And if I could get used to it every day, eventually the skin under my feet would thicken and again, the end of another summer, I would be hiking dirt trails barefoot over roots twisting through the path and the hints of gravel under pine needles but it wouldn’t hurt.
It’s one of the first hot days. We’re best friends and the age when we’re just starting to wonder if we should shave…you know, down there. It shows on the edges of our bikinis and we open coke bottles with our teeth. On our towels, over the sand, on what passes for a beach in Portland. The Willamette River in front of us is grey and brown and a bright stripe of sunlight. Before we jumped off the dock, we joked about all the chemicals in the river. About which mutations we wanted to come out with. Third eyes and cat tails. And when I ran in splashing—white hot, blood hot pain in my big right toe. You could never see more than a couple inches deep into that dirty river. A big rock in the river muck bottom took a jagged half of my toenail. Dirty water in the wound. Oh, we had band-aids. And I already wanted to dive back in.
I bought a pedicure kit. So unlike me. I wore little nylon socks. Bought four new pairs of heels at Goodwill. He never told me he had a foot fetish, but it was common knowledge rumor. Plus, well, he had sucked on my toes a couple of times. That was a tip-off, for sure. My ex noticed when I started to change my feet for another dude, he knew who. Said my feet don’t usually look like that, when we saw each other at the corner store between our homes, me in flip-flops. The ghost of my summer feet. He knew what it was about when my shoe collection doubled. This new guy, I always kind of wished he’d have told me he was into feet. A little communication, you know. Men and telling you what they want in bed. It’s like they forget how to use words, they speak in body and power. My big right toe and the nail that never grew back quite right. In his mouth. White clean where dirt used to live. Soft skin where I grated away at my calluses. The twisted roots through that path I found myself on. The sweat dead heat of summer, that kind of dirty sticky sex, but my feet don’t match it.
My skin, not the skin of a skinned-knee tangle-hair child. Slowly, I’d made changes, maybe not only for men, but changes to make me sexy. And sometimes, I’ll wonder: when did I start making myself so soft?
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Read the previous In This Body: here.
Header image courtesy of Igor Moukhin. To view his photo essay, "Labia Majora Prints" on NAILED, go here.