Egg Foot
by Meg Pokrass

My friend’s wife is stuck at home because her feet stopped working. Otherwise she’d be going places. She calls her condition “Egg Foot”. “Incurable” she says. “Unless treated”. This she tells me in an e-mail after her husband has flown. I google “Egg Foot” and after stumbling upon countless foot fetish photos, I stop. But maybe because of the strange photos, I can’t help imagining her foot on my stomach, toes digging in, warm and crazy.

“She’s insane,” my friend says about his wife. “You just figuring this out?” I don’t have many friends, and the ones I have are crackers. But I like my friend’s batty wife. Privately, in my mind, I call her “Daisy”.

“What will you do with your wolf-pack in the city?” I ask my friend.

“Why don’t you come along?” he replies, knowing I won’t.

I don’t say anything. Over the years, he’s become angrier and fatter. I’ve become skinnier and dumber.

Daisy has shiny masses of white hair. He says she sleeps all day. He says this is great, in its own way, how they live completely different lives in the same house. I imagine taking her into my arms, smoothing down her petals. “How about that marriage of yours?” I’d say. “Incurable,” she’d whisper. We are all incurable, Daisy, I say to myself trying to think of anything else.

Meg Pokrass is the author of four collections of flash fiction, and one award-winning collection of prose poetry, Cellulose Pajamas, which received the Bluelight Book Award in 2016. Her stories and poems have been widely published and anthologized in two Norton Anthologies: Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co, 2015) and the forthcoming New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co, 2018). Meg is the founder of New Flash Fiction Review, co-founder of The Flash Fiction Collective in San Francisco, and currently serves as Festival Curator for the Bath Flash Fiction Festival, U.K.

Image source: Wikimedia via Creative Commons

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