The Toes Know - Lauren Kardos

I love my husband, but I can’t survive his torture much longer.

It began with small annoyances. Doesn’t it always? These particular annoyances I told him again and again inflame my insomnia. He would snore, and his pinky toe would scratch up my calf like nails on chalkboard. His pointer toe, gnarled as an ancient oak, would tap-tap-tap to the radio’s jazz as we cooked dinner. In cahoots with his big toe, those two would imitate our primate ancestors, grabbing dropped pens from the floor and pinching my elbow for affection.

Therapy, my husband recommended over breakfast, particularly those mornings I arrived racoon-eyed and snarling. Phobias are treatable, my darling, he’d croon while filling my mug from the French press. Even now, I can see his eyes twinkling those mornings, same as the day I walked down the aisle. I wish my love was as patient, as kind.

Everyone dislikes something about their spouse, Mom said as the manicurists clipped away our cuticles. Once work calms down, my coworker promised over sushi happy hour, his feet won’t trigger such stress. But that one autumn night around the bonfire, our neighbors didn’t notice his middle toe giving me the bird, bobbing with my with husband’s crossed upper leg as he lounged on a fold-out camping chair across the smoldering pit. Of fourth toe I had few complaints, though I felt its calculations when I got the mail, when I Zoomed with clients.

I exiled his sandals to the Salvation Army bin when toes contaminated the final places I had to myself. I found them edging beneath the powder room door. I spied them wriggling like worms in the garden. Nights of naked feet I canceled with wool socks, and he agreed to wear close-toed shoes in the house.

In bed, I’d stare at the midnight ceiling and pray for silence. My husband slept on, unmoving as roadkill. How couldn’t he hear the rustling from the attic and kitchen utensils clamoring until daybreak? The quilt at the bed’s end writhed, and yet he never woke.

I should have asked him about the toeprint smears on the freezer handle. About the missing Santoku knife. About the red stain on the carpet he blamed as ketchup. When the officers crowded our doorstep, maybe I shouldn’t have shared my suspicions about the neighbor’s missing cat and the vanished prom queen cattycorner on our cul-de-sac.

My husband has visited a few times since, and he always changes the topic when I ask if he likes my suite, padded and devoid of rope-like objects. Detectives, psychiatrists, and podiatrists tell me that my brain fibs. Toes can’t move the way I say. Phalanges, they claim, do not detach, commit evil, then reattach to their host.

I love my husband, but I’ve been Googling good divorce lawyers during my allotted Internet hours.

Now the blue overhead lights dim to a false-twilight calm. The curtains slide back on the window of my externally deadbolted door, and there’s that goddamned middle toe, flipping me off. Fourth and second toes bend like shoulders, quaking with laughter. His toes have minds of their own.

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Lauren Kardos (she/her) writes from Washington, DC, but she’s still breaking up with her hometown in Western Pennsylvania. The Molotov Cocktail, Rejection Letters, hex, (mac)ro(mic), Best Microfiction 2022, and The Lumiere Review are just a few of the fine publications that feature her work. You can find her on Twitter @lkardos.