VENGEANCE BY THE FOOT

Grant Stone was terrified of surgery, and the mention of amputation would put him off his feed. But much to his delight, up until now, he had managed to avoid “going under the knife” his entire thirty-nine years on Earth.

Now he was on his back, being squeakily wheeled on a gurney toward a most horrifying blade fest. His journey through the hospital corridors was utterly terrifying.

One time, he had been hit in the head by a baseball, and had been rushed by ambulance to the ER, his mother crying and holding his hand, saying “Baby, oh my sweet little man,” over and over.

The scariest part of that whole incident had been his mom making him feel as if he were going to die. Her panic was infectious, and Grant had become convinced he was heading to heaven. Or perhaps even worse, he’d been brain-damaged and would exist in a vegetative state of unknowing, drooling on himself in front of The Price Is Right forever.

Lucy’s face hovered in his field of vision, replacing the endlessly boring procession of fluorescent bulbs that hung from the tile ceiling, passing above his eyes.

Lucy, so radiant.

Lucy had a perfect and angelic oval face, with high cheekbones, and perfectly plucked eyebrows framing an amazing pair of bright, fathomless, green eyes. Seeing her momentarily relieved his anxiety.

His wife squeezed his hand gently but unyieldingly. She gazed longingly into his eyes, beyond and into his soul. He loved her more in that moment than he had in the last six months combined. The last six months had been an unbearable period he had to forget about, and just move on. He had unfairly put the burden of responsibility for his current dilemma squarely on her.

He still loved her. He just couldn’t explain this to her. She would never understand.

He was afraid. Afraid his heart would fail because of the anesthesia, or he would bleed to death on the operating table while the doctors attempted vainly to save him. He squeezed Lucy’s hand, before it slipped from his as he was rolled unceremoniously into the operating room. “I love you, dear.” She spoke softly, “I’ll be waiting for you.”

Abruptly, Lucy was gone, replaced by the anesthesiologist, who was now leaning in importantly to speak to him. Whatever they had put in his IV was catching up with Grant, and the masked man’s words were becoming indistinct and irrelevant. Grant smiled for a moment and a gas mask was placed over his nose and mouth. A cool gust of grape flavored gas filled his airways and that was the last thing he remembered.

He missed a hell of a show.

Amputations are a messy business.

While Grant floated through a blissful stupor, the surgical team removed Grant’s badly rotted left foot and about eight inches of his lower leg for good measure.

“Goddammit, get Lucy, you assholes!”

His throat was parched, but he knocked the cup of ice from the nurse’s hand. He tried to sit up, but his head swam from the exertion and he leaned over the side of the bed to throw up. He dry heaved for a few anguished moments, and still felt like he was gargling broken glass when his head collapsed back to the pillow. He didn’t trust this woman trying to get him to suck on ice chips, she must have ulterior motives. What was her real angle, here? Grant decided to watch her very carefully.

Where the hell was Lucy?

“I want to go home,” he demanded of the nurse that was checking his vital signs.

She looked at him coolly, smiled with what appeared to be great difficulty, and said, “Your wife is on her way back to see you, though, I’m afraid you’ll be staying on with us for a while.” She attempted to look happy again, but only managed to grimace unpleasantly. “Sure you don’t want any ice chips?”

He did not answer and tried to remember what had just happened to him.

Aside from the sore throat and nausea, he felt okay. Then it came to him and he cried out in sorrow and terror. He yanked the sheet away from his body, gazed down at the sheet where his foot should be, the toes absently rubbing together, before he passed out.

MONTHS PASSED, and Grant was unable to return to any semblance of normalcy. He tried a support group, but he found himself unable to relate to the people who cried and complained about the loss of their limbs, and gave it up after a couple of awkward meetings. He had purchased a pretty good wheelchair and was still trying to figure out a way to afford a prosthetic.

He thought back to nine months ago, when he had finally agreed to let his wife scrape the dead skin from the bottoms of his feet. She had pestered and cajoled him for years, but he had never seen any point in it. She told him to wash and then soak his feet for ten minutes while she set up shop in the den. He came out and she instructed him to take a seat in a kitchen chair she had moved into the den for him. There was a towel for his feet, a bowl of warm water to keep them moist, and a foot-scraper that looked like a miniature ping pong paddle.

She had pulled his left foot off the towel and gone straight for his heel. She stopped abruptly before she had even begun to scour away the dead skin. Looking up at him with naked concern, she had asked “Oh my dear sweet Jesus, Grant, when did you cut your foot?”

Grant mentally retraced his steps over the last several days, but could not remember hurting himself once. He had shrugged and asked her why. Did it look serious? Her eyes had told the tale, but she had run to the bathroom and retrieved her makeup mirror. She had held it under his foot at an angle which revealed a sickly purple and deep red stain on the arch of his foot. Viscous fluid had leaked from it like milky tears.

“Eww.”

Lucy had grimaced at him, and explained that it looked and smelled badly infected.

Despite agonizing months of treatments, more treatments and referrals to wound care treatment centers to stop him from developing gangrene, the offensive foot had begun to resemble an eggplant. Ultimately, the only option remaining was to get rid of it. Grant had rebelled against that determination for a week, but then had simply given in and made the appointment.

He became a despondent husk.

Now he was one short of a pair. Minutes drained away like hours, hours drew out into months and months had passed like micro-lifetimes. He watched a lot of television in bed after the operation, unable to give a shit about much of anything. He got out of bed to piss and shit or take a bath. Everything else could be dealt with horizontally.

Grant was unable to break out of the despondency the loss of his foot had wrought. Painkillers became his new best friends, his wife remanded to the role of maid and caregiver. A chasm had grown between them, a fissure that couldn’t be filled with all the pills Grant shoved down his throat every day. He was like a kid scarfing the jelly-beans from the bottom of an Easter basket.

Grant’s truncated leg itched constantly as he was tortured by the phantom limb syndrome the surgeon had warned him about. He wore a soft cloth wrap around the pink nub. Lucy filed for her suffering husband’s disability and social security benefits, administered the care that Grant’s condition demanded, did all the housework and worked two jobs throughout the hellish journey. Not once did Grant acknowledge the sacrifices she made. She was thirty-five years old, with no children. The only source of joy in her otherwise languid existence was now merely a grumpy invalid, with nothing to offer but years of abuse.

No more pillow talk between them, no more of that magic spark that used to arc between them when their lips met. Their happy union had been severed along with Grant’s foot, apparently. Lucy felt as if she were living with the ghost of the man she had married. The only time Grant felt like speaking to Lucy was when he felt like piling on the guilt, inflicting his bitterness on her. She could not understand how he had twisted this into something she had caused, but after a few months of it, she ceased to find understanding relevant. She was finished.

It was September when Lucy stepped into the bedroom and gave the haggard-looking man who used to be the love of her life a final cursory glance before she blurted out “See ya later, asshole!” She turned on her heel, went into the other room and began noisily packing her things. A cab was waiting for her out front and after she was finished gathering what she wanted to take with her, she clambered into the back seat and disappeared.

Grant assumed that his wife was “having a moment” and that she would doubtless return and beg him to forgive her for her lapse in common sense, tail tucked firmly between legs at any minute. The first few hours after she had peeled out of there in a taxi to God knew where, Grant lay smugly watching The Twilight Zone reruns, cursing his wife under his breath.

He threw back some muscle relaxers and pain killers, semi-dozing his way through a full day of regurgitated crime dramas, sitcoms and game shows, knowing a reproachful Lucy would appear in the doorway. Surely she would be back in time to cook dinner.

Night fell. Grant hadn’t eaten since Lucy had awoken him that morning to bid him adieu. He was ravished to the point that gnawing off fingers as snacks was becoming appealing. That thought tickled him, so much he almost felt happy as he hefted himself into the underused wheelchair and rolled into the kitchen.

Grant opened the fridge and poked around for some sustenance. It looked as though Lucy had taken the food with her. Bitch, he cried out in his mind. There were motion sensor triggered halogens around the house, in lieu of a real alarm system and they were on. Grant saw that Lucy had left the front door yawning wide open in her haste to vacate the premises, or at least to the whiny cripple. Food was forgotten momentarily. Grant wheeled himself over to the open door with the intent of closing it, when he saw that the bottom of the screen door was torn apart and hanging in ribbons. Dead leaves were strewn across the tiled foyer floor.

“What the fuck?” He glanced around furtively, unsure of whether he should assign any significance to the mess. Lucy had been moody and she may have kicked a hole in the screen when she was boosting her bags out the door.

There came a clamor from the kitchen, a smashing of glass that went on for way too long. A loud smack resounded, immediately following the frenetic blast the breaking glass had borne. Before silence resumed, there came a series of smacking noises.

Grant was extremely aggravated now. “Fucking shit-licking cats!” He directed his chair back toward the kitchen to find the little bastard.

Between the foyer and the kitchen, an island of deep and foreboding shadows waited. For a moment, indecision clouded Grant’s mind, causing him to lose focus. How did he know it was a cat in there? Perhaps it was something bigger. He felt his chair constricting him. Never had he felt so disabled.

A grumbling erupted in his stomach, low and intrusive in the hush that had befallen the house since the eruption of chaos in the kitchen. He lifted one of his butt cheeks off his chair, and let a wet-sounding fart escape. At last, he felt ready to investigate. He began to roll across the hardwood living room floor away from the light spot by the front door, but stopped after half a wheel turn.

There was something in the living room, of that he was sure. Maybe a feline invader? Or a raccoon?

In the gloom cast between the sickly yellow light of the kitchen and the ambient wash of the flood lights was . . .

A human foot.

It resembled a novelty item he had guffawed at when he had seen it in the Halloween shop that popped up next to Applebee’s every September. It was a blackened and cracked looking human foot with at least six inches of leg still attached above the ankle, like a reverse tree trunk. The femur extended a few inches above where the limb ended, the tibia an inch or two less so. Tendons and arteries dangled lazily from the meaty hole at the top of the amputated appendage.

Grant was not amused.

He was frightened.

“What the hell do you want? HUH?” He screamed the last word and then giddily covered his frothing mouth with the back of one of his atrophied fists. He regained a semblance of sanity and decided that he had taken too many pills and he had not eaten all day. He must be hallucinating.

He was tripping.

It was so obvious. He chided himself and turned another half-wheel closer to the foot that blocked his way to the kitchen. His left foot began to itch fiercely and he almost absently reached down to scratch that which was no longer there.

The foot stood like an October party foul, not eight feet from him, trembling ever so slightly, its motion too human to be a novelty. This was no artist’s morbid recreation of the living flesh. This was the morbid flesh that had once been part of the living. The foot hopped tentatively forward, appearing unsure if it was making a good choice.

Grant guffawed. WHAT?

His next thought was that he needed to get the hell out of there.

NOW.

He was quite unprepared for what happened next. The smell came. It assaulted his nostrils and coiled into his guts, the odor of death. It was toxic. Grant gagged.

The foot stepped forward more audaciously than before. With more than a little revulsion, Grant saw the toes were wiggling.

Instinct asserted itself and Grant jerked backward and he and his chair hit the half-opened front door with alarming speed. The chair snapped sharply to the left and Grant was spilled painfully to the floor.

He hit the floor hard, his right leg and foot banging painfully against the metal of the chair, his head bouncing off the dusty living room floor. “Lucy!” He screamed, flailing his left arm around in wild circles. He momentarily forgot his wife had deserted him that very morning.

As his eyes fixed on the spot the body part had been standing, like a cowboy boot, the foot leaped into the air. The disgusting, disembodied abomination smacked squarely into the front door, slamming it shut and bouncing to an upright position on the foyer floor.

“Please stop this! Lucy where’s my Goddamn sidearm?” Grant felt foolish, knowing Lucy would laugh at him. He wondered if this would even be happening if she were here. Would she be standing in the living room, watching him fall all over the place as he tried to escape a phantom foot trying to do who knew what to him? Would she call the guys with the straitjackets?

Grant began pulling himself across the floor, shedding the chair, slithering toward his bedroom and his .357 Magnum. The foot hit him squarely in the middle of the back, forcing the air from his lungs and he found himself face down on the floor again.

With two hops, the foot made its way up his neck and onto the back of his head. It landed, on its third hop, on the floor, directly in front of Grant’s face, toes wiggling obscenely.

Grant wailed in horror. “Why?” he cried, ashamed that he was crying. “What is this shit?”

The foot rose up on its heel, black and blistered like an extremely overripe banana. The exposed portion of the femur appeared to be giving him the finger. There, in the arch, was a sickening festered sore which wept pus and blood onto the floor near Grant’s mouth.

Understanding mushroomed through Grant’s mind, and he opened his mouth in protest, not knowing what he meant to say to his old friend, his beloved foot. The foot leapt, toes forward, straight into Grant’s open mouth.

The rotting toes jammed their way into Grant’s throat. He grabbed instinctively at the offensive appendage, but could not get a grip on the thing. The foot made it far enough down his throat to trigger his gag reflex and Grant began heaving, his eyes bulging in terror. His mouth was full of foot and the vomit that couldn’t find its way out of his nose was forced back into his lungs. He was drowning in it. Grant felt as if his chest had been cracked open for emergency heart replacement surgery with no anesthesia.

The foot continued to work its way further down Grant’s throat into the small hours of the morning.

WHEN LUCY RETURNED, she let herself in. She paused briefly to shake her head in disgust when she saw the tattered screen door.

Dust motes danced in the shaft of sunlight that wedged into the room as she entered.

The smell hit her right away. Her stomach threatened to void its contents, but Lucy managed to control her nausea.

She walked cautiously into the house and found Grant in the living room. The wheelchair was pitched onto its side to the left of the front door.

The scene before her was one that would form her nightmares for years to come.

Her once beloved husband was bare from the waist down, propped up on his knees, nude ass facing the front door. His dead eyes gazing in horror into forever, his mouth stretched grotesquely until his lips had burst and most of his teeth were strewn about on the floor in front of his mouth.

A big, beefy toe protruded from an area Lucy had grown much too acquainted with lately. She began to giggle, aware of how disrespectful it was, but unable to care enough to stifle it. She had wanted to put her foot in Grant’s ass for so long, but she had been beaten to the punch.

Giving the comic atrocity of Grant’s corpse a wide berth, she went into the bedroom to pack the remainder of her things.