Footsie Files, by Doug Mathewson
Safe On The Ground, by Aleathia Drehmer
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Footsie Files
Doug Mathewson
You said: “Warm your feet on mine, yours are always so cold.” We rubbed our feet together, alternately interlocking, or wiggling our toes. I laughed and said, “I think our feet are talking!”
“And what are they saying?” you asked.
So badly I wanted to say, “The left says to grip her ankle tightly, the right wants to count my vertebrae one by one all the way up to my neck with her heel while I softly kiss you down between.......”
But being shy, and being awkward, and being afraid, I answered:
“They’d say they're glad we’re such good friends.”
Safe on the Ground
(excerpt from The Secrets of Womanhood)
Aleathia Drehmer
She hands me a small handful of cut mushrooms that look like dead earthworms in the center of my palm. I want to vomit before I even taste them. My mind is building itself up to something abominable. I put the first sliver in my mouth and for a moment it tastes just like regular dried mushrooms, then the saliva on my tongue changes its chemical composition. My tongue tries to free itself from the poisonous taste and moves it to the side of my mouth, between my teeth.
Automatically, I begin chewing it like gum, releasing more disgusting flavors. I pour the water in my mouth trying to float it down my throat, tiny pieces of it wedged into the crowns of my molars. I use the tip of my tongue to pry them out and the flavor nauseates me again. I have to get the rest of them down faster or I will never make it. I bunch them together like a small bundle of twigs, placing them at the back of my throat and chug water. I feel them floating around in my mouth. I want to swallow, I need to swallow….brain make me swallow.
I choke them down, barely escaping them coming back up. The acrid taste still lingering in my mouth, on my tongue, in the crevices of my teeth. I hope I will soon forget the taste because I’ll be high, that would make it all better. Elana snaps me from my mushroom concentration camp with the sound of her lilting voice.
“Let’s go up to the living room and watch a movie ‘til this shit kicks in,” she says to me, her pied piper’s half grin stringing me along involuntarily.
I follow her out of the tiny kitchen back into the expanse of the warehouse floor. The thick rope is swinging by itself in gentle circles, a pendulum of fibers. Chills run up my spine as I watch it. I could never stand the sight of pendulums, something about the bodiless motion making perfect movements that always drove me crazy. The height of the rope reminds me of my fear of falling from the sky which was the reason I was never a climber of trees, never liked flying in airplanes, and didn’t like scrambling to the top of anything. I need my feet on the ground to feel safe, it is that simple.
I divert my attention from the rope seeing the flow of Elana’s skirt in the air as she begins scaling a thin, rickety set of stairs to a platform near the ceiling of the warehouse. There is a rigid sense of sadness that drizzles over me watching that skirt. It calls to me about the secrets of womanhood, about feminine guiles and innate attractions, and though I recognize them they are lost to me. I have always been a shade under pretty, a shade over big-boned, clumsy and shy, and there has not ever risen in me the unabashed sense of freedom. I am an observer, not a doer, a collector of vicarious moments.
