My Own Big Toe, Object Study

Object Study 1

I shudder to think of the fetishists watching in the bushes who see this and find themselves spellbound: a toe is a toe, and a big toe is simply the biggest of the toes on a given foot. At the topside, a thick toenail flattened after years of stubbing and dropping books and tools on it. It’s mangled, just a little bit, by a lifetime of ill-timed and ill-fated clippings. The right end of it juts out a little farther than the left, which is thicker, a little ingrown, bleeds whenever the nail-clippers come down on it without mercy and without finesse. Beyond that, a tuft of hair—Hobbit-hair, as mother called it growing up. It’s lighter than I imagined it to be, lighter, the shade of my beard after a summer in the brunt of sunlight, the shade of half-dried sand on the precipice between dry land and less dry sea, the shade of the hair on my grandmother’s head before it turned white with age and then to ash.

The bottom of the toe is lined with ridges, deepened with calluses and general skin neglect—perhaps they would be smoother with daily lotion, but this isn’t that kind of toe. At its outer edge, a thick callus honed from foregoing public transit, shrugging at a four-mile trek through London, stomping through the same streets over and over again looking for a hidden statue or landmark or doctor’s office that I cannot for the life of me seem to find. The shoes that frictioned against this callus are all long gone, tested and discarded against the miles of cobblestones which tried them. The toe remains. At the tip, a deflated blister, formerly bulbous and full of liquid, popped on Christmas Eve with a kitchen knife. It had formed at the behest of 90 minutes on an American hotel’s treadmill, a sorry substitution for the unbounded walkability of European cities. It made do, but at what cost? This little piggy yearns to go to the market. It simply cannot, for its own sake, stay home.

Thank you for reading whatever the hell that was! I realize that I haven’t had a lot of actual writing exercise lately, and that most of my work has been purposely forward-facing. I want these things to be more instinctive to me, so I hope to continue these exercises throughout the year. If you have a suggestion for the next item to be so discerned, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment! If you want to follow along, please just link to this post! Happy writing, Vocalites!

To continue to support my immense greed, please read the following article:

To read something of actual literary merit, you can check out this short story, which I am really proud of: