It was then that I realized why they had called her “Sausage Toes” in High school.

I hadn’t noticed them before, when they had been hidden away from the world in her undersized Chuck Taylors. She had this way of sitting with her legs awkwardly stacked on top of each other, her feet extended straight up to showcase her lack of an arch. It was almost as she wanted you to know she was harboring some dirty little secret pertaining to her foot follicles.

But that day…. That day she had worn the flip-flops…. She called them “Jandels,” but it didn’t really matter. They were the frames; they were the carnival barker.

“No…no David…I don’t think you get the essence of my argument… Marv is the key to the wet bandits success. His slowness makes them able to fly under the radar. I mean, think about it. Their plan was flawless, if not for a cracked out ADD riddled Macaulay Culkin.”

The sun, waging the eternal fight for the night, had begun its daily retreat to plan its next attack. As if to add punctuation to the oncoming darkness, the rain that had been promised by the daily papers had finally arrived making the steam from our Banana Mango Peach Green Tea Chai Tea mocha latte curl in a Fibonacci beauty. It tastes like genocide, but I don’t complain. I can’t.

I am transfixed.

I don’t even notice her shouts as I run from the table, spilling the drinks with gusto. How can I stay? How can I be apart of this unholy union? The people I pass on the sidewalk glance up quickly, as if I am running for exercise and they are mad at the guilt I have forced upon their atrophying flab.

But now I am safe. I am safe from the unrelenting horror of the truth.

I can’t even bring myself to tell you her name.

No.

That’s a lie. I can.

Susanna. Susanna. Susanna.

The girl with hot dog feet.

Gross.

———–

Pat Moran is a writer from Portland, Oregon. He is an editor for Scawy Monstur Quarterly, a journal of questionable repute.