| About half a year after I started smoking I wrote a funny little story about it: The awkwardness of buying cigarettes for the first time, hesitating over the brand (I settled on Marlboros), the old-lady clerk squinting at my ID; that disastrous first light-up, when I held the flame to the cigarette but forgot to draw; it caught blue fire, and by the time that went out the tip had expanded till it looked like an exit wound; how I taught myself to inhale by watching _Out of the Past_; the way the men looked at me when I walked down the street with a smoldering phallic symbol bobbing between my lips. On a lark, I looked up the address of a smoking-fetish magazine and sent them the story. They sent me back a check for forty dollars. I cashed it and, since I wasn't in debt, I decided to splurge. I wandered into the drugstore that was across the street from the bank. I looked over the hair dyes, and the press-on nails, and even the rack of romance novels, and then I passed into the foot care aisle. I figured it was about time I did something about the dark cracks in my heels and the leather-smooth callus on my left big toe, so I bought a selection: One product with aloe and peppermint oil, one with urea and salicylic acid, one with ground-up peach kernels to exfoliate, and, just to round off the purchase, a metal file. I even had enough left for a pack of smokes. When I got home I sat down in the kitchen, put my feet on the table and filed them thoroughly, leaving them quite red and warm. I snapped the metal front off the file; the compartment inside was filled with thin grey powder. I poured it into the garbage, but some of it billowed back and hung in the air like the fine ashes of a cheap cigarette. I took a shower and scrubbed my feet till I thought they would bleed. Then I rubbed on the ointment with the salicylic acid, covered my feet in some threadbare socks, and went to bed. I continued the same way for a week, aloe and acid on alternate days, and one morning, when my feet were dry, I tried the file again. It wasn't long before that started to hurt; when I opened it up there was only a trace of powder, and it was talcum-white. I lifted one of the mirrored doors from my bathroom cabinet, set it on the floor, and looked at my feet. The heels were soft and unsquared, the arches pale, the soles as pink as a fresh-shaved cheek and mounded like a bodybuilder's chest, the pads of the toes as plump as grapes. I went and got my good camera, the one with the timer, and found some color film. I took twenty pictures, all that remained on the roll. I got the prints back today; some of them turned out well. I've just mailed them to another magazine. I could get a hundred dollars for them. I've been thinking about what I'd do with a hundred dollars. There's this sundress I've been looking at, in a catalog $89.95 expensive, but cute. I could wear it and be just another girl who smokes and has nice feet, but doesn't make a big deal out of either. I hear there are actually guys who go for that sort of thing. |
