There was no escaping those feet. They were always there. It was bitterly cold in here, but her feet always stuck out the end of her blanket…all pink and perfect. They were there when she opened her eyes in the morning and they were there when she went to sleep at night. She’d been watching them for the last five months, presenting themselves to her from the upper bunk. Feet are very personal. One shouldn’t go waggling them in some strangers face. They’re too intimate. It was like staring into someone’s sole. (Ha, ha) Often in moments of irritation she had wanted to pull on those little piggies and make them go wee-wee all the way home. But often too, to her own surprise, when she found herself awake in the middle of the night when one is prone to strange thoughts, she had been sorely tempted to lay her cheek against their soft warm rosiness and kiss them.

They were very clean: for a convict’s feet. Always clipped and cured. Very pretty, with slightly fallen arches that gave them a look of vulnerability. She felt very differently about the owner of the feet, as if the person and the feet were two different people. She felt more intimate with the feet than the person. She actually had a love-hate relationship with those feet that almost amounted to a secret love-affair. Through all the empty hours it had built up into an obsession. Sometimes in the gloom, if she stared at them too long, they would begin to flow outside their boundaries and even change their shape, shifting like ghostly wraiths running over the sheets and reaching down towards her, and she would have to pull her imagination up sharply. She spent more time talking to the feet (in her head) than she did to the owner. Without her relationship to those feet, unrequited as it was, she was sure she would never have made it this far without going crazy. Dutch was normally a physically active person. Being the pilot slash loading engineer of an Ore-transport ship had kept her running, lifting, hauling and exerting herself to near exhaustion for many hours of the day. After work she would continue rough-housing and arm-wrestling with her comrades, drinking and raising hell till the early hours. Here she was locked up in a cell hardly big enough to spit in and spent most of the time lying on her back…staring at the feet.

Often in the mornings, when all were still asleep, she would lie and keep watch over those feet. She knew every contour and wrinkle. She knew the shape of every toe, some slightly deformed from wearing narrow high heel shoes. Contemplating them had a great soothing effect on her and often she found herself mentally stroking them, as if they were a pet.

Soon they would start to twitch. Just once at first and then lapse into stillness again for a while. Then they would twitch again and Dutch would know she was starting to surface from her dreams. Another twitch – a long pause – and then twice….and then the twirling and stretching out of the toes as she finally woke up and the cot would creak and sag above her. Then the owner of the feet would give a yawn and a sigh and sink back into a blissful doze while Dutch waited patiently.

“Good morning,” she’d finally say.

The day had begun.

 

Somewhere a door clanged and someone said something…and then silence. Just the soft humming of the scrubbers, recycling the same old stale air. Just like this station was trying to recycle her. She shivered and turned in her thin grey blanket. The cold light from the corridor spilled through the bars of the cell. The chilly metal walls dripped noisily with condensation.

“What do you think it will be like? When we get there?” came the disembodied voice from the top bunk.

“It’ll be just the same as here.” Dutch’s voice rang out unnaturally curt and loud. “One cell’s the same as the next.”

“Do you think they’ll put us together?” she said, her voice was filled with concern. “I mean…we’re friends aren’t we?”

The silence crept over them like a chilly fog up a hillside.

 

The nights were long and Dutch had plenty of time to think about what she had done to her husband. It still made her smile involuntarily every time she recalled the fatal scene. She got the same kind of perverse pleasure one would get out of squashing a mean bug. It gave her a kick on the one hand, on the other, if she could have that moment over, she wouldn’t have done it. She hadn’t meant to kill him. It’s just the devil finally got into her.

They had been co-workers on the same ore-liner for many years, with the occasional fling to let off steam, before they decided to throw in the towel and get married. It wasn’t love really, just convenient. After the wedding she was quite happy to continue with the same old same old, but something flipped inside of him. He never was mister nice-guy before, but owning a wife seemed to tip him over the edge. The problem was she could do most anything better than him, and she was a hell of a lot smarter. None of this had been a problem until they tied the knot. Then he began to put her down whenever they were in company, making snide jokes about her which of course she couldn’t really complain about seeing that they were ‘just jokes for God’s sake’.

In the beginning she would just grin and bear it. She understood that he had a fragile face to save and she was a bigger man than him so she didn’t pay him much mind until one night, after she had involuntarily let fly a witty repartee, he knocked out a couple of her teeth. Teeth were a premium way out there in the middle of nowhere because dentures were hard to come by and their staple diet of dog biscuits not so easy to chew without them. Also, she didn’t look so pretty anymore. Not that she was ever a raving beauty, but now she looked like a corn-cob hill-billy broad to boot.

He must have got to like the feeling because soon he began hitting on her for no reason and she had to use all her whiles to protect what remained of her Colgate smile. Things went on in this vein for a while until one day there was an incident.  She was running the control board during a pickup and he was E.V.A. when a retro rocket on the incoming ore train malfunctioned and he began screaming bloody-blue-murder at her why-didn’t-she-open-the-fucking-hatch-you-stupid-whore-get-me-out-of-here and all the while she watched dispassionately as his end drew nigh, her finger tap-tapping the vital release switch on the cargo bay air-lock ever so lightly as she contemplated her husband and his just deserts. He didn’t say please. That was all it boiled down to in her head. He just didn’t say please. She would have gotten away with it if the Super hadn’t walked in while she hesitated too long and her husband died. The Super happened to be her husband’s brother, and she was busted.

So here she was. On a prison shuttle on her way to the Delta Section Penal colony because space protocol was sacrosanct. It was too dangerous out here. Fatal accidents were common place enough without being given a helping hand by a hormonal wife. She never got a chance to explain her side of the story. No hearing, no nothing. No one was interested. The fact that she would never do it again and that everyone knew the bastard had literally begged for it didn’t mean a thing. You don’t fuck around in space. Ever. The funny thing is, that in her dreams, she always flicked the switch in plenty of time to save her husband from being crushed against the hull by the runaway ore-sled.

She looked up at the feet again. Why couldn’t she have had pretty feet like that? She stuck her big galumphing things out the end of the bed and waggled her ugly porkers.

“Ugh.”

Then she felt an unaccustomed rush of tenderness for her own malformed manlike body and two burning tears sprang up in the corner of her eyes.

N

 

 

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