I can’t limp down to the corner without some ignoramus asking me if I’m still in love with my mother. Ha, ha. Never heard that before. What I would give to go unnoticed, but it’s my dammed feet. Everybody knows the story because that nuisance Sophocles keeps tweeting about it, mentioning my gait. Hobbling around is like having “I’m a pervert!” tattooed on my forehead. As if no one else in town has foot problems. Why, just the other day I saw the Graeae sisters shuffling to the bus stop with their canes; no one stopped to smirk and ask if they’re still in love with their daddy. Not one person.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not happy that I’m blind, either. At least that didn’t happen until I was an adult, though. Plus, the locals have more sympathy for blindness than foot issues. Diony, who runs the café, always reads out the specials of the day to me, and Plinius Soter, the crossing guard, makes sure the mules, sheep, and drunks are well out of the way before I enter our one intersection. Why do people respect the blind but not the deformed? That’s right, I forgot—the blind can foretell the future. Not really, though—that’s only Tiresias. Every time I’m asked if it’s going to rain the next day I reply in the negative. We’ve been in a drought for longer than anyone can remember, though, so I get the props.
Then there’s the idea that my mangled feet were an omen, that from my infancy I was marked as the man who would kill his dad and pine for his mom. My dad spread the rumor after hearing an “oracle”—whatever that is—when he was inebriated. People who buy this ridiculousness are simply ignorant of medical science. They still utter “feed a fever, starve a cold” throughout the winter, even though the Spartans have just as much luck with feeding colds and starving fevers.
I’ve been to many real doctors over the years, actual MDs. Sure, a few in the beginning wasted my time: “Stop wearing stilettos,” or “You could lose a few pounds.” The smart ones know it’s not my sexy shoes, and that my girth is none of their business. And forget that story of my father binding my ankles after the “oracle” spoke. The last doctor I saw, Hippocrates Oz, University of Nebraska Medical School, gave me the most definitive diagnosis: tarsal coalition. A freak of “evolution,” he uttered under his breath, whatever that means. It apparently has something to do with my ancestors. In any event, this coalition business has prevented my ankles from stabilizing. Miniscule bones have refused to respect the rules of fusion (or is it fission?), creating a weakness that thwarts my every step.
Dr. Oz confirmed his hypothesis with an X-ray. “An X-what?” you ask. Ray, as in Raymosthenes, the guy who runs the tanning joint. With an X-ray, you can see inside the foot; it’s like in that old expression “X-ray vision.” Remember the story of Plato’s cave, where all those shadows were walking around, but the dummies thought they were real people? It works something like that. The doctor uses a “cellphone camera” to make an image of your feet, one at a time, holds these up before a lightbulb, and—presto! —the insides appear in front of you, each tiny bone showing up black against bright white. And there in each ankle, just where he foretold it would be, was a gap, the refusal of two things to come together—which was never a problem with my mom and me, by the way. Dr. Oz was ecstatic. “Well, Pus, we’ve proven it! At least when it comes to your feet, your perversion is natural, nobody’s fault, really.”
So, stop throwing shade on my feet, okay? They’ve been through enough as it is. First, my mum joked about how useless they were the whole time we were getting it on, and now every Apollo, Alexander, and Atlas on the street draws attention to them. There’s no cure, understand? There may be one day, who knows? I’m blind as a bat, but I can’t see that far into the future of medicine. I don’t even know if it’ll rain tomorrow. Or ever.