Feet First

He tells me he’s a foot man. My toes poke out of my sandals and his lips smack, ready to swallow them like Tootsie Pops. Downtown, 1:00 a.m. and a sticky July. I’m several drinks into the night, searching for the right man, though I’ve never found one. He certainly is persistent.

“It’s not just the foot,” he says, “it’s what it represents.” Every foot guy believes feet are the windows to your soul. He rests a hand on my shoulder drawing the other one out like a palm reading. “Each one is unique.”

“What about these?” My feet stretch like a ballerina’s and I wiggle my toes.

“You, young man, have doll feet. Unblemished, porcelain, delicate doll feet,” he caresses my sandals.

I’m surprised by the compliment, and I shoot back the rest of my drink without a word, not sure if the burning in my cheeks comes from the alcohol or him. He knows he’s gotten to me and squeezes my thigh—his eyes as wide as a child’s whose about to open a gift.

He looks about forty-five. Probably married. He’s been planning this all night. The way he sauntered down the bar closer and closer, winking as I drank more and more—he with a single glass of whiskey on the rocks. He ordered me a drink, too, when he finally sat next to me.

“I got a place we can go.” He pulls me from my seat, without permission, the way men do.

We slip out of the bar and I wonder if his back-pocket bulge is a wallet or a knife; his cell phone or a gun. I follow behind, only our hand-holding linking us as something more than two men on the street.

“You’re not the first foot guy I’ve met.” I begin to tell a story I’ve started countless times before but never finish. I think it’s the feet that have me talking, or maybe the gin.

“Oh,” he grunts to recognize that we are conversing. We pass the nice hotel in the neighborhood, the hotel that would put me at ease that he’s not taking me to a dumpster to cut off my feet as trophies.

“When I was a kid,” I say, and pause, wanting to say that I meant child, as in seven, although I only remember the event as a television recap, something in which I observe instead of participate, something I float above like an angel or dispossessed soul leaving its body.

“You’re still a kid,” he smirks in the orange street light and sizes me up. I wonder what he’d think if he knew the twenty-six-year-old before him has never had a boyfriend, just a string of men who invariably called him a kid.

“It was different than that,” I protest, but he manipulates himself around my waist. “I didn’t really know.”

“Of course you didn’t,” he brushes my cheek, “but then again, you did know, didn’t you?”

What I want to say next I keep to myself. I keep my mouth shut the way I have my whole life. I don’t tell him that I was seven when I was swinging at a playground in a state park. Nor do I tell him my family was picnicking, my parents paying attention to my younger siblings, when a man plopped down on the swing next to me and said hello. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

 

The man on the swing was shabby: a mesh baseball cap with weasely hair puffing out of the bottom. Oil or dirt smattered his face and under his fingernails. He stunk, but I didn’t know it was the smell of alcoholic sweat. He produced a wooden box out of thin air—a wooden box carved in the shape of a train. He blew on one end and it whistled.

“You wanna try?” he said. He put the soft-sanded box to my lips and told me to blow. I tasted his warm tobacco spit, but knew not to push it away from me, not to disobey an adult. I blew and the high-pitch train sung again. I tried it a few more times, each time watching for his approval like I would my father.

“What’s your name?” he asked. Strangers weren’t supposed to ask me that question, and I wasn’t supposed to answer. And yet I couldn’t just ignore him.

“My name is Jack,” I said, and he shook my hand. I gave him the name of a neighbor boy, thinking this was a way for me to both obey an adult and not tell a stranger my real name.

“Well, Jack, I’ve got one of these for you, do you want it?” I nodded, watching curiously as he searched his backpack. A peel of laughter echoed from my family’s picnic table. My sister was blowing gum while my brother popped her bubbles. Why hadn’t my parents seen this man yet? They should’ve been at my side to talk to him the way they’d always done.

“Shoot,” he swore, “it’s not here.” He slapped the pockets of his pants.

“That’s okay,” I began swinging again, believing our conversation over.

“You know what?” He scratched his chin. “I think I left it back at the treehouse.”

“Treehouse?” I clawed my feet through the sand bringing the swing to an immediate stop. I’d been begging my dad to build one forever. “You have a treehouse?”

“It’s just over there.” He pointed to the woods with his whistle. “You can come check it out if you want.”

“I should ask my mom.” I hadn’t left her sight before. I looked back to my parents but they were busy cooking.

“I can’t wait around all day,” the man said. He looked into the sky as if the weather was going to turn at any moment. “Maybe some other boy will be brave enough to go on an adventure with me.”

A real-life treehouse was too much for me. I hopped off the swing and wandered into the woods behind him. The whole conversation took two minutes. This is how quickly I disappeared from my family.

 

My foot friend and I retreat down an alley where he spins me around to survey me once again. “Boy, you are beautiful. Just lovely.”

There are certainly worse things that can be said. I gently yank his tented khakis, giving him a good feel so he knows what I’m looking for. But then he does something unexpected, something that leads me to believe he is more nervous about our rendezvous than I am. He laughs a little and looks down at my hand on his crotch. Then he leans forward and gives me a clumsy, hurried peck on the lips. Not a kiss, but a whiskey-scented peck. Something about it is uncertain, like an animal in danger. Is this his first time?

“You okay?” I ask him, giving him an opportunity to back out. I’d rather have flight over fight. “We don’t have to do this.”

“It’s just a little further,” he reassures me.

 

These are the same words my kidnapper said as he coaxed me through the woods.

“It’s just a little further. You’ll see the treehouse soon.” The train whistled and I obediently followed.

I started to believe there wasn’t a tree house. I counted the paces from my family, committing my way home to memory, but once we hit one hundred I stopped. I couldn’t count much higher and I couldn’t see the way out anymore.

But then there was a treehouse. It appeared out of thin air. It was exactly the treehouse I’d imagined: wooden slats nailed neatly together for walls, an open square window and a ladder going up the trunk. The roof was covered in mossy shingles like a Disney movie.

“You first.” He guided me up the ladder. When I had trouble lifting myself up, he took hold of my butt and pushed. Just one of his hands covered the entire thing. The embrace was firm—warm with a bit of sweat—but it didn’t feel inappropriate. I wouldn’t fall or get away from him. Nothing my dad wouldn’t have done.

Inside, a sleeping bag, pillow and small gas stove cluttered the floor. There was an old plastic children’s chair next to the window, the yellow faded by time. All of it seemed like items I’d find in a tree house, though they were more beat-up and dirty than I imagined. They at least matched my idea of a treehouse, except the large duffle bag in the corner. It was the type used to carry bats or golf clubs—something I could fit neatly into.

“Isn’t this just wonderful?” he said. I nodded. I sat down on the chair searching the forest below from the window. I saw the smoke from the grill my family was using, smelled the hamburgers, and heard the shouts of my siblings. I was frightened: alone with a stranger, up high in a fort with my family out of sight. Yet, I was also thrilled. I was doing something all by myself like an older boy.

“Here, sit down.” He patted the floor next to him. Most people say they would’ve left just then. Most people think Why would you listen to this creepy man? But that’s not what I thought. When I sat next to him I thought nothing of the way he loomed over me. Adults were big but had always been kind and gentle.

“Take off your sandals,” he said, easing his hand on top of my foot. “It feels nice in the open air.”




This is the place,” my foot man says. In front of us is a hotel that offers hourly rates, though an hour feels too long. The cool air-conditioned lobby relaxes him immediately. He no longer darts his eyes around as people pass him. He whistles down the fluorescent-lit hallway, turning to give me another wink. Now would be the perfect time to flee. There are witnesses in the lobby—it’s a public place. But what’s the danger, really? Or why is it that I’m so aroused right now? Why do I always fall under this spell and follow someone who wants nothing more than to swallow my toes, to consume me? I take hold of his hand again. I want him to call me sexy, to call me his baby.

He fumbles his keys into the lock and it’s under the sober light that I get a good look at his face. He’s not un-handsome, he’s just no longer young. He has the earliest of wrinkles and I wonder if they come from happiness or anger. There is a five o’clock shadow that suggests he’s employed in finance, and the faintest bit of vanilla cologne that mixes with the whiskey breath.

“You’re handsome,” I say, and mean it. He is a man in the ways I’ve been told about men; about what they should look like, what they should smell like, and how the roughness of his face is what they should feel like to the touch. He does what men do when told they are handsome: he declines the compliment but straightens his back. He flexes as he opens the door. He brushes against me, an exhale of breath as he does so, and then corrals me to where he wants me to go.

“Let’s take those sandals off.”

 

My sandals were Velcro because I couldn’t tie my shoes at seven. They came off with a flick of a wrist.

“Doesn’t that feel nice?” the man asked. He removed his shoes and socks, releasing a pungent cheese smell into the treehouse. I wiggled my toes, the air from the window evaporating the sweat on my soles. “Those are some nice little piggies.”

Hearing him call them piggies made me giggle, but also, his notice of my body, his examination of my now uncovered feet, made me feel naked. Not naked like when I got naked for a bath and ran around the house, but naked that was naughty, the naked that my parents shielded from my eyes when an odd TV channel was flipped. It felt like static building on the surface of my skin, something that could shock me with one wrong move.

“This little piggy went to market,” he said and tickled my big toe. The electricity increased, and the hairs on my neck prickled. The smell of his sweat was so strong I tasted its coppery tang. There were good touches and bad touches, and the moment he touched me, I knew it was a bad touch. But I didn’t know that I’d want the attention, the excitement a bad touch brought me. My heart pounded faster. I closed my eyes and his voice disappeared, his body disappeared. All that was left was the warm static tingle on my toes.

 

My first time was transcendent,” I say to my foot man as he wets my toes with his tongue. He snorts an acknowledgement and massages my soles with a warming oil that causes me to squirm.

“I mean, it was like a seizure. That’s the only way to describe it. He didn’t even touch my crotch and it happened.”
“Like a virgin, so lost,” he says, coming up for air. He still doesn’t take me seriously. He doesn’t think that what I’m saying is more important now than ever before.

“I was frightened,” I say. “I didn’t know what was happening.”

“You know you wanted it.” He drops his boxers and a heady musk fills the room. He swings his hips so that his penis makes a slapping noise against his thighs—his attempt to alleviate my dark mood. But then he does what I remember the man in the tree house doing: he traces his fingers up my shin until they reach my knees. Then he changes direction and his fingers creep up my inner thigh.

“There was a film covering me that made my skin crawl. My muscles tensed all at once, as if string ran from my head to my feet. Then the ends of that string were suddenly pulled in an effort to snap me in two.”

“What happened next?” the foot man whispers into my ear, pushing himself between my legs.

“My whole body shook, and I whimpered. I don’t think I lost consciousness but it felt like an eternity passed.” I lift myself and he kisses my lips. “I remember coming to with his hand on my chest. I remember a voice in my head telling me to run.”

“Oh honey you’ve got a guardian angel.” The man swallows my chin and sucks.

 

I ran out of there as fast as I could, cutting my toe on a nail because I didn’t grab my sandals.

“Mommy,” I screamed when I entered the picnic area. She was still cooking, hadn’t even noticed I’d left.

“What happened to your foot?” she said. “Where are your sandals?”

I thought of telling them the truth. A man had tricked me into a treehouse and touched me. If I’d stayed any longer, I wouldn’t be here. But I worried they’d make me take them to the treehouse and it would be empty. Or worse, he’d still be there, a sandal in each hand.

“I lost them,” I said. “I didn’t mean to.”

 

My mom was so angry,” I say to my foot man. “She spanked me.”

“Mmm, a spanking.” His hand strikes my ass. “I’ve got you now, young man. Where’s your guardian angel?”

I don’t tell him that with every man I’ve been with, I still get that voice. I get a voice telling me to run, though I never do. I do what I’ve learned men want me to do: I shove my toes back into his face, diving in feet first.


Chad Koch Contributor
Chad Koch is the co-founder of the queer literary journal and press, Foglifter. His work has been published in The North American Review, The Madison Review, Midwestern Gothic, Eleven Eleven, The East Bay Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Sparkle & Blink. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart prize.

1 Comment

  1. On the edge of my seat and, sorry for the pun, waiting for the other shoe to drop! Love the structure; I got lost a couple of times, in a good (great!) way, unsure of which foot guy we were with (both creepy, in each their own way). You grossed me out, especially with the smells. Remarkable.

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