The growth appeared three days after my twenty-ninth birthday – not that these two things are mutually inclusive, rather it just feels like something of note. The cusp of my thirties was marked by the shape of an abnormality.
My ex had found it when he’d been stroking the foot I’d stretched out upon his lap, the remnants of risotto in my molars and white wine heavy on my eyelids as we watched reruns of Spicks and Specks. He’d missed my birthday party earlier in the week, a quick text claiming that he only celebrated ‘the big ones’. I’d left him on read only to open the door several days after the celebration to find him with a cheap bottle of wine and a squashed discounted cake from the local grocery store I worked at.
His finger slid between my large and second toe before quickly pulling back, my foot pushed off of him as he jumped up. ‘What the fuck?’
I sat up, knee under chin, and delicately spread the appendages of my right foot, making a mental note to shave the knuckles of my toes. There. No bigger than the size of the chewed nail of my pinky finger, a raised pinkish lump nestled within the gap between two fleshy, bony pillars.
‘Fuck off, it’s a wart!’ He ran to the kitchen, old pipes thunking like the beat of a slowing heart, the sigh of the soap dispenser pressed, two, three, four times.
I rested my chin on my knee and stared at the newest member of my body, mesmerised. How this body could grow and nourish parts of me without my knowing. How I could live in pure ignorance while my skin pushed outward, forming new nooks and crannies. How I had been without and suddenly, was with.
My ex came back, damp tea towel thrown over his shoulder, his hands red from scalding water or intense scrubbing, or both, his abnormally long index finger pointing at my foot.
‘You should put a sock on that.’
***
We broke up not long after that. Again, lump and separation were not linked, but interesting timing nonetheless. It was the typical story: he was a floater, an in-between-things-at-the-moment kind of guy, a hobbyist dj-er with ‘big dreams’ and a long list of crazy exes. I was too career driven, me with my part-time grocery job. I was part of the capitalist system. I didn’t live in the moment, I wasn’t present, I wasn’t attentive to his needs. I was, in finality, a ‘stuck up bitch’ who’d asked him to air out the apartment and run the dishwasher one too many times. It wasn’t him, but me, lump and all.
I blocked him on Instagram on the bus ride over to a doctor’s appointment. I’d known about the growth for almost three weeks by then, its presence felt by the sensation of rough flesh rubbing against the socks in my work shoes. I’d start to think I was getting pretty good at ignoring it, but then 11pm would roll around and I’d be cross-legged, foot propped up on my thigh, phone held landscape in the folds of skin between my chin and neck, the torchlight illuminating the chewed nubs of my fingertips as they spread open the gap between my toes to reveal my newest appendage.
Every night I’d take photos with the flash on and zoom in and in and in, spreading the screen with thumb and index the same way I’d pull my toes apart; searching for meaning, searching for the answers to the what ifs and what the fuck is its. After a thorough examination that included a good poking and prodding – no pain, was that good or bad? – I’d take my research to Google. ‘Small pink lump between toes’ garnered a lot of responses, and I’d spend a good hour comparing the photos of my own growth to those taken and uploaded by strangers on the internet. Wart was a common response, that was nice. But so was cancer, and that was not so nice. Eventually I’d steer away from medical sites and find myself on opinion blogs and Reddit forums, people telling me to ‘burn it off, that’s what I did and it was fine’, others telling me that they’d had their foot amputated because the lump turned into an infection and the infection into sepsis.
User ilikebigcakesandicanlie241 said, ‘My gma said that lumps and scars are actually ur skin holding onto the memory of ur previous body’s cause of death. Wonder what sort of fatal injury would occur between ur toes lol.’
‘I think you’re thinking of birthmarks,’ anonymous responded, and that made me a bit nervous because my birthmark was nestled between the creases of my ass cheeks.
And although all this would leave my chest tight, a sort of pressing and hammering at my chest bone that made my throat feel like it was closing up, I’d tell myself that my body was my body and my body would not hurt me. We’re in it together, my body and I, if it turned on me, then we’d both be in for it. And that would calm me down, but then I’d remember about things like endometriosis and I’d start googling if ovarian cysts could somehow appear on the skin between someone’s toes.
I did not tell all this to the doctor, rather I told her I had a weird lump on my foot and took my sandals and bandaid off to show her. She nursed my foot gently between gloved fingertips and I stared at the crown of her head, the stark whiteness of her scalp lending to the murky brown of her roots, the shiny black of the rest of her hair.
She gave me a script for a topical cream to apply twice a day, morning and night and told me to put a bandaid on when I’m out and about, but to otherwise let it breathe.
Breathe. My lump was something that needed to breathe. Inhale, exhale, inhale.
‘We’ll do an ultrasound and an x-ray too, just to be sure,’ she said.
And I wanted to ask, ‘To be sure of what? What are we unsure of that we need to be sure?’
***
A month passed and the lump was still there, and it was nearly the size of my pinky toe. I’d run out cream from the pharmacist, and I’d been too scared to book in for the scans.
I started seeing a guy at work. He worked in the butcher’s section of the grocery store and he’d caught me watching him slicing ham off a leg bone, the nub of white glistening under the fluorescent lights, perfectly framed by the pinkish flesh. He’d winked.
He asked me out for drinks after we closed the store, I said yeah sure, why not, and we went to a pub a few blocks down and I pretended I was an IPA kind of girl, not a strawberry cider kind of girl. He asked me what kind of music I liked and I said whatever he’d said, and he told me that I really pulled off the work uniform, green polo and black trousers. We went back to his place and I gave him a blowjob and pretended I was the swallowing kind of girl, but when I went to the bathroom I turned on the fan and let the tap run as I threw up into the toilet. After a week of casual sex and after work sleepovers he asked me why I always wore socks around the apartment, he’d never seen me barefoot. And I told him that I was a sensory kind of girl, that I didn’t like to feel things on the soles of my feet, it made me feel yuck and he laughed and grabbed my waist and threw me on the bed and tried to pull my socks off until he realised what he thought was laughter was me sobbing in terror.
***
One night I google what people are most afraid of.
– Spiders
– Snakes
– Heights
– Flying – mainly crashing
– Death
– Drowning
– Needles
– Abandonment
– Open water
– Public speaking
I write ‘death’ in the middle of a yellow post-it note and write the others on the list in a circle around it, all with arrows pointing to its centre. I go to write ‘lump’ in the space I’d left between ‘drowning’ and ‘heights’, but hesitate, the ink on the tip of my pen leaving a pool of blue ink. I think of exes and dead parents, of reincarnation and pet birds that fly away. I think of children that cry when they get their haircut and how bees die when they sting something. I think of tsunamis and earthquakes, of those videos where people get hearing aids and hear the voices of their loved ones for the first time. I think of how the eyes of cows look the same as the eyes of beagles and how the sun is large and will someday be small. I think of the thing growing steadily between my toes and I cross out ‘death’ and write ‘growth’.
***
The scans had come back all clear, so I went back to the doctor’s office for a second opinion.
The new doctor I saw said that it looked like a calcium buildup and that because the growth was external he could burn it off with ice, and I thought how strange that ice and burn could be used so coherently, so seamlessly in a sentence when aren’t they at odds with one another? Aren’t they polar opposites?
I asked if I could keep the lump, if he could maybe put it in a jar for me, and the doctor raised a singular eyebrow and slowly shook his head. ‘No, uh, we can’t do that.’
And I said, ‘Oh okay, that’s no worries.’
‘So, would you still like us to, uh, remove it?’
And while I mused over how uncertain this guy seemed for a doctor I thought about loss and how this lump had outlasted both my ex and my current relationship, boyfriend or friends-with-benefits or colleague or whatever it was he wanted us to be, never what I wanted no no no, and I thought how sad. How sad for my lump. How sad for me to say goodbye to something that had been more constant than anything else in the last two months and how sad for me to upend it, to destroy it, to sacrifice it in the way of health and comfort and beauty. And I thought about the diagram I’d drawn on the post-it note and how I’d tucked it between the back of my phone and its case and I thought about growth and death and how maybe they’re not that mutually exclusive because is there not growth in death, is there not rebirth, is there not gain without loss, is there not fear without change?
I thought of the dream I had the night before the scans; how my foot had begun to pulsate and I’d taken off my shoes to find a slit in the tip of my lump and how the slit was a mouth and within were several teeth. It looked like it was grinning, it looked like it was breathing. Inhale, exhale, inhale. I thought of how I’d woken up from the dream and googled lumps with teeth and that it was a genuine thing called teratoma, but normally it occurred inside the body, and that the growths were caused by unformed or fully formed tissue. And I thought of how foreign the body is, how foreign my own body is, how I live and exist at the whims of something internal that I can not control, but can only observe.
I looked at the fake skeleton by the door, it was dressed in a doctor’s coat and had a stethoscope around its neck. I looked at its foot.
I said, ‘Okay, take it away.’
