Raw Meat

The crack on Ola’s heel has grown exponentially wider over the past two days. What started as dry skin with a slight groove has grown into a gaping mouth, a cenote with hard-skinned ridges and a pool of crimson water, not yet visible. Ola thought she might try stitching the sides of the crack together, but the skin has dried past the point of penetrability. No thread and needle would be enough.

Ola heard her sister-in-law, Clem, speak about skin glue once after tripping over a can of crushed tomatoes in an aisle of extra virgin olive oils and garlicky pasta sauces at the grocery store, hitting the shiny linoleum ground and lodging an orphaned piece of green glass in the meat of her palm. Clem was rushed to the hospital then and given a choice: glue or stitches. She’d chosen the glue. Remembering Clem’s experience, Ola dials her number and waits for her to pick up.

~

Does the brain live in the map of the feet? In the rough heels and small birthmarks? The scars that blossom toward the outer edges like cups of spilt chocolate? Can you trace the wrinkled cosmos, the valleys and hills, and find something there? What lives in the wounds from rusty nails, the little bits of nail polish you stepped in and haven’t had time to clean, the dirt from hours of walking the floors of your unswept house? Is your brain there, in the strained muscles? The eager toes? The blue-green veins and small bones?

~

After trying a fourth time to contact Clem, Ola puts her phone away. She doesn’t want to bother anyone at the Mediclinic down the road with something as simple as a cracked heel, so instead, she tiptoes up the carpeted stairs of her townhouse, careful not to put any weight on her heel, and goes into the office where her wife keeps the craft supplies she uses when she babysits her nephews. Behind Ola on the stairs, little drops of black blood litter the soft grey carpet like a photo of the night sky with the colours inverted.

Ola rifles through the many drawers in her wife’s office, trying to find the supplies. After drawers of client files, printer paper, spare ink, and leather-bound notebooks, she finally finds it: a clear box filled with craft glue with scratchable blue bumps covering the lids.

Each of the bottles of glue is slightly different, but the one that claims to have the strongest sticking power is also the least likely choice to patch a cracked heel—a purple gelatinous goo infused with small metallic stars, dark green butterflies, and silver iridescent micro-crystals. Ola feels the cavernous wound in her heel widen even further in response, stinging somewhere so deep in her foot that she almost feels the pain in her calf, her knee, the hollow of her thigh. She looks down as a small pool of blood forms beneath her foot.

Ola grabs the glue and several pages of construction paper from the still-open drawer, slathers the purple shimmer on bright orange paper, presses her heel into the gluey page, and hobbles out of the office, screaming back toward the inverted sky of the stairs.

Siarra Riehl (she/her) lives and creates on Treaty Six land in so-called Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with her wife and two cats. A transdisciplinary writer, performer, and teacher, she holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Siarra’s fiction received an honourable mention in AWP’s 2020 Intro Journals Project, and her work has appeared in The Molotov Cocktail, Pinky Thinker Press, Flash Flood, the tiny journal, Khôra, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. Find her at www.siarrariehl.com.

A Song for Siarra