CORTNEY PHILIP
"When Alistair Lost His Sixth Toe, He Lost Everything.
"Surgical Trilogy"

When Alistair Lost His Sixth Toe, He Lost Everything.

The time of the toe remained situated in the limits of four-year old Alistair's memories. At their arrival on the shores of this bounteous and commercially developed land, Mr. and Mrs. Voyesky knew the time had come for young Alistair to don shoes upon his previously carefree feet. A cursory visit to a cobbler ended abruptly with a flurry of embarrassed hand gestures and head bows. The sixth toe, once a source of wonder in a place where genes held no stock over legends, in this new world was no more than an inconvenient malformation to be dealt with immediately. Mr. and Mrs. Voyesky spent the last of their inherited silverware on a surgeon who chastised them for not "taking care of it sooner." And those were the last words young Alistair heard before he woke into the world an ordinary child.

His memory became much sharper and more adept at putting things into focus after his feet were properly cobbled but it was the time of the toe upon which he fed his dreams. In that space of morning between wake and sleep, when his feet felt comfortably whole and right in their blanket nest, Alistair practiced remembering the before. He carried with him a vague sense of previous power: the phantom ability to fly, to leap strange gray office buildings in single bounds, to save kittens caught in rainstorms without getting wet himself.

Of course, Alistair had no idea if any of this was true. What he remembered most clearly from his early childhood was running, running through the lush forest encroaching on the boundaries of his village. Once a year, his father and the other men cut back the bush with machetes, hoping to keep the lynx and bobcats away from their pastures. But young Alistair loved those ancient woods and mountains and deep tectonic lakes. He loved any ground across which he could brazenly tromp.

Alistair trudged through his days at a Company, starting in the basement mailroom and working his way up through a maze of cubicles with a rolling cart. He squeaked slowly up the floors, a wayward wheel keeping his cart always just a smidge off-course. His Company-issued non-skid shoes fit perfectly. "Here is your mail," he said. "Here is your mail." Sometimes they said thank you; mostly they nodded slightly and pretended he had interrupted some very important typing.

He met his wife in the mailroom, or rather she came to him like spring into the world after a winter of gray sludge. Ramona was the substitute mail carrier, pushing her own cart along new sidewalks every day when a regular mail carrier suffered a dog bite or called in blistered. She pushed her cart with a bounce, and laughed when Alistair gawked at her purple sneakers.

"The proper ones are in the shop," she explained with a wink. He scooped her up into a mail sack and carried her off to a cafˇ for an early lunch break. He won her heart with stories of running unfettered across green hills in the land of his ancestors.

In bed at night, Ramona traced the thin white scar on his left foot. "Tell me again, Alistair," she sighed. "Tell me about the time of the toe." And he did, over and over into the morning. He told her about the ancient mountains of his land, said to be both uninhabitable and impassable, how he wished to challenge them when he got old enough to go off on his own. He told her of how he beat the older boys at climbing trees by using his toes to cling to minute crevices in the bark of their trunks. He told her of a family holiday to the beach of Vlora and the fine yellow grains of sand that couldn't be grasped between his toes. He laughed and laughed, recalling how hard he tried to hold the beach with his feet.

When little Digio was busy being born, Alistair was busy pacing the waiting room and praying for many, long-lived toes to come out with him. And true to form, Ramona's words to Alistair upon transferring Digio from her breast to his were playful: "He'll never fit into his father's shoes." Pushing through his swaddling, Alistair revealed Digio's feet. He had not one, but two extra digits! Or rather six on each foot, or twelve altogether. So many toes to love between them. They wept and laughed, and Digio slept with the abandon of the extraordinarily blessed.

Alistair threw himself into his work like he never had before. He oiled his cart and repaired the wayward wheel so he glided through the rows of cubicles with stealth and speed. The Company bosses praised his labor and soon Alistair had a cubicle of his own to decorate with pictures of Ramona and Digio and in which to type numbers into spreadsheets. Ramona made a sling for Digio so he could bounce along on her belly as she pushed her cart up and down the streets. The residents in one neighborhood liked her purple sneakers and her smiling baby so much, they foisted heaps of homemade cookies upon her and circulated a petition to make her their regular mail carrier instead of their substitute.

Alistair and Ramona saved every extra penny they made in a pickle jar under their bed and on Digio's fourth birthday, they announced an extravagant surprise laid waiting for him at the shore. Taking Digio in hand, they met a giant ship at the dock. Alistair gave the stuffed pickle jar to a man who lowered a wooden bridge, and the family boarded the ship. The sailors marveled at how quickly Digio developed sea legs, scampering barefoot across the decks so quickly he made everyone else a little queasy. When the ship reached the other side of the ocean, Digio scurried down the gangplank and onto the green ground of Alistair's earliest memories. He stood marveling at the grass between his toes while his parents made their way slowly, like shoe-wearing grown ups.

"Is this my birthday present?" he asked.

Ramona nodded, eyes welling. Digio threw his arms around her knees, then solemnly stuck his hand out to Alistair for a manly shake. The place of Alistair's ancestors loomed bigger than he remembered; more lush and vast than the half-dreams of early morning wakings had recalled for him. Digio turned from his parents, pawing at the turf with splayed feet. Inside his non-skid shoes, Alistair's feet twitched a response. Digio took off sprinting for the forest, disappearing over a hill. Alistair wanted so badly to scoop Ramona into his arms and run after him, wanted to run her through the trees and all the way into the impenetrable mountains where he would climb and climb, using his toes for balance. But Alistair knew that his time had come and gone. It was too late for him, but for Digio, his life of running and climbing and sand-sifting was just beginning.

Alistair took Ramona's hand in his. Together, they watched the land for a few moments longer, imagining Digio running freely across it, then reboarded the boat that would take them home.



Surgical Trilogy

Farming

She farms unicorns by strapping horns onto animals and waiting for them to grow into the magic. The kids become goats, the frogs turn into princes and most of the others die young.

An ark with the dying and the transforming and the good, but not a unicorn in sight. And not a boat but a farm carved out of the woods and a little house that isn't gingerbread but might look like gingerbread from a great distance.

She gets older, she gets frantic, she starts plying around inside their heads. A horse gets a steel plate for better horn anchorage. A parakeet gets a tumor. She might die in that not-gingerbread house in the woods, never having seen a real unicorn.

She adds her own blood to the dirt field. She puts a horn on her own head. If she is to die alone in this place, no magic to save or redeem her, she will die like the others, pretending to be a unicorn for a brief glimpse of the imaginable.

Trephining

Istevan crouches in the dirt. All the children have come out to watch, come to see Istevan's blood running across the courtyard again. The doctor unties his leather pouch, selects a tool, holds the chisel over the blue part of the fire's flame.

The doctor stands above Istevan, taking his head between his palms. This will be Istevan's fourth trephining. The first hole released the angry spirits caught in his skull.

The doctor swings the mallet, testing its weight. He gives the chisel a practice tap, not yet puncturing skin. The other two holes were just for show. Istevan thinks about the drought that plagues his village.

The doctor presses the chisel into Istevan's temple. "How about here this time?" The villagers revere the survivors as blessed by the gods, but the drought has been hard on the head-heroes. The villagers guard their food closely. Fewer baskets of smoked meat and apples appear on Istevan's doorstep every day.

Istevan nods slightly. Istevan has a family to feed. He must garner more rewards. He closes his eyes and waits for the mallet to drive the chisel into his skull.

Glass Eye

The inside of Laszlo's eyelid grows slowly, itchingly, winding its tentacles into the mess of the wire sphere. Under Laszlo's eyepatch, he knows what the socket looks like, a half-skin and half-monster placeholder where the eye used to be. Doc says, wait, wait, it'll grow. I'll make you a nice cover for it when it heals. Haven't you always wanted a blue eye to go with your green one? But Laszlo's been waiting, and now he wants his hole back, that hole he used to rub his finger around in at night, over and over, before he went to sleep.