Jessica Lee Richardson

Swizzle

The floating could be seen as a bonus, but at the disappearing of the technicians’ feet none of them felt anything but alarm. It took the previously bored women three days to realize they were not alone in their affliction. Each was too scared they were having breaks with reality to mention the lost feet to anyone. The wife of one was at a symposium. The other presented no excuse. Ondine had told her mother, but her mother only hung her head and lightly snored, eyes open. She did not react to the overly bright lemon wall, visible behind Ondine’s ankles.

It was possible Ondine’s mom hadn’t seen the missing feet—her cataract surgery had been postponed when she had the stroke, but Ondine thought the nonseeing was proof she was hallucinating and had a panic attack. She binged videos of cake. Her mother noticed that and served her cups of ginger tea, rubbing small circles on her back.

Ondine was relieved when she found out her coworkers feet had also vanished. In mind versus feet math, she chose mind. That she was not alone in the predicament meant her mind was intact. She could hold onto that, it grounded her. Besides, she could scoot around fine on her invisibilities. So could Terra and Aline.

“The feet can no longer be viewed, that’s all,” Aline said. Terra and Ondine disapprovingly honked. “Their essence is still holding us up.”

Aline doubled down despite their noises. “We become what we pass by. Isn’t there a little poetry to that?”

“Visually,” Ondine said. “Only visually.” She stood in front of a snack dispenser and didn’t feel like she’d become a snack dispenser. The lab was too poor to hand out free snacks and so was Ondine, they had that in common.

Terra and Aline sighed at Ondine.

“I guess you are kind of like an old refrigerator.” Terra rested her head against the freezer door.

At night Ondine was struck with piercing longing for her toes. She missed her heels, but her toes were code to something profound about her. The part of her they explained could not be explained by fingers. Her fingers told another story. When she was thriving, her toes wiggled in the sun like fat and happy worms. Sometimes she painted them morose colors. Still, they winked back at her, reminding her she was alright. Now, how would she know?

Terra and Aline seemed sleepless too. They cursed at office chairs that tripped them up. The organizational skills they were hired for were slipping. Long trays of samples were stacked out of order on Tuesday. A pizza box from Thursday was not thrown out by Friday. The researchers noticed and made frightening comments about operational grants drying up.

None of the researchers noticed the missing feet, though. They were not that observant. Unless you counted slip ups. All three felt their jobs were on the line.

“Ice skating,” said Aline, as if waking up from a trance. Terra and Ondine repeated the word, clueless. On their way out for the evening, she dangled her keys. “Come on,” Aline said, “Let’s go to the rink. I’ll drive you back.”

They hopped into Aline’s ancient Volvo, which smelled like antique leather and cold weather herbs, careful not to catch their nonexistent feet in the doors. Ondine did not feel personally capable of ice skating, but shut her mouth, soothed by Terra’s patchouli-cedar oil and Aline’s sweaty enthusiasm. They belted pop songs and rolled their hips at stoplights.

After forty-five minutes at SHRED, they’d only moved from the rental counter to a sticky bench beside the ice. They dumped the skates because they couldn’t get them on.

“How do your feet still smell,” Aline said to Terra, and they laughed so hard they had to pee, because Terra’s feet did smell, even without being there. Peeing took another fifteen minutes because they had to stop and sit twice so they could hold it. By then Aline had tiny cold tears in her eyes and Terra’s nose was chafing.

“I really wanted to see the ice through our,” she trailed off. They didn’t always feel comfortable calling these transparent appendages feet anymore. It seemed almost an insult. Terra and Ondine didn’t understand Aline’s desire to view the bottom of herself as a circle, frozen in time and space. They understood the tenor of a sudden longing, though. How close to the heart a vision could strike.

Ondine said it first. “Let’s go out without the skates.”

They laughed. “It’s not allowed.” It was true, there were signs.

“No one will know.”

The embroidery of a thrill puckered Aline’s face. Ondine tugged her butt off the bench.

They slid with ease onto the glossy ice. The chill seeped up their knees, but they acclimated and soon they were racing. Twisting and leaping. Without the skinny blades it was easier to be elegant. Other skaters clapped. Tipped invisible hats.

Aline, you could see, really wanted the onlookers to notice the absences. How a part of them had been replaced. They were the ice they spun on, flecks on a cosmic contact lens. She glided into some minimalist, reflective painting she shadowed with her other limbs. Ondine felt differently. Did she want to go on and on in a distressing white circle? Endless? No.

Terra tried for an axel, oblivious to the skaters who couldn’t see what was there because they couldn’t see what was gone. She shook her fists, nailing it.

“The eyes are not set up for absences,” Ondine said, crunching on nachos stuck to a paper canoe.

“What did you say?” The clerk wiped a glass countertop, openmouthed. They cocked their head. None of them noticed the clerk was missing their ears. They breathed audibly and spritzed again, temples frilled by the buy a pretzel get a pretzel sign. The three followed a slow song out and synced up for a backwards spin that, even without eyes, would be difficult to miss.