How my foot looks

Until Thursday afternoon, I'd been permitted only occasional glimpses of my injured foot. Between casts, while wheeling from podiatry clinic to X-ray, I stared and on occasion touched the strange flesh that had once been part of me but now belonged to doctors and nurses and technicians—and to that same category of existence that lodged many of my life's unpleasantnesses, and which was understood to fall outside of The Meaningful, The Useful, The Relevant.

Now the foot and the leg attached to it are naked, and though they are far from perfect, their care and improvement have been left to me and to an occasional black boot, no longer to a bent plaster tube.

This is not my foot as I remember it. The skin is dry, peeling, wrinkled, splotchy. The area around my ankle is swollen and I don't recall that freckle. There is a cut along the left side of my heel, with tape strips crossing it. Some dried blood. Much of the skin is shiny; what isn't tends to ruddiness. I can wiggle my toes and rotate my foot, but I don't do much of the rotating because it hurts a little.

The leg, too, is foreign. Bruises streak and stripe it, and I did not know that bruises came in such colors. Much yellow, some purple. The calf muscle is gelatinous, unsightly.

Lots of skin is flaking and sloughing from the toes and between them. I've been leaving the cut alone, but I suspect that while I sleep the cat or I may try to lick it. Maybe it tastes metallic, or maybe it's like licking a battery.