Foot Note

You have to rub your wife's feet, she wrote.

I know, I wrote back. Of course I would rub my wife's feet. She's my wife.

I handed her the note and her lips parted, as if to let in an unknown truth of me. She slid her feet under her chair, slowly, as I'm sure she didn't want me to notice. And I'm sure I wasn't supposed to notice how she crumpled the note up and stuffed it in her pocket. But I did.

Hands and feet. The longer you look at them the stranger they are. And I think of one as being so clean and the other so dirty, and that bringing the two of them together is some intimate act. Which I think I like. There is so much blurred in the world, I'd prefer to keep my little intimacies. If I can.