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Walking Distance

Doesn’t make sense, Mia says to herself and surveys her foot. She calls a doctor and when the nurse asks the reason for the appointment, she deflects to calling it a twisted ankle.

Sitting on the papery slip in the sterile room with the doctor holding her bare foot, his glasses tipping to the edge of his nose, a nose, she notices, that makes excessive noise upon each breath, he concludes, “Nothing, m’dear.” He rubs a thumb under the ankle, pushing at the tendons. “You tell me again. Does it hurt here?”

She shakes her head, confused. Her black hair drips over her face as she points toward her foot. “Just. Could you maybe do an X-ray? I’m certain you’d find something if only you did an X-ray.”

“My secretary tells me you don’t have insurance. Do you know what one of those costs without insurance? And anyway, m’dear, there’s nothing the matter.” He prescribes that she drink more water. Take more walks around the block. “Young girl like you could handle a bit more rigor in the day.” He takes off his glasses. “You know. For the body?”

She makes an appointment with a second doctor, hoping for a second opinion, and keeps this one a secret from her boyfriend Greg, who had already told her that this—all of this, he said while waving his palm at her foot—was a very “Mia-thing to do.”

“What’s a ‘Mia-thing’?” she asked, feeling stung but also reassured that he knew her well enough to name a trait after her. 

“You do this,” he said, working his hand over his face, through his hair, then diving it into his back pocket. “You get all worked up and turn it into something bigger than it is. ”

“Look, okay, sure, Greg, sometimes I say the fish I caught was twelve inches when it was six, who doesn’t? But this—” She pointed at her foot. “—isn’t an exaggeration. You just don’t believe me because it doesn’t look like anything is wrong with it. But something is wrong with it.”

This is what she says to the second doctor who holds her bare foot. She looks over his head at a kitschy poster as he gently sets her foot down. “Stand up for me.” His arms cross and rest against his doctor coat. “There’s your problem,” he points. “You never noticed you’re pigeon-toed?”

“Is that the medical term?”

He chuckles. “Okay, no. ‘Intoeing’ is what we call it.”

“So. Like. What does that mean?”

“The ankle likely feels stressed. It’s overcompensating. Trying to correct something that doesn’t actually need correction.”

“So, stop trying to correct it?”

“Precisely.”

+

Mia answers phones and schedules appointments for a hair salon down the street. Everything is down the street, all of it walking distance from where she and Greg live. Well, from where Greg lives. Mia’s moved in with him so it’s technically his place even though he refers to it as their place. No matter his insistence though, Mia calls it Greg’s place.

She holds up a finger to someone across the desk, a phone smashed between her ear and shoulder. Her left pointer finger clicks on a mouse, scanning through colored boxes on the screen in front of her. 

When she finishes, Amelia Grace—her name like a church but her personality that of a dinner plate—hovers behind her left shoulder. Some stylists call her Mealy, which she hates, and Mia couldn’t agree more. Sounds like brown meat and gravy. And she kind of is, at least in comparison to the other stylists. Her make-up, for starters, feels slightly wrong, like she couldn’t quite grasp the YouTube tutorial. Not that Mia knows much about make-up. 

When Mealy opens her mouth to complain, their bodies grazing, Mia decides it’s her voice she hates the most. It’s scratchy with some kind of pox that can’t be itched because it resides in the larynx. 

“I know, I know. Won’t happen again. Honest. Hand to god,” a statement Mia’s never said but feels appropriate now. When she eye rolls Mia, Mia tries not to take it personally because she did book a client at the wrong time. But Mealy’s always after her about something, her fault or not. She returns to answering phones. 

+

Mia looks forward to night, to sleep, to possibility without restriction in the form of her dreams. It’s a chance to dive her bare feet into the high-count sheets, a singular item of elegance she brought with her to Greg’s place, and become someone, anyone, else.  

The days are okay. She’s complacent with them. She tolerates them. Her wicked little job and her boyfriend. 

But in sleep, she’s untethered.

One dream, though, threatens her nighttime retreat. It’s shifting her space of escape, and her inability to control it, like everything else in her life, is unnerving. 

She confides in Greg, and Greg’s eyes widen. “So that’s why you ran off to all those doctor appointments.” It feels accusatory. Is he accusing her of something? He butters toast while standing at the counter. She sits at a two-top they bought at a garage sale. 

“Yeah, okay…might’ve started as a dream. Like a dream sensation. Like that time you bit into a tomato in your dream?” She rubs her ankles together. Her left foot feels like a wooden peg, like some dead appendage, like Ahab on the Pequod but Greg hasn’t read that book and she doesn’t offer the comparison. 

“I don’t even like tomatoes.”

“Sure, but you said you bit into one while dreaming, tasted it, and woke with the juice running down your chin.”

“Must’ve been your other boyfriend.”

“Do you think my foot looks twisted?”

It’s a fairly consistent dream but the dream itself comes to her after she’s awake and even then it lingers mainly as a feeling, a dull pain in her foot, which is not asleep, not like that. Rather a thickness. And when she throws her legs over the side of the bed and transitions from night to day, making the commitment to start again, it’s there. With every step, the dream rests in the pads of her foot, in the folds of her toes, in each ligament and tendon. Its presence is indefatigable. 

+

On break, a stylist who solely goes by Z pulls Mia into a corner and says she needs an extra set of hands for a wedding and couldn’t Mia be that set of hands? “You know.” She waves her own hands around and Mia finds herself following them more than Z’s request. “Just someone there to, like, hand me the flat iron or keep the bridal party straight. It’s just. It’s a big wedding, fourteen girls and the bride.” 

Later, Mia overhears Mealy snickering. Z obviously doesn’t want to split the pay with another stylist, but she can underpay Mia just fine. This doesn’t exactly bolster Mia’s confidence, but, hell, she needs the money. It’s all well and good that Greg uses a college degree to earn a salary with benefits and whatever else (a retirement plan?), but it’s all scraps for her. A piecemeal lifestyle, as her mother calls it. 

Back home, Mia sees that Greg has wedged seven different framed pieces of thrift store art on the dining room wall between two windows. The windows are old. In the winter they whistle and cold air whittles into their rooms. Mia thinks the cold belongs to ghosts, but Greg continuously points to the windows, sometimes rapping a knuckle on one to prove how weathered it is.

She stands in the doorway and looks at the wall and can’t for the life of her decide how Greg interpreted her suggestion to decorate to mean this.

“You love all that vintage stuff. Pretty cool, right?” 

He’s tried his best to hang them without flaw, but once the initial shock of the worn cottages and faded fruit bowls wears off, she moves over to straighten the edges. She’s tempted to measure the space between each, make sure everything’s equidistant, but Greg’s watching her.

+

Laying awake later while Greg snores, she feels guilty for not making a bigger deal about the art. She should have been more appreciative. All he did was listen, after all, and what more could she ask for in a partner? He’s convenient, which isn’t exactly romantic, but take this apartment. She moved in because she couldn’t afford rent. She decided to leave college (would not use the phrase “drop-out”) and, again, as her mom called it, was in the middle of piecemealing it all together when Greg made the suggestion. 

Damn art. She taps her fingers against her clavicle bones, but she knows it’s really herself she should be damning. Greg’s a good guy who wants to visit her at work and surprise her with sushi and be all supportive, but is he the guy?

On the other side of this debate is her most recurring dream. Her left leg is longer than the right and drags behind her. It stretches like black putty but it’s stiff like wood, and she grabs at her thigh with both hands and uses all her strength to move the left leg along with the rest of her body. Not aware of the destination, she moves relentlessly forward in darkness. The scenery doesn’t matter. It never matters. Only the struggle of moving something that would otherwise be so simple. 

In the morning, she rubs at her calf and sulks under the seven pieces of art. 

+

“You’re late,” Greg announces. 

“I’ve had a whole day of late.”

“There’s a concert down the road. A little free thing. Let’s go.”

She sees he has a wagon and hesitates to answer because it’s a gesture. The whole art debacle became a thing and she shouldn’t turn this into a thing as well. Unable to sleep a few nights after the art made its debut, she crept out of bed, tiptoed into the dining room, dirt crumbs clinging to her bare feet, and plucked the art off the wall. She plopped onto the floor between the wall and table. The cottage and fruit bowl and whatever else sat with her while she contemplated her next move, the knuckle of her pointer finger dragging across her teeth. 

The oppressive Victorian frames now felt romantic. But, Greg, c’mon. He was so busy with work, how did he even have time for this? He must have picked these  against other options,  actually thought of her opinion and weighed them against what he saw in front of him and decided, yes: Mia wants to admire these between bites of grapefruit. 

The next morning, however, Greg found the collection of frames separated from their contents. A tidy stack of art sat on the dining room table, the frames back on the wall. He didn’t say anything,but the residue of her actions coated his mood.

That had been yesterday and today Mia worked Z’s party, which had been all right but not great. Z paid more than she had originally offered, but working the math on the walk home, Mia figured she had still been underpaid, and now she is exhausted. She could have called Greg for a ride—he has a car he uses for work—but is she in a position to ask for favors?

“And you want to walk to this concert, I’m guessing?”

“It’s not far. I’ll pull the wagon.”

What she wants to say, but knows he won’t appreciate, is about her dream. Walking from Z’s party, she felt the dream strangling her ankle. Was she intoeing? Was she correcting the intoeing? Could she not say intoeing one more time?

“Cooler’s already packed and there will be food trucks. Food trucks, Mia, what’s better than food trucks?”

Based on several former conversations,this is a point she can’t argue.. They leave after Mia quickly throws water on her face, decides her eyebrows are a tragedy, and changes her clothes. 

Walking toward Wade Park, she monitors her foot placement. Her left foot turns toward the right and there is tension where it pushes back, its own attempt to step toe-forward. This constant attention on her stride creates space between Greg, who’s also taller and quicker, so she hastens to catch up. He’s mid-story, but she’s only catching fragments. By the time she’s at his side again, he offers a final sentence but it sounds the way doctors write prescriptions and she’s missed the point. 

The park is an electric hive of people in constant motion. Adults shout to their friends. Kids run and scream after footballs and frisbees. Dogs, way more than a reasonable amount, come from all angles. Her eyes dart from one group to the next. “It’s a madhouse,” she says.

“First nice day of the summer, you know?” They’ve unpacked snacks and Greg tears at a cheese block. Mia pushes a little knife towards him as a suggestion.

“There’s a pile of ants there. Look.”

“What is this music? It’s like jazz but not. I hate that. When music can’t decide.”

Mia watches him with the cheese block and she can’t figure out how he’s able to break it off like that. Like, it’ll be all underneath his fingernails. 

“Here.” She pushes the pretzels at him and he surrenders the cheese block.

“What do you think of these guys?” 

“I wish everyone would just sit down. It’s hard to focus on the band with so much happening.”

Greg tosses a pretzel into the air, throws his head back with a wide mouth. 

Mia thinks it’ll lodge into his throat the way it falls, but no such luck. He claps his hands to rid the crumbs. In another quick motion, he’s on his feet, says, “Bathroom” and then she’s alone. 

Her legs stretch ahead of her; the left foot dips toward the right. Feeling antsy, she cleans the snacks, organizes the cooler, pours a small glass of wine. She tells herself it’s a nice night. Okay, sure, the day was too long, and her legs are exhausted from walking everywhere, but it’s a nice night. 

The crowd stirs again. The band is on break and Greg’s been gone a while. Probably at the funnel cake stand, and she decides to find him there. 

But the crowd has truly swelled—perhaps doubled—since they arrived. She circles the pathway around the gazebo and wonders how this many people live in such a small town, her eyes going left and right. She feels dizzy and tired. 

The crowd pushes around her. It’s a breathing organ, this crowd, constantly pulsing. She maneuvers into open pockets of people, moving when they move. Relief hits her with each sliver of open space. She lunges forward and slides between bodies—strangers all of them—but the dizziness causes  her body to falter. “Sorry,” she repeats to each person she falls into. “Sorry.”

She curses. This is all her fault. She looks to her legs and realizes the left foot is nearly perpendicular to the right. This can’t be good. She hobbles farther. She’s twisted it somehow. Maybe knotted it against something. Another person’s leg, perhaps. 

She tugs at her left leg, unaware she’s doing it, the muscle memory from a hundred nights engrained there, the pain like skin, the motion its own muscle, the movement separate from her mind.

“Mia?” She hears her name. She feels hands on her body. She hears someone telling her to inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Keep breathing. Just like that. Yes. She hears slow, deliberate counting and her eyes come into focus. 

She curls on one side to vomit but realizes she’s wedged between two food trucks, lines of people craning their necks to catch a glimpse. “Greg?”

“Not Greg. Amelia Grace. Damn, girl. What’d you drink?” Mealy’s laugh is just like her nickname. Mashed potatoes. 

Mia manages to recite Greg’s phone number to Mealy, and within minutes he slides into the space, the food truck exhaust blowing hot air onto them. Greg towers above her, a funnel cake in his right hand and what looks like  a pile of ants on top. 

“I broke my foot.”

“You had a panic attack.”

“Please. Take me home in the wagon.”

He kneels, the funnel cake now on the ground, and he cradles her foot, before deciding the bones appear in order, the shin in line with the ankle which is in line with the foot. He thumbs a sore bug-bite and finds a rogue, too-long leg hair.

“Does it hurt when I do this?” He folds her ankle.

She won’t answer.

“And what about when I do this?” He bends the foot again.

“Just get the wagon, will you? This is embarrassing.” People have mostly moved their attention elsewhere, but Mia feels a few lingering gazes.

Greg stands. “Sure, Mia, the wagon,” he says, but he doesn’t move in that direction. Instead, he sidles next to Amelia Grace and Mia hears Mealy say something about Mia’s lack of focus. Mia wants to interject but the conversation is about her in a way that isn’t meant to include her. They’ve annoyingly shifted out of reach and Mia doesn’t trust herself to stand. Not alone anyway.

And what would she tell them? Would she say that she is stressed? That she’s feeling apprehensive about everything? The job, the stupid job where, aside from Mealy, she’s some kind of ugly garden weed. And what of Mealy? Who’s always micromanaging her—like the salon is some type of pecking order and Mia’s at the bottom. Like, is she actually beneath brown gravy Mealy? 

And then there’s Greg. Greg and his apartment and his niceness that isn’t annoying exactly but isn’t her. But what is her?

Mia silently commits to make a change. Something’s gotta give. Quit the salon or quit Greg or maybe just move. Move somewhere with less walking. Somewhere with a train maybe? She can’t stomach more walking. 

“Let’s try to get you to stand. C’mon, just lean your weight on me.” Greg reaches both hands toward her but she waves him off. What would be best, she decides, is if everyone left her here and when she could finally stand up alone, she could do just that. Stand up and walk off without leaning on anyone at all, but she’s so unstable she recognizes she better placate him. Better to let him be the hero, so she tells him okay, and he counts to three and she hears the smallest splatter of applause once she’s on her feet. 

+++

Katie Strine is a fiction writer from Cleveland, Ohio, where she earned an MA in English. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has been supported by The Kenyon Review

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