The above picture was attached, somehow, to a message conversation between my wife, Cute Judy Lee, and our daughter, Julie Beth, you see! The feet part that is! How it got there we don’t know. But I fear that only The Shadow Really Knows for sure!
This post has prompted me to relay to you “The Tell-Tale Feet!” A really short story by Florida writer Edith Hellen Hammer-Toe. It was first published in 2003 and is related by an unnamed narrator who endeavors to convince us that her toes are actually straight and pristine clean. The reader of this piece surely questions the narrator’s sanity while simultaneously describing the grizzly sight of the hammer-toed feet.
But foul murder was, I fear, amiss! And the victim was no other than the narrator’s clueless old-man husband with filmy “vulture-eyes,” as the narrator calls them. The narrator emphasizes the careful calculation of the murder, attempting the perfect crime, complete with dismembering and hiding the body under her queen-sized bed.
Ultimately, the narrator’s feelings of guilt, or a mental disturbance, result in her hearing a continuous thump-thumping sound, which the narrator interprets as her dead husband’s heart beat or more likely expelled gas!
Or was it really just the cracking and crinkling of her disfigured hammered-toed feet!
No! It probably was really the odorous sound of The Tell-Tale Fart!
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My thanks to Edgar Allen Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart!”
