Celarium - "Basement Fantasy" Chapter 1 - Taking Inventory
Verity had an extra toe. It was not the envy of her peers, nor an abomination whispered about by the lavishly dressed. It was not her most closely guarded secret, and she had not grown up with the habit of always wearing socks or never going swimming even if the opportunity was nearly unavoidable. In fact, no one, not even her family, knew about it. This was because, until yesterday, she had been in possession of a perfectly ordinary number.
Hugh decided he could spare her a pair of his old shoes. They were sitting on the two uncomfortable wooden chairs that made up half of the sparse furnishing of his attic apartment, him on the one closer to the wall, leaning to keep his head from hitting the slanted ceiling. Though she was over frequently, he always gave her the guest’s seat- in the center of the room where the A-frame was highest. He only had two chairs up there because of her company, after all.
The attic smelled of the wooden walls (or ceiling, considering their angle) and the boxes of overstock pharmaceuticals that had to be stored up there for lack of space downstairs in the shop, but the pair had been in there long enough that they scarce noticed it, as usual. One of Verity’s leather lace-ups was lying sideways on the rug, knee-high sock discarded on the floor nearby, and she was tugging single-mindedly at the other, grunting as she did so. Her face was pinched into a frown of concentration- this shoe proving to be a much tougher adversary.
The whole scenario, the two of them alone together, even without the risque detail of a young woman’s lack of footwear, appropriate or otherwise, would have conjured, at the very least, a gasp of reproach from any self-respecting, god-fearing lady of the upper crust, but Hugh had learned long ago that to think of things in terms of what those who garbed themselves in money and disgust found acceptable, was like hitting yourself against the inside of a cage that you had built on your own. The person who had taught him that had just wrestled her other shoe off.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t kept a good grip upon it, and the ultimate yank sent it whizzing directly into Hugh’s desk, bidding his lamp and pencils a swift journey to the floor.
“See?!” Verity wiggled her toes, ignoring the mild destruction she had caused. Her feet were side by side, her knees pulled up toward her face and her hands hooked around the edge of the chair’s seat, as best to display the numerical disparity of her digits. Her expression wasn’t distraught, or horrified, necessarily- more like mildly annoyed, like one might feel upon finding a new blemish on their face before an important appearance at a dinner party- thinking ahead to the ways she might have to endeavor to hide it. Sure enough, the other foot was unaffected by whatever had suddenly deigned to give her that peculiar gift.
“I mean, you showed me the foot with the extra toe first. I didn’t think you were lying about it being only on the one side,” said Hugh, still a little shocked, but taking it in stride, as he did with most things related to Verity.
No sense trying to argue away the anomaly- there it was. Almost like it was trying to be a thumb for her right foot, sprouting off the inside edge of the ball. It seemed to him she was able to wiggle it with just as much dexterity as the others. He got up and walked over to the desk in order to right his fallen posessions.
“Yeah, well, I almost had to check to make sure another one hadn’t appeared suddenly in the time since I was last looking.” Verity moved to appraise it up close, bending her right leg so that her ankle was resting on her left thigh. “It wasn’t even like I woke up and noticed it, I swear it wasn’t there this morning! I mean, to be fair, I didn’t wake up and immediately count them-”
“What, you don’t regularly take inventory?”
“Yes ‘ha ha,’” she responded with sarcasm, “after this, maybe I’ll have to start. I knew you had to count the old sawbones’ pills, I didn’t know that responsibility extended to your body parts.”
“Oh, you know how it is.” He paused. “Wait, hold on- you’re saying it appeared partway through the day? Did one shoe suddenly become really uncomfortable or something?” The shock was wearing off. He was starting to actually pay attention to her story.
“I mean, I’m pretty well sure, as long as I’m not losing it- don’t .” Hugh closed his mouth and put his hand down. “It was more of a… slowly growing discomfort, I suppose? But yeah- I had to take my shoe off, give it a look without taking too much time, stifle whatever reaction would have been appropriate for a spare bloody toe -no it wasn’t bleeding, you know what I mean- and then get my damn shoe back on over it. You saw how hard it was to get this one off, imagine me doing the opposite while in a rush.”
He didn’t need to be prompted, the mental image was already tugging at the corners of his mouth. “How did you manage to take a look at it while on the job? For being a lady, don’t they berate you for, like, having feet at all?”
She laughed. “Feet are like opinions, Hugh. They don’t mind me having them as long as they can’t see them. And to answer your question, I had to pop into a phone booth.”
“How do you see an opinion?”
“What?” A beat, and then she rolled her eyes. “Oh, come off it, let me wax philosophical in peace.”
“Fair enough.”
Hugh stood up, careful not to bump the ceiling, and moved to close the small, if incongruously ornate window above his bed. Summer had ended, and Autumn was beginning to whine for attention by habitually dropping the temperature of the drafty little room.
The neighborhood pharmacy that he lived above and apprenticed for was, like the majority of the buildings around, a strange shape. Though it was one of the shorter structures on the street, it was still two-and-a-half stories -Hugh’s room being the “and-a-half” in question- with a silhouette like someone had grabbed the pointy top of a child’s drawing of a house and stretched it skyward, without much caring for whether they pulled straight up. The street that it sat quietly next to, curved in just such a way that the young man’s window looked out longways down the drag, and if one were to peer to the empty space not blocked by steep slopes of neighboring shingles in dull, cool colors, and little metal pipe chimneys bent at angles seemingly disadvantageous for their function, guests might be treated to a scene of commercial bustle and hustle all the way down to the next bend in the road. That is, if he were to have any guests of esteem at all. Verity didn’t count.
Hugh took a cursory glance outside before he pulled the window shut, checking to see if the neighbor’s cat was sitting in the window across the alley. It wasn’t.
“It has to be magic, right?” He left the windowsill and rocked arduously down to his knees to look under the bed. His legs were long enough that shifts in altitude were tough. “I mean, Meera had that thing with the fishes last year and your mum sees that witch doctor or whatever sometimes.”
“My aunt does. Did. Definitely not my mum. And don’t say ‘witch-doctor’ out and about, you’ll have some poor gramp in conniptions.” said Verity behind him.
“Oh, sorry, yeah, your mom would never do that, actually- I misremembered.” He tried to stop remembering the correct alternative as he dug around in the boxes under the bed frame. Verity’s mother was like a glistening steel scythe, in mind and body. Not that she was necessarily very “sharp,” as it were, just that any bit of wheat that stuck out a bit too far to the side was labeled a weed and violently harvested. “How is your aunt now, by the way?”
“Dunno, haven’t seen her since I moved out, and I barely knew what was up with her when I saw her more. I bet Da’s kept in touch, but she was always a sight too weird for the old lady to invite ‘round the old Revel.”
“I suppose you take after her, then, yeah?” He found what he was looking for as she chuckled. A old pair of shoes he hadn’t thrown out, not fitting her dapper, leather sensibilities, but good enough to hide an extra digit on a smaller foot than his. He wiped the dust off them, straightened his back, and turned around.”I always liked her stories, though- wha-”
She was leaning back, extending the leg with the new addition as far as it could go toward one shoe, the one close enough to be on the carpet. The tip of her tongue was poking out of her mouth in concentration, and the chair was suggesting that it may be inclined to fall over.
“Are you seeing if you can-”
“Seeing if I can grab things with it, yeah.”