worth 1000 words

Big feet. Yep. That is the subject of this week’s episode. I loved the style of the art, the comedic implications, so here we are.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Oliver Ryan

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Vg4Zmb

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Martin had never punched someone, let alone knocked them out. Well, the edge of the wash basin had technically knocked him out.

Martin’s hands tremored, looking down at Dr. Forsythe, the man he was to become. He carefully undressed him, the dead weight of the doctor making him sweat and his heart flutter every time footsteps sounded down the corridor behind the thinnest of doors. Mere inches from discovery between him and–

“Pshhhh.” The doctor’s breath expelling from stuck-together lips.

Martin reclined on the floor, having fallen. His tailbone throbbed to the beat of blacksmith’s hammer. He scrambled to undress the doctor, then dress himself. The button on the trousers was a battle won by his ample belly. The sucking-in reinforcements called showed a pathetic assault, so he hoped his belt would do.

Donning the coat was the last of his duties, and he was grateful it concealed the unfitting mess beneath. After pushing the doctor under a gurney he checked himself in the mirror. Face full of white highlights from the sweat, hair an untamable mess of curls and grease, but the mustache, it was perfect. The one detail he hadn’t looked over. Dr. Forsythe had a prominent one, and to his luck, they were fruit grown from neighboring genetic branches.

Martin scuttled into the cooridor, head down, using the floorboords as a guide.

“Doctor?” The soft voice of a woman hit like a brick.

Caught. All this planning for nothing. He rubbed his wrists, preparing them for shackles, clenched his buttocks preparing them for prison.

“Your shoes,” the woman said.

His feet, pale, knobby, and bare, flattened on the oiled wood. He curled his toes. Disgusting.

“My mistake,” he said. “Inexcusable presentation. Forgive me.”

He looked up to a blushing nurse. She turned away when their eyes met. He tasted something foul.

“Let me fetch them for you,” she said.

Forsythe unconsious, maybe dead, is what she would find.

“No,” he said.

She withered.

“You have much to do,” he said. “Much more important business.”

She blinked back her composure, nodded like a simple dog, and swayed child-bearing hips in the opposite direction. Martin returned to the room and retrieved Forsythe’s shoes, having left his outside in order to quietly sneak into the hospital. They fit better than the trousers. He left Forsythe’s socks on him, the contour of his feet indication enough they would be as hideous as the man’s face.

Clacking down the cooridor, Martin held his head high, shoulders back, smoothing his mustache every step of the way to the door of the surgical theater.

A cyclical, layered beauty it was. Any view would suffice. He was late, purposefully, hoping the others would be glued in anticipation to the discovery, for he knew he’d have been.

He opened the door with brazen conviction. It was hard as hell. But it worked. The theater viewers, though less numerous that he had imagined, were hypnotized, most on the upper levels as if what lay below might be an explosive, or something worse.

Martin entered the first level, joined by only one other, who slouched on the rail, disinterested. Two surgeons joined the body at the center, on the same side of the gurney, one with rolled sleeves, ready to dig in. Dig. What an unfathomably unworthy man. Martin bristled, then calmed himself by grooming his mustache. Must. Fit. In.

The sheet was draped over the body like fresh snow. Two massive, majestic, magical peaks standing at symmetrical attention at the foot of the gurney. Martin giggled. The fellow near him cleared his throat but did not bother turning.

A hushed conversation between the two surgeons on the floor commenced, their hands placed firmly at the sheet’s edge. It must be as soft as the skin of a babe’s, the thread count impossible to distinguish, even that close. Martin was sure of it. He caressed his own coat, imagining. It was coarse and thick and nothing at all what those two men had the honor of placing their hands on.

Seconds felt like hours, like years, like eons. When, when, when would they do what needed to be done? Unleash the glory of what all knew was underneath yet eager to finally see.

Do it, do it, do it. His lips slid over teeth, mouthing his thoughts, tongue and gums secreting far too much. He slurped it down to another throat clearning of the man next to him, who finally did give him a half turn and an disgusted stare.

The surgeon closest to the spectacle finally moved after a nod from the other. He flexed his fingers. Knuckles popped, reverberating throughout the theater, throughout Martin’s guts, to his mind that was fit to burst.

Slowly, so painfully slow, the surgeon pulled the sheet away. It went taut, and Martin’s breath held. What a tease this was. His entire epidermis excreted a cold dampness.

The surgeon released the snag, and like wet, white paint, the sheet slid down the five-toed peaks, clung to the fuller between the tendons as if forged, flowed past ankles, and a sock line of frizzed down.

Martin forced his hands to his sides, the claws they had become splitting a nail on the polished wood before him. No words, no thoughts, only feelings consumed Martin, reborn into a mere observer of the twin monoliths that could not be of this world.

The surgeon with the rolled sleeves turned to the audience of one that was Martin.

“Dr. Forsythe,” he said. “Tell me, what would the esteemed intellect of one as yourself diagnose this poor soul with?”

Martin waddled to the side on stiff legs, the surgeon blocking his view. An elbow from the disinteresed man made him recoil, so he stretched his neck, vertebrae snapping. The tip of one toe is what he saw, a flesh-colored ripe apple.

“Doctor?” The surgeon again.

Saliva broke the dam of his teeth, pouring in a gush of fluid mixed with words that simply said, “Big . . . feet.”