Footglass

It’s early. Pre-dawn. Before pulling on his trainers he trims his nails, feet and hands. He sniffs at the ends of his fingers. A strange smell – old, decaying. Nails are dead tissue. He washes his hands thoroughly. Time to feed life and energy into the system. He’s running before he’s out of the house it seems. Down this side of the gorge then up through the woods to Oakwood. No longer training. This is an expression of who he is. He is simply being. Full of energy and power. The world is his. He criss-crosses through the steep paths up the bank. He’s aroused by this. He drops beside a tree and relieves himself of that particular tension. Then continues.
Up through the desirable housing estate and out onto the open grassland. He removes his trainers and leaves them by a tree. Running barefoot toughens the feet and puts you in touch with the earth. There’s something empowering about it. The lack of support to the ankles. The riskiness of leaving your trainers somewhere. But there’s no one on these playing fields. Here in Oakwood, it’s safe.
Mark’s finishing his running now. He’s slowing to a walk. The long walk home is a cool-down, part of the session. He stops, stretches. His foot is wounded. Must have trodden on something. Something in the grass has cut him. He didn’t feel it at the time – the feet doing their work so well a little nick couldn’t interrupt the flow. The sensory impact of footfalls on grass masking this incision. But as he puts his shoes on and walks home, the foot begins to hurt.
Down through the woods again. He needs to poo. It’s urgent in a way that can often happen when he runs – as if he’s sped up his metabolism by running, used up that ration of fuel and is now ready to expel the waste. He finds a small clearing beneath the shade of a bush. A leaf takes care of the wiping part.
After showering, Mark looks again at the foot. It’s too painful to be just a cut. Must be something in it. He takes a pin, sterilises it in flame and proceeds to probe the wound. There are so many feelings here. The reluctance to hurt oneself. Probing the raw flesh – nothing there. The tough outer layer that you can tug at without pain. And there – a raw grating feeling. It’s almost as if he hears it. He feels it with the foot and with the thumb and finger through the pin. A foreign body in his body. Now to tease, to pry and to dig it out. Every pressure to the piece (of glass, is it?) brings pain as the sharp edges cut through fibres. He’s squeezing the wound with one hand so that it gaps open, gapes open to reveal the alien thing. But the shard of glass is invisible, a red fleck unseen within the red wound. He digs and teases and pulls the flake of glass out. Tiny. He searches the wound again. This time the pin finds nothing that is not him.
Now Mark cleans the wound. Pleased with his keyhole surgery. The foot is sore from all the manipulation. But now it will heal.
Mark is sterilising a Stanley-knife blade now. Taken from his father’s toolbox. Plenty of spare blades always. He’s cutting into the palm of his right hand. There where a slug of pencil graphite still lodges. This is not so easy. This thing has had time to become part of him. It’s not lying in a cut, it’s bedded in to tissue. But he cuts deep. Much blood. The pin levers the lead out. And there’s another raw wound; and a sense of health and wholeness.
Why does he feel this way? He records some thoughts:

Why am I like this? I am not real. Why am I gouging away at this old wound? My parents made me, somehow. I need to dig this out of the hurt. I am something put in there. I am artificial. I have always known this. Nothing bad has ever happened, but this always already made me incapable of being - a human - being. I know it’s true. I’ve seen a seam. A ragged line along the base of my penis. I seem to have a ragged seam at my root. A scar at the base of the middle of myself. That is where they inserted “me” into this shell. A self pulled off a shelf. That’s why I am selfish. Shell/fish. I am a changeling. I am an alien. I am the other. I’m not myself today. I’m not feeling myself at the moment. I am an android. That’s why I don’t love them and that’s why they don’t love me.