Unshod, Cackling, and Naked Excerpt
I did it for you
She decided terror was more productive than revenge.
She purchased an eyelash curler, and outfitted the plates with filed-to-size, high-carbon, stainless-steel knife blades powerful enough to slice through bone.
She’d always loved eyelash curlers because they provided the satisfaction of a scissor snip, had the air of medical tools, and, with the slight risk of capturing the entire lid during the curling, were mildly terrifying.
After several trips to the hardware store, she found just the right tension spring to add to the lever, so she could squeeze and cleave with ease. Her creation made her quite pleased.
As she sharpened the blades, she thought of him, his palm squeezing her throat, his moist breath in her ear. She wouldn’t give up hunting him, but until then, she’d collect.
The rules for her collection were as follows:
She would only target men who were creeps to begin with—catcallers, whistlers, harassers, butt-cheek pinchers.
She’d never approach her victim. She’d wait for him to make the first move.
She’d strike during the witching hour, when everyone could say the guy really shouldn’t have been in the prostitute section of town to begin with.
She’d never accept money from them.
She’d only collect when the men were unclothed, in bed, and fast asleep.
She’d disinfect the amputation site with seventy percent rubbing alcohol before slicing, and she’d take care to line up the blades so she’d increase the odds of clearing the bone.
She wouldn’t be greedy. She’d collect the baby toe, and only the distal phalanx or tip.
Her rules were designed to debase, to transform offenders into victims, but also to keep the focus on the toe-loss and not on any infection nor need for further amputation, thereby maximizing victim-blaming, so they could experience what that was like.
It helped that the men were usually inebriated when they first shouted, “Hey, sweet thang,” or “You wanna have a little fun?” And if they weren’t, she had just the product in her purse to knock them out, either in pill form or a tasteless liquid slipped into their drink.
Her fleshy trophies included all skin colors and varying sizes. Some stubby, others narrow. One guy had no toenails. If she could feel anything for them, that one would have elicited some guilt.
She photographed the toes before throwing them in the flames of her fireplace, but she kept the images on her camera’s digital card, and not on her phone nor in the cloud.
Two is a coincidence and three is a trend, so on the third victim, the local news station led with the story on its ten p.m. broadcast and spent most of its time warning men to be on the lookout for a sex worker with an eyelash curler. She laughed so hard she spilled half a glass of pinot noir and stained her couch. That’s specific, clowns.
On the eighth victim, the newspaper referred to her as the “Digit Gatherer,” and that name annoyed her. First off, “gatherer” sounded pleasant, as if she were out rounding up daisies. She wanted men to feel the same terror she’d experienced, to undergo the pain they so mercilessly inflicted, because it was possible for a man, even a creep, to go his entire life without ever being threatened.
Second, the moniker bothered her because the news media were always trying to sound so clever when they could just be direct. “Digit” was too broad a term. She wasn’t collecting fingers. Nor was she accumulating big toes, for instance. Why not just call her “The Pinky Toe Bandit” or “Baby Toe Collector?” Actually, those might have been worse. Maybe she could live with “Digit Gatherer.”
One social media user commented, “The victims should be happy she chose toes and not dicks.” Good point.
She’d not chosen to lob off their penises because she knew how coveted those instruments were in American society; she imagined the police would have used more of its resources to hunt her down if she were collecting those particular organs.
She’d selected the tip of the smallest toe to ensure a private shame. A shame others couldn’t see when they asked “how’s it going?” She wanted them to have a hidden-away truth they would need to explain before undressing for future lovers or for doctors performing an exam. Something missing they’d have to acknowledge each morning when they woke and rose from bed.
Her tenth victim was the problem. He asked, “Can I give you a ride?” and his voice was familiar, made her shiver, but she put the memory out of her mind. It was a generic enough pick-up line for the street she walked down; she let it go.
She got in, and the cracked leather seat squeaked as it poked against the flesh on the backs of her thighs.
He wore a black baseball cap, and a mustache and beard so thick and crooked they had to have been purchased at a costume shop. Smooth jazz saxophone-playing filled the car, and the air smelled of whiskey and cocoa butter.
Crumpled-up burger and fry wrappers littered the floor beneath her heels, and, in need of a tune-up, the car belched out the stench of burnt wires. It chugged down the street as if it had been shot and would soon die.
“I know a place,” he whispered, steering his lemon around the block as if they’d agreed on where to go.
She’d been in this car before. With him. And when he pulled into the motel’s parking stall, she realized what luck she’d happened upon. Giddy with adrenaline, she could envision the weapon nestled in the crushed-velvet drawstring pouch in her purse. If it could speak to her, it would say, Girl, this is it!
In the room, sitting in a stained fabric chair near the door, she told him she had something “fun” for him and retrieved a white pill from her bag.
“This will make you forget all your troubles.”
He threw it to the back of his throat, not waiting for her to fill a cup from the bathroom sink. Perhaps he’d noticed the clumps of blonde hair clogging the drain, the stench of bleach and urine, the black ring in the tub.
She stalled by getting him to talk—about his estranged wife who had absconded to Toronto with their savings and his six-month-old pug, his dream vacation to Niagara Falls, the ‘97 Ford Mustang he was fixing up. And when he’d talked himself to sleep, she returned to her bag, remembering the first time they’d met. How he’d been between shifts on his beat work. How when she wouldn’t say “yes” to his demands, he’d handcuffed her, and, an hour later, dropped her back off on the corner, un-handcuffed, but with bruises where the metal had been. The rumpled fabric of her skirt had hidden the lacerations.
“A hooker can’t win a case against a peace officer,” he’d told her, with no sense of irony about his use of the word “peace.”
“I wait tables at the diner on that street. Is that what this is? You thought I was...you go after sex workers?”
She’d thought of Maggie, with the scar across her eyebrow, who always showed off pictures of her Kindergartener. Maggie was saving cash to send her son to Catholic school so he wouldn’t have to attend where he was zoned. “I don’t want him going through a metal detector to learn.”
She’d thought of “Hip Hop,” who chain-smoked Virginia Slims and had dreams of turning her poems into money-making rhymes for local rap artists. “Poetry. Rap. Spoken word. Shakespeare. All the same,” the raspy-voiced woman had said.
Maggie had given her a switchblade. Hip Hop had armed her with pepper spray. Was it because he’d done this to them as well?
“You say you only wait tables? Well, stop wearing low-cut tops.”
That’s what he’d said back then before driving off and spraying her shins with muddy rainwater that had pooled against the curb.
But now, she removed her palm-sized weapon from the same purse that held her pills, slipped his baby toe inside, and as she was about to squeeze the tool, she felt cold steel against her forehead, just above her right brow.
“Drop it.” He spat the pill into her face. It rolled onto the mattress between them, and his warm spittle slid down her cheek.
Her heart should have been racing. She should have begun sweating. Her breaths should have quickened until she was lightheaded, but she felt nothing. And she wouldn’t let it go—neither his toe nor what he’d done to her. He wasn’t going to win. He’d have to kill her if he wanted to keep the digit.
“Do you know who I am?”
“I know exactly who you are, and what you’ve been doing to men who—”
“You really don’t remember me?”
“I said ‘drop it.’” He removed the fake hair, revealing a chiseled face, pursed lips, and a tight jaw.
“Shoot me.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“How much do you love your toe?” She dug the blades against his flesh hard enough to prick it and draw blood.
“How much do you love your life?” He pressed the barrel deeper into the skin on her forehead.
“You mean the life you took from me?” She waited until recognition welled up in his eyes. “You think losing a toe would be bad? How about losing your will to live? Having someone extinguish it like the flame of a candle.”
Satisfied when he opened his mouth but couldn’t speak, she squeezed with every drop of rage flowing through her, feeling the digit pop between the blades and warm blood squirt onto her chin where it oozed down to her breasts and into her shirt—the same low-cut top she’d worn before.
He screamed, and the gunshot intended for her head hit the ceiling. With her weapon and his toe in her blood-soaked hand, she grabbed her bag and shoes and ran for the door. She took a bullet to the back of her right shoulder, stumbled into the hall, and plummeted down the stairs. The shot felt like a sucker punch of fire that knocked the wind from her chest.
She stood, but, off-balance, she careened, blasted through the double entry doors, tumbled outside, and collapsed onto the street, where she was met with the click of multiple stiletto heels rushing toward her.
“Honey, oh my God.” That high-pitched voice belonged to Maggie. “Oh-my-god-oh-my-god-oh-my-god. Don’t move, honey.”
“I’m calling nine-one-one,” said another voice, sounding scarred by a lifetime of cigarette smoking. That was Hip Hop.
She was comforted that Maggie and Hip Hop and a gang of their fellow workers were near...like if Severed-Toe Cop managed to limp out of the room and come after her, they’d all protect her.
But she wouldn’t allow these women to fuss over her. She rose. Maggie and Hip Hop exchanged a glance, and their frightened faces made her love them.
Raising the arm on the uninjured side of her body, she waved her weapon in the air, saluting their mini-skirts, courage, tank tops, perseverance, red-sequined, four-inch pumps, and compassion.
The night grew darker and the ground seemed to spin under her. She turned and trudged off. Was she fainting or dying? She wasn’t sure which, but as the pain in her shoulder went from a ten to a thirty on her imagined discomfort chart, she’d put her money on “dying.”
“Reisha, honey, you’ve been shot. Everybody heard it. You need a doctor.” Maggie tried to run, but, in her six-inch pointed heels she didn’t get far. She kicked them off, sunk several inches on her bare feet, and tried to close the gap.
Reisha rounded the corner. Blood oozed down her arm as if the bullet had opened a faucet from her body. She glanced over her wounded shoulder and shouted between ragged breaths, “I did it for you.”
“You did what, honey? Please, stop.” Hip Hop reached forward but only caught air. Reisha retreated just long enough to give Hip Hop what was in her hand.
“I did it for us all.”
Hip Hop took the deadly curler, the severed toe the size of a large cashew, and showed them to Maggie, who immediately screamed.
“Reisha, honey,” Maggie was sobbing. “Oh my God. You should have told us, honey. Because this…this isn’t the way.”
Reisha crumpled in the middle of the street. “It’s my way.” Surrounded by a throng of multicolored pumps, she became fixated on the vast array before her. Cerulean, fuchsia, fire engine red. They were all so beautiful. Could even serve as weapons. She wished she’d have done it differently. Heels. If she survived the night, which she was almost certain now she wouldn’t, she’d get her next victims with the pointed heel of her shoes. Lodge them right in their eyes. They’d have a visible injury. She could be the Stiletto Stalker. Just as men winced at the sight of eyelash curlers, high heels would make them nauseated with fear. Did people even realize stiletto was a synonym for dagger? Well, they would after she was finished with them. And then, she will have won. They’d think twice any time they saw a woman in heels. Yes. Trepidation. She’d consider that a victory.
About the Author
Tamika Thompson is a writer, producer, and journalist. She is the author of Unshod, Cackling, and Naked (Unnerving Books, 2023) and Salamander Justice (Madness Heart Press, 2022). She is co-creator of the artist collective POC United and fiction editor for the group’s award-winning anthology, Graffiti.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in several speculative fiction anthologies as well as in Interzone, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Thompson also has producing credits at Clear Channel Media and Entertainment, as well as with NBC and ABC News.
She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Columbia University and a Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Southern California. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her online at www.tamikathompson.com.
About the Book
A beauty pageant veteran appeases her mother by competing for one final crown, only to find herself trapped in a hand-sewn gown that cuts into her flesh. A journalist falls deeply in love with a mysterious woman but discovers his beloved can vanish and reappear hours later in the same spot, as if no time has passed at all. A cash-strapped college student agrees to work in a shop window as a mannequin but quickly learns she’s not free to break her pose. And what happens when the family pet decides it no longer wants to have “owners?”
In the grim and often horrific thirteen tales collected here, beauty is violent, and love and hate are the same feeling, laid bare by unbridled obsession. Entering worlds both strange and quotidian, and spanning horror landscapes both speculative and real, Unshod, Cackling, and Naked asks who among us is worthy of love and who deserves to die?
Horror / Published by Unnerving Books, 26 January 2023
