The Blisters

2:23 PM, July 27, Mansilla de las Mulas, 20 km from Leon, Albergue Privado

(This is a piece of short fiction I wrote this afternoon. It's unedited, but please give me feedback! It's expressive of the emotion of the moment, but none of what occurs is true. Further, I'm now back to feeling the family ties with Lida and Lisa as they are here as well, and we have sorted out our differences. Let's just say they weren't leaving me the last couple of days but instead chasing someone else...)

Matt’s little pinky toe looked like it had been on the wrong side of a knife fight in an alley in Leon. Or, perhaps, the seeming destruction on the cratered-surface of the toe was a result of a violent arson attempt by the pinky that went miserably wrong. Matt grimaced, aware that his American doctors might say nothing short of “amputate it,” and Matt went to pull away the second piece of athletic tape.

“You have no right to say that,” Lisa stammered, flustered. The accusation had made her pale complexion flood with color. “You know we care about you more than the others, Matt.”

“Then why do you chase—“ Matt’s voice had an unnatural inflection on this last syllable, as he had just lanced a new blister on his ring toe, “—the others and leave me behind?” He watched as the fluid trickled around to the front of his toe, skipping and churning and babbling on the knuckles until it found a suitable canal to use to escape his foot. As Matt’s question hung on the air, a single droplet hung from the side of his foot at the end of a glistening trail.

“We told them we would meet—“ Lida began.

“But you told me the night before and didn’t keep that promise to me!” When Matt jerked forward to issue this interruption, the impulse carried down to his left foot and the last droplet made one additional dark spot on the blue sheets.

A collective silence fell like a wool blanket over the three, soft and heavy.

Matt pulled back the tape on his heel to expose the last blister, a behemoth plateau found in the tattoo garden, that lovely little bowl on the side of the heel where women get inked with daisies and roses. He brought the Swiss Army scissors to the ballooned skin and slowly cut a V into the base of the blister.

Alas, the floodgates had opened. Fluid gushed from the broken dam, smearing across the base of Matt’s foot.

And Matt broke the silence: “Maybe next time you tell a friend you’ll meet him, you’ll meet him on that night and also not abandon him on the next.”

With that, Matt seized the tape and ointment, got to his feet, and hobbled down the corridor toward the garden, leaving in his wake a trail of small pools of nectar.