The Guardian's Short shorts contest : To the Point
Every night, Tom lay in bed wondering if his toes spoke to each other while he was fast asleep. Stricken with cerebral palsy at birth, he was always upset about the way his limbs worked. The inability to control his body frustrated him.
At 15, Tom was brighter than most patients his age. He never stopped questioning his disabilities and often derived logic from his own reasoning.
He couldn't find any plausible explanation for his body's uncooperative reactions, other than concluding that his body parts talked to each other while he was in deep slumber, and weave conspiracy theories for battle. But to catch them directly in action would almost be impossible.
Tom took on a Holmes persona and set about devising various ways to observe his toes while he slept. He spent many sleepless nights awake, occasionally with toothpicks to keep his eyes open- dali-resque style and other times he counted crocodiles instead of sheep. Crocodiles frightened him and the thought of the scaly reptiles kept him awake the entire night.
One day, he asked his elder brother to help him set up a video camera and explained his 'mission'. Although it sounded ludicrous, Pete gladly obliged and made sure Tom's unfounded anxieties were addressed. Tom was determined to find his alter ego and get it to cooperate so that he could have better coordination.
The recordings started that night.
Days passed and Tom slept soundly. He replayed the tapes religiously every night before he went to bed and noticed nothing unusual, save the fact that he snored as loudly as his father, and sometimes he drooled.
His toes twitched occasionally, but there were no fixed intervals or patterns that implied that his toes communicated in morse code. For an entire month, Tom meticulously recorded his findings in graphs and charts before concluding that his own body was conspiring against him. He felt possessed by his own body and there was no exorcist in the world that could dispel this negative energy.
Finding himself was harder than he thought. He’d really had it. That night, he sharpened the kitchen knife to slice off all his toes; if he couldn’t fathom their secrets, he’d just have to get rid of the ‘enemy’. Recalling the documentary he watched on the Chinese’s traditional foot binding, he bound his feet tightly with cloth and crushed the bones of his toes with a heavy rock before he performed his surgery of exorcism.
Then he passed out from the excruciating pain, without toes.
