Issue 4

When I got my first period Mom sat me down, pulled my feet onto her lap, and squeezed my heels.

‘They’re bumpy,’ she said, ‘but I think you’re okay. The hooves come in at puberty for women in your dad’s family, but it seems to skip a generation, so keep that in mind if you someday have kids.’

She said it happened to Dad’s sister Reb, back when she was 11 years old and living in another city. One day, shortly after her class had finished studying animals from around the world, she took off her shoes in the gym change room and a so-called friend saw her hooves. The kids then nicknamed her Gazelle, not just because of the hooves but because her feet always moved so fast, at …well, gazelle speed … and her hair was always held in perfect place with a couple of hornlike clips. The name stuck until her family moved. I sympathised with Aunty Reb, she couldn’t help who she was, but I sure didn’t want to be treated the way she’d been, so I never to let anyone see my bumpy bare feet.

Everyone was surprised when Aunty Reb married slow moving Uncle Freddy, though there was talk that he’d inherit a bundle from an elderly relative. Aunty rarely slowed down, always seemed to outdo everyone by leaps and bounds: her laundry pegged to the backyard clothes line before anyone else’s on a Monday morning, her shopping piled at the grocery store checkout fifteen minutes after the doors opened on discount day, her kids waiting on the school step at 8:30am on weekdays before the others arrived.

I was curious to see Aunty Reb’s feet without shoes so I often hid in the grass, avoiding the bunches of nettles she encouraged along the edge of her garden, peeping through the picket fence. One day I got what I’d been waiting for as she strolled past, stroking the nettles and sighing deeply before kicking off her runners and wiggling her feet in the damp earth. I was surprised to see that they were solid and powerful, not at all delicate like a gazelle’s. She stabbed a three-pronged pitchfork into the earth and shoved it deep with one cloven foot. Over and over until her face was red. When she stepped back, I swear I saw the tip of an arrow-point tail poking out from one leg of her vermilion sweatpants. I could smell her sweat—the rich scent of sulphur—and I realised she wasn’t digging potatoes. She was digging a hole.

Not long afterwards, Uncle Freddy disappeared and rumours whirled about town. He had enough, couldn’t keep up with that perfect wife. He had an affair and ran off with some floozy. He had dementia and wandered away.

I never told anyone about the hole in Aunty’s garden, not even after he was gone seven years and she went through the process to have him declared dead, just like I’ve never told Mom that I know for sure that hooves don’t always skip a generation.