She Used To Paint Her Toenails Red
Short Story
Sahara was thinking about how she used to paint her toenails red.
She was sitting in the back of the family’s van, an old Toyota TownAce van that had been through it all. There wasn’t a part of the van that hadn’t been touched by coarse sand and lung-adverse dust. A few brightly patterned blankets covered the holes in the seats — holes born from stubbed cigarettes or the nervous fiddling with fingernails. The suspension was near-shot, which wasn’t ideal on this, her journey home. The car rattled and shook; her father muttered a curse under his breath as a pothole screeched its displeasure of having been run over. Sahara could only see the crown of her father’s head; a thick forest grew there, the greys like some invasive species slowly replacing those jet-black.
It had been an IED that had robbed her of her legs and the ten petite nails that she used to paint red. On her way to school, a patch of road suddenly heaved and erupted shrapnel and shockwave. Hours in surgery couldn’t save them, but she was “lucky.” Though with all the talk of Paradise at the mosque, Sahara thought those that died in the blast were the real lucky ones.
Again, she looked down at her stumps, and where she used to paint her toenails red. From the bandages bloomed hard metal, which resolved to imitation feet at the end. The crutches lay on the seat next to her, to be used until she got used to this new way of walking.
Her thoughts wandered and returned, like a dog to a piercing whistle, to her toenails red.
There were other colours she used to paint them, too. Turquoise, purple, pink, white. Once, she painted each toenail a different colour, so everywhere she stepped, a rainbow was planted. Now her steps were halting and a dull grey.
Her father must have looked in the mirror because he called back to her, “Don’t worry, my Angel. We have plenty of honey at home. You can have all of it, if you want.”
“Yes, Papa,” she said. She didn’t move to say more. Her father took the hint and focused on the rough road ahead.
Father and daughter bathed in silence until they pulled up to their home. A small house, it had a few extensions — like benign tumours — that grew outward from the property. A labour of love and necessity as Sahara and her siblings had grown.
Her father parked the car, hopped out, and walked around to slide open her door.
He looked at Sahara, his head haloed in the sun. “Come, Angel,” he said.
Trying not to look at her legs, at where she used to paint her toenails red, she slowly picked up her crutches and set them onto the ground beyond the open van door. She turned around and let her metal legs stick out over the empty space. One by one, with her father’s arm under her own, she stepped down onto the rocky front-yard.
Her mother appeared in the doorway as she righted herself and began moving toward the house.
A flash of fur past her mother’s shins. Adiva, their wily mutt, came bounding over to Sahara. In typical dog enthusiasm, he ran too quickly, went to place her front paws on Sahara, which toppled the two of them and sent them crashing to the ground.
Her father swore at the dog and went to go and pick Sahara up, but the dog’s licks were many, and they were welcome. For a moment — the first of many in the distancing of a tragedy — Sahara giggled uncontrollably and in the saliva-dampened bliss, she forgot about her legs, and what colour she used to paint her toenails. It all fell away to a gladness — of being alive, for her parents, her siblings, her dog, and her ten remaining fingernails.
