Tying teaspoons to my toes

You don’t need to live in the desert to punish yourself. You don’t need to wear spiky underpants…

But punishing yourself can make the pain in your heart okay to live with. After I killed my Granny by accident, I could not watch Tennis on TV with my mom anymore. The sounds they made sounded like the sounds of some of those only fan videos that Dad, real Dad, used to watch, and if only Popsie did not have to put up fans everywhere, Granny would not have had to come and live with us, and I would not have had to kill her by accident.

Granny in the passage, and Granny in the bath, and Granny facedown on the bed, and me with a basket of red wet wool became a painting in my head that I could not stop looking at and so I decided to start tying teaspoons to my toes. If you walk up the passage barefoot with teaspoons tied to your toes, the ability to be super silent and sneaky becomes a thing of the past. With teaspoons tied to your toes, you could not climb up the walls in the passage anymore.

Now, you would always hear me coming. You’d never get a fright from me.

I held the teaspoons on with string and little elastics – one teaspoon per toe, and this made it very difficult to put your shoes on. “And what is the point of putting on shoes while you have teaspoons tied to your toes?” you may ask, “surely the shoes dampen the sound?” and yes they do! But they also rampen the pain and while you walk quieter when you put on shoes over your toes with the teaspoons, you walk much slower, much much slower. Forcing your feet, toes, teaspoons and all into shoes was very difficult and very painful and walking made it worse.

To walk, you had to bite your tongue and make your hands into tight little balls; you had to move with your mind the pain from your feet – from your pigglywigglies to Mrs Palmer and her five lovely daughters as real dad called your hands. But it was possible to walk, and if you did it slow enough hardly anyone noticied anything was really wrong. I walked as little as possible, and when I did, I toddled and I didn’t speak much so nothing sounded wrong, although I still used the important words like “Please” and “Thank you”.

I started getting headaches again, and my eye whites turned pink, and it was hard to see, and everyone sounded like they were underwater like I was in every episode of “The Man from Atlantis” I loved that programme. – he could change his hands and feet whenever he was in the water. Bath times were the only time I took the teaspoons off – after bath time, I put on my Jimjams and then my football boots. Football boots and teaspoons hurt the most, and I hardly ever slept, but this was okay because that way, I could not dream of Granny in the passage and Granny in the bath where she would talk to me and tell me things. I don’t remember much for a few years after I accidentally killed my Granny by accident.