The Queen of Toes (Alex Taylor)

-an excerpt

MY BOY BROUGHT ME A TOE the other day. IT was a big one. I was sitting on the back porch killing about my fifth Blue Ribbon when he came running through the tall grass behind our house, holding this great big, door-stopper toe out for me. I was sure glad to see it. I'd just come home from the car-lot and was feeling pretty rough, but the toe made my day. 
"Look here, Dad. What do you think about this?" my boy asked me.
"Goddammit, it's a fucking toe!" I said.
I snatched it from him and held it close to my face. The skin was flaky and gray, but it was fine toe, the nail painted a kind of flowery lavender, and the cut had been clean so that I could see the little ring of bone gleaming like a diamond down in the meat. 
My boy went nearly comatose with joy. He did a twirl and fell back in the grass. 
"Goddammit, it's a toe!" he kept chanting.
But it really wasn't that unusual. I knew my boy had been playing beside the highway, down in the alfalfa field where the medical waste truck had wrecked the day before, so the toe wasn't a giant surprise. Men in bright blue rubber suits had spent all of the night clearing body parts out of the grass. When the truck jackknifed, it flung arms and amputated legs and syringes and old rusty bedpans flying all over the place, piling plastic bags full of blood and teeth in the haygrass, so it was no wonder the cleanup crew had missed this toe, what with all the tubing and bones they had to worry with. So the toe wasn't a great big deal or anything.
Except it was for me. I've kind of got a thing for toes. I see them in my dreams. Rows of pearly toes with painted nails and cotton swabs shoved down between them. You wouldn't think it to look at me because my hair is usually combed and I look put together most of the time, but I'm one of those lousy weirdoes, the kind of guy who can't do a damn thing for a woman unless she's got a real set below both ankles. I tried to make it once with a girl who had an ingrown toenail on her little piggy, but it was more than I could stand. All the hair and thighs and wetness don't mean diddle to me without proper foot hygiene. The minute I saw Donna, my current wife, wearing sandals, I knew I'd marry her. At the time, I was trying hard to get over my first marriage which had gone way south in a hurry, and I was at this community lake lapping beers at sun up, trying not to think about my first wife and how she'd left me out of the blue with this strange boy to raise, when here came Donna wearing her leather-strap sandals with her dimpled toes lined up like hors d'oeuvres. She doesn't have a clue this is why I love her. She thinks it has something to do with the way she fixes sweet potato casserole or how she's always waking me up in the middle of the night and putting her hands on the right places, but you could throw all of that out the window and I wouldn't leave her. It's all about the toes for me.
"Hey, Pop. What do you think about your new toe?" my boy asked.