The Armrest
Something warm brushed my elbow.
I was four hours into a packed flight from Boston to Seattle. Middle seat. Row 23. Somewhere over Montana. I’d been half-asleep with my head tipped back and my arm resting on the armrest, trying to forget that I still had two more hours of this.
Then I felt it.
Warm. Soft. A little damp.
I looked down.
Five bare toes were resting on my armrest.
Right next to my elbow. Close enough that if I’d moved my arm an inch, I’d have been touching them.
For a second, I honestly thought I was imagining it. I blinked. I looked again.
Still there. Five toes. A big one with a ridge down the nail. A little one curled under the others like it was hiding. A tan line where a sandal strap had been.
Then the smell hit me.
I don’t know how to describe it except to say that it was the smell of a foot that had been inside an expensive leather shoe for a long time, in a hot airport, without a sock.
It was sour. And warm. And somehow also a little bit like cheese.
The woman in the window seat next to me, an older woman with silver braids and reading glasses on a beaded chain, wrinkled her nose. She looked at the foot. She looked at me.
“Is that,” she whispered, “what I think it is?”
“I think so,” I whispered back.
I turned around in my seat.
