Kale Hensley

I RECKON WITH MY FEET

The first time a girl witnesses her toes in the mouth of another, she would not have anticipated it happening during a game at church. It is complicated. I use that word in its oldest sense: entangled, combined, intertwined. Not tongue in cheek. No, big toe carving into the soft pink. I stood on a blue tarp—the brightest one you could imagine—so creased and dry. I stood in a line with other children who were picked to participate in the game. They challenged us to make an icecream sundae with our feet. If you have attended church camp, you are familiar with these disgusting antics. There is always a hint of the grotesque in children’s games: ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

The organizers of the event had already filled the bowl with icecream. My responsibility was to arrange the toppings with my toes. Using my big toe and less so special second toe, I clipped the banana in half, picked out cherries close to bursting. Do not ask me how I put the chocolate syrup in the bowl. Were there small bowls with spoons that I had to wield? All I can recall it that I finished the sundae and dashed, feet covered in chocolate, to my partner seated at the table.

With the sundae in front of them, they supped. Ate what I had made to the audience’s amusement and disgust. I recall one young man running toward a large trash can, one that you would see in a school cafeteria, and hurling up his lunch. The first team to finish would receive a prize most coveted: an iTunes giftcard, a plastic ticket to music paradise. Not to my surprise, my team was the first to finish, but the game did not end there.

I was a teenager when I realized some sects of Christianity believed in raw transmutation. They did not hold a tasteless wafer and Kroger grape juice in their hands; no, this was truly the body and blood. This surprised me as the faith of Pentecostals could surely will such a transformation. After all, we believed in lying with the spirit, feeling it sink into our bones until a marathon could be run, the arrival of a different tongue in our mouths, a message could be conceived in such mayhem. My cheek became intimately familiar with the green Church of God carpet; the gum-stuck, wax-touched, tear-strung carpet. How easy it is to lower oneself.

They chose volunteers from the crowd. My partner was the young man who had thrown up his lunch. He had a biblical name, of course, one that meant miracle. The man in charge, balding and bellied, gave our partners a single challenge, to suck the chocolate clean off of our toes. Did I feel horror or shock? Curiosity? Pleasure? I retain to this day an image of that young man, Miracle’s golden hair and the memory of lips closing around my pinky toe, propped up on his elbows. How warm my cheeks were. We did not win the gift card, that I know for sure. I would illegally torrent a Casting Crowns album months later and get my family’s internet shut off.

Could the grotesque appear as a need for penitence? On the pastel pink and blue tiles of the church kitchen, colored like those chalky Easter mints, we consumed decadent concoctions. These were lock-ins (meant to be pray-ins) but in adolescence, you want to talk to boys, not God. Around a blender we would stand, dropping in ingredients without relent: ketchup, candy, whatever was available in the church pantry. Gross was our brand of charity. The chunky scarlet celebration turned in serrated circles—of course it was red, it had to be. Now, drink. God was watching, teased the other kids. You had to drink. Drinking became a way of knowing.

It was the same for Margareta. She lived long before me: cross kisser, a sister-disser. Mystics talked shit like it was a requirement. She was upset. I wish I could tell you that she knelt on tiles or carpet or what her knees looked like. What is known is that she wept. She wanted to kiss it: that large cross that hung in the sanctuary, but she could not reach it. So Christ came to her in a dream and bared his breast. Drink, he said. And she drank till she was blood drunk. We put our mouths on wounds to seal them. Could it be that Margareta was healing him while he was nourishing her?

I think the same of my cut finger mingling with my tongue. I prefer my verbs to have a color. Wondering is a red string. If you do the right movements, you can make a ladder. Use a pointer finger to pick up the strings from each palm. Drop the pinkies. Drop the thumbs. Keep picking up strings. This next part is tricky. Don’t pull too tight. A little tension is good; you don’t want too much. Your hands will have to pass through these small shapes. You will need to turn your hands away from you to see it: the ladder from which God and his angels will descend and ascend. A ladder made by your hands. Touching, healing, and writing: little girl, they’re all red.

KALE HENSLEY is a West Virginian by birth and a poet by faith. You can keep up with them at kalehens.com,