The Geranium Girls Read Online Free Page A

he asked Beryl.
    “On my foot again, the right one,” she said, and showed him the spot.
    He removed her sandal and placed it on the floor.
    “I’d like to try something now, but only with your permission,” he said.
    “Yes? What?” Beryl asked. “What do you have in mind?”
    “I’d like to suck the poison from your foot as best I can, to try to minimize the reaction that way. It sometimes works for snake bites so I think it might be worth a try,” he explained.
    “Well…if you think it’s worth a try, by all means,” Beryl said. “Are you sure you want to?” She looked at her foot.
    “Yes, quite sure.”
    And then his mouth was on her instep drawing out the poison. He spit once onto the floor.
    “Sorry for spitting,” he said. “I’ll clean it up after.”
    The elderly couple observed with interest. A few other people had gathered by now and they watched as the pharmacist fastened his lips once more onto the soft inside of Beryl’s foot. He sucked hard for all he was worth and spit again.
    “I can taste it!”
    He sucked till he couldn’t taste it anymore.
    Beryl felt relaxed. She wanted to close her eyes against the small gaping group, and lie against the chest of this odd man who had so willingly taken her foot into his mouth.
    He returned her foot to her.
    “Thank you,” she whispered.
    “I hope it helps.”
    She held her foot up in front of her and liked what she saw. Beryl thought of her feet as her best feature, though she had learned to keep that point of pride to herself. When she was a teenager she had mentioned it to a boyfriend once and he had said, “Nobody has nice feet.”
    It had hurt her feelings, but hadn’t stopped her from admiring her own feet. If she was having a bad day, one of those days when she hated her face and her life and all the things she had done, and more things that she hadn’t done, her feet sometimes helped — just the sight of them.
    “You have beautiful feet,” Dhani said quietly, so no one but Beryl could hear.
    “Thank you,” she replied.
    “The show’s over, folks.” He spoke loudly now and the crowd loosened up a bit. A disappointment to those who arrived too late to see what the excitement was about.
    “It’s still going to hurt.” He helped Beryl to stand up. “But I’ll bet it won’t hurt as much. Come and sit behind the counter with me for a few minutes and we’ll talk about pain.”
    She obeyed. She wanted very badly to talk about pain with this man. What could be better! She followed as he toddled along. He had a peculiar way of walking, a bit Chaplinesque, Beryl decided. He leaned backwards, as though to keep himself from falling forwards, but almost to the point of tipping from overcorrection.
    “Careful,” she felt like saying, but didn’t.
    She sat on a chair and Dhani sat across from her on a stool. Two other pharmacists or pharmacists’ helpers bustled about behind the counter. They smiled at Beryl and didn’t seem to think she was out of place. Perhaps Dhani made a habit of acts such as these.
    “Okay, so pain?” Dhani said.
    Beryl felt again the hard round bone of the mushroom girl pressing into the arch of her other foot, the left one. A duller, achier pain than the sharp sting of the wasp.
    “I came to think of it differently,” he said, “before I had my toes done.”
    Ah, Beryl thought. So there’s something wrong with his feet.
    “Yes,” Dhani said and Beryl tried to figure out from the way her mouth felt if she had spoken aloud. No, she was sure she hadn’t.
    “I had rheumatoid arthritis in my toes,” he went on. “It was so bad there was nothing to do but chop them off.”
    Beryl let out a little gasp.
    Dhani held up one of his own feet.
    “There are special slippers inside my shoes, with toes built in. False toes all in a clump. A malleable clump so it doesn’t hurt my stumps.
    “Anyway,” he continued, “the business with my toes was the worst pain I ever had. Not so much after they were lopped