Friend of mine went to buy a foot the other day. Left foot. He lost the original in a war, and he didn’t replace it for a while, being distracted by other things, as he says, but eventually he did replace it, first with a bamboo foot, which was a terrible foot, he says, and then with a rubber foot he made from a tyre, which was actually a pretty good foot, he says, and then with a series of wooden feet, which were pretty much worthless, he says, and finally with a series of plastic feet, which are much better than wood or rubber or maybe even the original, he says, although the fact is I hardly remember that one at all because we parted company so long ago.
But recently when he was coming down a ladder he broke his current foot, a plastic one, though he didn’t discover it was broken until he got home that night and took off his boot and half his foot fell off.
I tried to glue it back together but it was just no use, he says, so I went to the foot store.
The foot store was founded by a guy who lost his leg in a war and carved a new leg from barrel staves. At the foot store you can buy all kinds of feet. You can buy feet with or without toes. You can buy feet made from plastic or steel or wood, although most feet in the foot store are made from carbon fibres arranged in a stunning number of ways.
You can buy feet with toe and heel springs. You can buy feet with adjustable heel heights. You can buy waterproof feet. You can buy feet designed for golfing and rock-climbing and swimming and skiing and sprinting and snorkelling and scuba-diving and mall-walking and hiking and tennis, among many other things.
You can also buy ankles and knees and legs at the foot store, and there are foot stores, says my friend, where you can also buy hands and arms and elbows, but this foot store focuses on feet and has by far the best selection of feet in the city.
Most of the feet you can buy don’t look like feet at all. They look like the sort of wild modern sculptures you might see in a hip downtown gallery and when you wander in to see them more