Excerpt from Honeydew by Edith Pearlman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"…White."

She moved to the back of the room and a refrigerator door opened and closed. She put a goblet of wine on the table next to the socks. "You can recline further. Just push the little button on the side of the arm." He reclined further. A ledge rose with his bare feet on it. She dragged over her stool and sat down. He covered his erection with The Later Roman Empire. She rolled up each leg of his jeans to the middle of the calf.
Then she contemplated her new customers. "Have they ever had a pedicure?"
"Nope. Ten little virgins."
"Some men find the process effeminizing."
"Well . . . no polish, please."
"Not a drop. And some find it decadent, like your Romans. We'll see how you feel."

Wearing surgical gloves she examined his dreadful feet?—?the corns, the ragged nails, the discoloration, the beginning of a bunion, the heels that seemed made of animal horn. Then she fetched the tub of water. Cradling his ankles in one arm, she bent back the foot ledge of his chair and moved the tub a little and slid his feet into the warm liquid.

The stuff that resembled crème fraîche turned out to be a lightly foaming soap and the water glimpsed beneath it a smoky gray. He closed his eyes, imagined a future filled with princely attentions.

After a while he opened them. He saw that she was continuing to sit on her stool, a thick towel on her lap, and that his now clean but still unsightly feet were on the towel. They seemed detached from his body, from his rolled-up jeans; they were a pair of unnecessary footnotes. "Ibid and Sic," he named them aloud.
"Exfoliation is the next task," she told him.
"Exfoliation?" He knew what it meant, but her voice was a lyre.

"To exfoliate is to cast off or separate in scales, flakes, sheets, or layers. Flakes is what your feet will yield."
She began to scrape his soles and heels with an elfin scalpel. He glanced at her. The dark head was bent, and she offered no small talk. So he closed his eyes again, thinking of his mother and tender bathtimes. But a different memory muscled in.


They were driving in a snowstorm. They wanted to get home. Everyone on the highway, coming and going, wanted to get home. Twelve inches were expected. The storm forbade speed. Whiter and whiter became their medium, and all the cars within it a pastier white, white spread with a knife. Suddenly, on the other side of the median strip, a bit of humped purple spun like a dancer, lifted itself like an animal, groped in the air with its four round feet, and fell back onto its roof. It lay in the high- way. Other automobiles edged slowly past it.

"Did you see?" Renée gasped. "Yes."
"Go back." "No."
"There'll be a turnaround ahead. We must go back."
"And do our own somersault? There are state police. There are other people traveling in the same direction as that Volkswagen." "Other people? Nobody is stopping. Only us." "Not us, darling."
He heard the click of her seat belt and she fell onto his feet and tried to pry his boot off the accelerator.
"Stop that, Renée. I'll have to kick you." "Kick me."
He didn't kick her; his instep sternly lifted her hands. The buckle of his boot met her face and entered it, though he didn't know that until later. She gave up then, and hunched in her seat, crying, crying.
"Put your seat belt back on."

Click. She stopped crying, stopped speaking. They got home after a few more perilous hours. She slept on the couch. And the next day, a Band-Aid on her cheek, and a little rosy streak making its infected way toward her chin, she went silently to work.

And then she transformed the episode into an argument about moral responsibility. It was what she did best, and so she did it?—?night after night, then once a week, then once a month. He argued back to show he cared about ethical behavior, though what tormented him was the vision. He saw the spin and the overturn again and again. Then he elaborated: onto a white shirred background came a splash of purple; it bounced; broken stick figures slid from the half-open door. Or he saw, within the upended machine, soft sculptures sinking into their own mashed heads. Or he saw the windows shatter and the white surround become splattered and splotched with red, ecru, gray?—?blood, flesh, brains. Porcelain bits landed on the canvas: bones and teeth.

Excerpted from the book Honeydew. Copyright © 2015 by Edith Pearlman. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.