Cinderella Toes

Everyone thinks the same thing when they hear the word cleavage. I heard it in my cell bio class and I smiled- but it wasn’t that kind of cleavage.
Then came butt cleavage. All over Hollywood, young actresses with their ass cracks hanging out, and it was supposed to be sexy. Butt cleavage. Then (and I don’t know when this started) came the worst cleavage of them all. And I saw it everywhere. I saw it on models and actresses, and I saw it when I went to nice restaurants.
When those little stilettos you love so much don’t quite fit. The Manolo Blahniks you spent a fortune on. And they don’t quite fit, but you force them on anyways. You curl up your toes, and you squeeze them on. And every time you look down- revealed cracks between your toes, tiny fissures now, squeezed together, suffocating on top of one another. The shoes are a sardine can, but you’re packing halibut. You force them on anyway. And every time you look down, the cracks grimace at you.
It didn’t matter at first. The shoes looked good, and it was worth it to be uncomfortable for a few hours. But now you just look desperate. Now you’re uncomfortable and you have toe cleavage and it doesn’t even look good. Now even the people who think butt cleavage looks good look at you, and they try to keep their eyes off your feet. But you know they know. You just look desperate. Knobby aching tarsals poke out of your shoes, and they tell you, expensive shoes won’t make your life better. Expensive shoes won’t change you.
Cinderella probably had toe cleavage. She would have done damn near anything to get away from that life of hers. So she forced her feet in, and what’s worse? They were glass, so even if you couldn’t see her toe cleavage before, you could see it now-the whole foot, swelling and red, and the slipper, glass, for the whole world to see.