I won a prize beauty treatment.
As I sit down for my pedicure, in a small white living room, a man squares up in front of me and raises my naked left foot, puts it on his knee. He takes a large dressmaker’s scissors and, starting from the bottom of my pant leg, he cuts vertically up.
Next to me, another man assures me I will like it.
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Once the podiatrist has slit my jeans up to the knee, he takes a razor and delicately shaves the hair to the top of my calf.
With a shorter, thicker pair of nail scissors, he holds my toes with one hand and scratches, hard, the nail of my big toe with the other, scrapes a large glob of a thick clay like substance from the surface.
Eww, he says, as he pincers a malleable smelly lump before passing it to a woman on his right.
Fascinated, she holds the brown chunk between her index finger and thumb, squeezes it, like Play-Doh, into a wedge and passes it right for the next person in the circle to examine.
I am feeling embarrassed.
Then the man scrapes under the nail of my toe, sprays snow-like flecks of skin.
Oww, I say. And he starts on my cuticles. This is going to hurt, he says. He puts the heavy scissor’s blade against the edge of the cuticle.
Strangely, as he penetrates the skin it doesn’t.
Picture, cropped of Pedicure by Hagit Shahal via Creative Commons
