Offerings

by Kira K. Homsher

Sydney selected her photo, cropped it, decreased the saturation, typed “#kneesocks #girl #feet” into the caption, and posted it to her new, anonymous Instagram account. Just to see what would happen. She placed her phone face down on the bed. Other girls made money doing this kind of thing; she saw it on her feed almost every day. Sydney was not satisfied with her life. She couldn’t seem to make as much happen in a day as other people could. She couldn’t make herself understand the gravity of passing hours.

After a minute or two, she picked up her phone and tapped the heartshaped icon to check her notifications. Two accounts had liked the photo: _anya_feet_ and daddyjeff764. The latter had also left a comment: Dm me to get spoil baby.

As a child, Sydney had believed fervently in the existence of fairies. She liked the idea that she could leave little gifts in the backyard and return to find them vanished or altered by unseen visitors. She wanted to believe that if she reached out to touch another world, someone might reach back with tiny fingers and place a small token of acknowledgment in her open palms. All the mythology and folklore her mother had read to her made it plain that it was ill-advised to accept a gift from the fairies, for to accept such an offering was to owe something unknown in return. And it was considered a terrible insult to thank a fairy.

The internet did not seem very different from the world of the fair folk. It was spurious and cruel, at once too big and too small for Sydney to find her way around. Time spent on the internet became hazy and imprecise. She went largely ignored online, but occasionally she’d leave an offering and return to find it touched by many tiny fingers.

Daddyjeff764 did not have any of his own photos posted, and his default was the white outline of a male face against a gray background. He followed 26 accounts, all of which had photos of feet as their avatars. The feet were suggestively positioned and freshly pedicured. Sydney looked down at her own feet and wondered if she should paint her toenails. She wondered what it meant to be spoiled and if being spoiled would change her in some deep, fundamental way. She was a pretty girl and understood that there was another world waiting for pretty girls like her, if only she knew how to access it.

Sydney opened a DM with daddyjeff764 and stared at the empty white box. She typed: I want you to spoil me, then hit send.

She closed the app and placed her phone down a second time. She flicked the sound on, then off again, relishing the click of the switch under her nail.

If the daddy responded, she didn’t want to know right away. She wanted to let it simmer, a limp curiosity she could forget about, rediscover, and toy with again later. Sydney was a vagrant of sorts, dipping her toes in other realities but never fully committing to or believing in them. She just reached out to confirm they were there.

Outside, it had started to rain. Sydney walked through the front door and sat at the bottom of the stoop, patting the wet concrete with the balls of her bare feet. She lit a cigarette and cupped her left hand over it to keep it from getting wet. On the opposite side of the road, a couple walked by, their voices barely audible through the rain.

“Don’t take my side,” said the woman.

“Sorry.”

Their words were encased in drizzle. Sydney felt as though she were studying the couple through a champagne glass.

“You shouldn’t have flushed the fish. We should’ve buried it.”

“You’re right—”

“I said don’t take my side.”

“I know.”

“What are we going to tell Kate?”

A woman, a man, a dead fish. They seemed like loose figments of Sydney’s imagination, symbolic totems of family dysfunction. Frowning, she considered the countless pets that must have traveled through the pipes beneath her feet. Nothing with a name should ever be flushed down a toilet, she thought.

Sydney’s own mother had flushed her goldfish when Sydney was seven. She had come home from school to an empty tank. No trace of Spot remained—her mother had even drained the water.

“Where’s Spot?” Sydney demanded. Her mother explained that he’d died earlier that morning, and that she’d flushed him so he could join all the other fishies in the ocean. Her voice sounded flat and tired.

Sydney processed this betrayal for a small, quiet moment. She pictured Spot floating on his back, his fins lifeless and translucent. Then she shrieked and scratched her mother across the face. Her mother grabbed her by the wrist, dragged her into the bathroom, and sat her on the toilet seat. She opened the medicine cabinet and procured from it a pair of silver scissors. “Stay very still,” she said, and Sydney did as she was told.

It had taken three years for her hair to grow back to its original length.

Across the street, the couple turned a corner and passed out of sight. Sydney wished for another cigarette. She combed her fingers through her hair, which she now wore cropped to her chin, then reached behind her ear to unclasp an earring. She pressed it into the wet earth beside the sidewalk. It spangled gold in the muck.

Sydney went back inside and picked up her phone. Three other accounts had liked the post, but the daddy had sent only one reply: good grl. Sydney wasn’t sure how to proceed; she’d expected him to ask something of her, and she’d expected him to set the price. She didn’t know whether to act coy, demand money, or send another photo of her feet. After some thought, she shed her socks and decided to paint her toenails. There was a pale pink polish in the medicine cabinet; she applied two coats and bent forward to blow it dry. She stood in front of the bedroom mirror, curling her toes and turning her ankles in and out. Her tendons caught strangely in the lamplight. She thought she could see the appeal—feet looked like alien, secretive things.

She took six pictures, angling her feet differently each time, then typed: just took some pix for u. what will u do for them. The daddy started typing almost immediately. Sydney felt powerful and afraid, her phone hot in her palm. $50 baby wats yr cashapp?

She sent the daddy the link to an account she’d made weeks ago “just in case.” Her name on the app was Mika, a name she thought men on the internet might find unique and endearing. A name they might wish to spoil.

She sent three pictures and the cash-with-wings emoji. Then she added a pink heart for good measure. She thought: This is a way to make money. The thought made her tired. The fact that she and daddyjeff764 were both alive, in the same world, at the same time, made her tired. She was giving him images in exchange for digital money, and the transaction would materialize in glowing pixels and vibrations. Somewhere a lonely, fixated man saw the image of a pink heart because she had sent it with the tips of her fingers. Was this power?

Sydney’s mother had never apologized for what she’d done. She came from a family of boys. She told Sydney she would learn, eventually, that people could take far worse things from her than hair. But she must have felt a little guilty, because she gave it back to Sydney, braided and tied with red ribbon. Sydney kept it in her dresser drawer until her mother suggested she leave it out for the fairies, who could use it to build nests for birds. She didn’t know at the time that birds made their own nests, so she strung her hair around a branch of the tallest tree in her backyard. It had never been hard for her to let go of the things she no longer needed. Days later, she found a dragonfly wing, perfectly intact, on the ledge of her bedroom window and took it inside to keep. She knew better than to accept gifts from the fair folk, but the wing was so beautiful she didn’t care. The debt had followed her ever since, never leaving her side.

She got into the habit of leaving gifts for the fairies in the hopes that one day they might consider her debt repaid. She left them cinnamon sticks, buttons, shoelaces, and gemstones. Letters, snow peas, and floss. Her offerings always vanished soon after. She took this to mean they had been accepted, but she never lost the sense that the fairies desired something greater, something she did not yet have to give.

The phone went cha-ching and suddenly there it was: one hundred dollars. Sydney waited a moment to see if a change had registered somewhere in her body. She pressed a finger against the inside of her thigh, rolled her shoulders, ran her tongue over the back of her teeth. Nothing was any different. Face now, said the daddy. Face n feet together. 1 hundred. Sydney felt the corners of her mouth slacken, but still she lifted the phone level to her face and opened the camera.

Her hair was wet, her eyes looked dull, and her skin seemed flat somehow. She realized that it made no difference to her if some man wanted to buy a copy of her face, though she couldn’t imagine what he wanted with it. She understood, logically, that he would probably masturbate to the photo, but the idea seemed absurd and laughable. It was the 21st century and lust, Sydney thought, was outdated. Lust was analog. There were so many other ways to pass the time now, so many other ways to get off in the digital realm.

The daddy probably wanted her smiling, so she drew her lips into what felt like a pleasant, inviting shape and angled the phone above her head like an old Myspace selfie in order to get her feet in the shot. She dug her toes into the rug and tried to think about sex so that it would translate through the pixels of the screen. She took only one photo and sent it without making any adjustments.

Looks good xxx, he said. A second payment lit up her screen and she hit like to acknowledge it. She couldn’t bring herself to thank the daddy, though she knew it would be prudent to do so should she want to be spoiled in the future. She lifted her hand to her head and thought of the earring she had left outside. Enough time had passed, she thought, for her gift to be discovered.

Outside, the air tasted pearly and fresh, the way it always did after heavy rain. Sydney stood in the threshold of her front door, marveling at her body’s response to the weather. She felt brand new, like someone who would never have thought to make an anonymous Instagram or wonder which angles made her feet appear most enticing for a man who called himself Daddy.

It wasn’t that she felt objectified or that she feared exposure. She had tossed a fragment of herself into the yawning void of the internet, where someone had seen and claimed her offering in a matter of minutes. She’d accepted his reward and entered into a contract with the unknown. This was just one more world to which she did not belong but was now tied.

The sun peeked out through storm clouds overhead, casting shadows in cool-orange and gray. Sydney crouched at the bottom of her stoop, scanning the ground for her gold earring. It was gone. In its place sat a perfectly formed acorn with a hard, glossy shell. She understood it to be a gift and wanted nothing more than to extend her arm and press it against her palm, to hold and possess something simple and real. Sydney folded her knees to her chest and sat admiring the acorn, thinking herself lucky.

After all, not everyone was fortunate enough to have their signals heard and answered. Some people just went on sending signals into dead air, waiting in vain for some small token of acknowledgement from the senselessly disordered world.

Kira K. Homsher is a writer from Philadelphia, currently pursuing an MFA at Virginia Tech. The winner of Phoebe Journal’s 2020 nonfiction contest and a Pushcart nominee, her writing also appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, New Delta Review, Barrelhouse, Hobart, and others. You can find her at kirahomsher.com and tweeting @bogcritter.