The Toe Brothers
By J.C. Duffy
You’ve all heard the rhyme:
This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
This little piggy had none,
And this little piggy cried 'Wee! Wee! Wee!' all the way home.
You’ve heard it; I’ve lived it. If you can call this living.
I’m Tom. I’m one of the Toe brothers. Well, I assume we’re related, since we definitely look alike. There are five of us on the right foot of a Toddler named Henry. He’s two years old, and when his parents, Nancy and Don, want him to go to sleep, they do the “This Little Piggy” routine. It doesn’t make Henry sleepy, it just jazzes him up and pisses us off.
Usually it’s Nancy who runs the show, with Don grinning in the background like the simpleton he seems to be. She grabs each one of us by the head and shakes us violently. I’m the middle toe, so when she gets to me she says the words which permeate my nightmares: “This little piggy had roast beef.” For your information, Nancy, I’m a toe, and so I don’t eat. And if I did, I’d be a vegetarian.
Being the middle toe, I feel like the middle child, with all of the psychological baggage that brings with it, Also, we in the toe community see the middle toe on a foot as the equivalent of the middle finger on a hand: I’m the “Fuck you!” toe. We can’t give Nancy and Don the finger, but we can give them the toe. My brothers just crouch down, and Don and Nancy are flipped off, though I doubt they realize it.
By far the biggest toe on our foot is Doctor T. We gave him that nickname because he should be playing basketball, though we probably shouldn’t make light of his gigantism. His real name is Joel.
Next in line is Ed, also known as The Enforcer. Doctor T is too lumbering for the job, so it usually falls on Ed to keep everybody in line, literally and figuratively.
Speaking of which, why must we line up in size order? How boring. What is this, a fire drill? I’ll have to bring this up at the next toe meeting.
After me comes Vinny, the ladies’ man, as he would have you believe. Since there are no lady toes around, we have no idea if this is true.
And finally, there’s Hugh. We call him Tiny. That’s another nickname we should probably retire. “I’m not a midget,” he points out, “I’m a little digit.”
It’s not easy being a toe. Have you ever been stubbed? I doubt it. It’s not fun, believe me. “Stub” is a pretty benign word for being rendered unconscious by blow to the head. And try waking up every day to a mobile of the planets hanging over your head. The sizes and distances are completely inaccurate!
We have distant relatives on Henry’s other foot, though the two branches of the family aren’t close. They’re kind of crazy. They’re constantly wiggling for no earthly reason. On our foot, we only wiggle along to music, even though the music the parents play for Henry doesn’t exactly rock out. And some of the songs are scary. The last thing a toe wants to think about is being run over by “The Wheels on the Bus.” Or being bitten by an “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” The toes on the other foot resent us because Nancy and Don play the stupid Piggy game with us more than they do with them. This is only because Henry’s right foot is closer to the side of the crib where the parents stand. Little do these other toes realize that we would trade places with them in a heartbeat.
So, let me see if I understand this pig story correctly, just for the record.
Piggy #1 definitely went to the market. We can assume piggy #5 went along, since he cried “all the way home.” Since roast beef is involved, I assume this was a food market, not an antiques market or a stock market. Piggy #2 definitely stayed home. We know piggy #3 had roast beef, and we know piggy #4 had none. We don’t know exactly how many piggies actually went to the store, or how many actually partook of roast beef. We don’t know why piggy #5 was crying. This analysis raises more questions than it answers. Also, nobody cries, “Wee! Wee! Wee!” It just doesn’t happen.
Well, here come Don and Nancy, so it must be show time again. When she says “this little piggy had roast beef” and tries to rip my head off, I wish I could let out a blood-curdling scream, but we’ve agreed among ourselves to remain silent around the humans.
I don’t need roast beef. I need a chiropractor.
