3 years after I returned from the war, I noticed something had changed about the feeling in my toes. I could no longer feel them, but I could certainly hear them. They cracked when they were wiggled. Like walking on dried leaves or on a pile of sticks. I often imagined a very large, disfigured man snapping multiple pieces of kindling with his bare hands. Every once in awhile a shard would splinter into his hand and bleed out. Each drop of blood softly splattering on his aged, leathery boots. He would snap kindling for so long that ants would come and clean up the blood, carrying it back to their young as food. The only possible application of such would require the large, disfigured man to have very high-blood sugar. Enough so that the sugar in his blood would become sustenance for their writhing larvae. So one night as I sat staring at the pages of a book I've never read, as I most often do, I retrieved my pocket knife from the night stand and slowly and carefully removed each and every one of those damned toes. Now I need a cane to walk, but the ants are gone forever.