Erica could have called it a “champagne problem,” but that’s not really how she saw it. She preferred to view it instead as a “unique foot problem.” Unique in the sense that it directly affected her very specific work situation. Which was to say, Erica took highly curated, tailored-to-each-client foot pics. And part of what made those foot pics of such high value to people were how attractive they looked. How much money Erica spent on making them look attractive (after all, as it is said, you have to spend money to make money). And an extremely key aspect of doing that involved shelling out rather regularly for pedicures. Oh sure, she could swap out one color for another herself “in a pinch” (and if a client expressly mentioned they wanted to see her wearing a different one with little notice), but genuine and meticulous upkeep required so much more than that.

Specifically, the professional scraping, grating, pumicing and cuticle-push-backing necessary to create the most pristine, orgasm-inducing kind of foot. Which Erica had been able to do quite effectively now for the past year, without any “incident” or “hindrance” whatsoever. That is, until the beginning of the summer (a peak season in terms of being able to do her best work)—when the mosquitoes started to come out with a vengeance. And, although she’d certainly been bitten in unusual and unexpected parts of her body before, it never occurred to her, in terms of anticipating a career hazard, that one of those bastards (though bitches is the more precise term, seeing as how male mosquitoes don’t suck—literally and figuratively) would double-bite her at the base of her big toe. The real moneymaker, goddammit. The toe that fetishists automatically focused on the most (at first glance, anyway). Not just if it was perfectly straight in its alignment, but if there were any “blemishes” on it. Which would, of course, most definitely include a raging redness from the bites that had become so irritated and inflamed (almost as irritated and inflamed as Erica herself) that they looked like one giant bite in their mutated gnarliness.

And yet, that still wasn’t even the worst part of it. No, the worst was that she couldn’t possibly dare to get a pedicure with motherfucking Rudolph’s nose glaring on her big toe like a carbuncle. She had more respect for nail technicians than that. Indeed, she was keenly aware that she owed much of her financial fortune to their handiwork (or, in this case, footiwork). And she didn’t want any of them, let alone the regular person she went to, Melody, to suffer through the sight and touch of the current state of her toe. Granted, Melody, on the surface, might pretend not to be disgusted, but underneath, she would be resisting every urge to vomit, Erica just knew it. She couldn’t have that. The last thing Erica wanted was to alienate Melody, or any other nail tech she might gossip to about how appalling it was to work on Erica’s foot with a mutant bite on it.

“How the fuck am I supposed to work with this?!” she complained to her best friend and fellow “foot pic creator,” Hazel. The two had met in college and began selling their “content” at the same time during junior year, when the crunch of paying for their own tuition was made all the more pressure-laden by the sudden pulling of their expected loan amounts during the spring semester. This put the onus on both of them to make up for the deficit in the budget they had each planned to meet without compromising their “study devotion” by needing to work a second job. Because they already took advantage of having work-study jobs. For Erica, that was working as a cashier at the university’s bookstore; for Hazel, slinging the slop at the dining hall. Neither of them wanted to have to “venture outside” the confines of the school to drum up more cash. Which is when and why it occurred to Hazel to get the “foot thing” going. The idea hit her like a ton of bricks one afternoon as the two were lounging on a beach towel in the middle of the quad wearing nothing but shorts and bikini tops. With both sets of bare feet exposed to Hazel, she could see the potential they each had to appeal to some unsuspecting podophiliac.

Later the same day, Hazel was the one to take action and create accounts for both of them on an app called JustJunkies that catered to a wide array of fetishes, whether “vanilla” or esoteric. As far as Hazel was concerned, being a “foot pic creator” definitely fell on the more vanilla spectrum, but then, she wasn’t raised with the same uber-conservative parents that Erica had. Their buttoned-down approach to sex being to effectively gasp if and when it ever came up, demonstrating to Erica in no uncertain terms that it was somehow taboo, illicit. It took her going away to college to finally understand that there was nothing wrong with sex or generally embracing being a sexual creature. Hazel was instrumental to making her see that, taking Erica under her wing at the beginning of freshman year and “liberating” her into a “slut”—at least by her parents’ stodgy standards. Standards that Erica could no longer live up to, or even bother to try. That was part of the reason she ended up agreeing so readily to Hazel’s JustJunkies scheme: it wasn’t as if she could ask her parents for financial assistance anymore, for they had all but severed communication with her after visiting her in the spring of sophomore year and seeing, firsthand, “how she lived.” Which, apparently, must have been “in sin.”

Luckily for Erica, she was done being worried about what her parents thought, what their opinion was of her. Therefore, she was free to make money however she saw fit in the absence of them offering it up to her as they might have done in the past. And so, ever since those days when she first began building a regular and steady stream of clients almost four years ago now, Erica hadn’t looked back. In truth, she was so spoiled by her profession that it never even occurred to her that it could be threatened. Let alone in some highly unforeseen and rather random manner as this. To be financially felled by something as minuscule as a mosquito was what bothered her most of all. She would have preferred a far more major reason like, say, JustJunkies going bankrupt and unexpectedly blocking their users from ever engaging with the platform again. But no, it was a goddamn mosquito that had done her in. At least for the next week or so while the monstrosity healed.

Hazel, however, answered Erica’s imploring question of “How the fuck am I supposed to work with this?!” with a solution of her own.

“Just find the freak who’s actually turned on by how gross your big toe looks right now. There’s gotta be somebody. There always is.”

Erica considered this. Hazel, as usual, was actually on to something. And so, for the next twenty-four hours, Erica scoured various internet sources and apps in search of a niche within this brand of partialism that might indicate there was some sort of previously “untapped demand” she hadn’t noticed before. But, based on what she found—which was a whole lot of nothing—there appeared to be no demand whatsoever. Could it be that this aspect of foot fetishism was too taboo, even for as “uninhibited” as everyone was supposed to be now? Erica couldn’t believe such a thing, refused to accept it. So she decided to take a gamble and curate what she called her “even bigger big toe” mosquito bite content, getting Hazel to “craft” five “scenarios” of her mosquito-ravaged foot so that she could tease her most devoted “junkies” with them and see if there were any, well, bites. If any of the junkies among them emerged to reveal an erstwhile unknown or unadmitted fetish.

To her dismay, the reaction was either radio silence or outright unsubscribing to her account. Erica didn’t quite expect that. Suddenly, she felt embarrassed. As if she had made a huge mistake and no longer knew her audience. Which was key to success on this app. But then, about twelve hours after losing approximately fifteen subscribers, Erica received a message from one of her least active acolytes, letsplayfootie, imploring her, “Can u send me more moskeet pics that wuz the hottest shit ive evr seen.”

As it turned out, Hazel was right. There really is an audience for everything. No matter how small that audience might be. In this case, Erica imagined that the smallness also applied to letsplayfootie’s penis size, but who was she to judge? It’s not as if she would have to touch it or him. She would just need to keep the mosquito-bitten foot content coming. Ride the wave of this shitty situation until it was over and then go back to her regularly scheduled program of untarnished feet pics. She figured she had about five solid days of catering to this man and securing her bag with him. He being, at present, the lone teat from which to suck dry in order to keep sustaining herself and the life she had grown accustomed to since joining JustJunkies. But what Erica could never have expected was how willing letsplayfootie (who had, up until now, never parted with much of his cash) was to empty his wallet. Getting more aroused with each new bite mark-pocked image. There was one that he gave her five hundred dollars for. She couldn’t believe it. The most anyone had ever given before was two hundred and fifty. Erica never thought she would top that. But, lo and behold, letsplayfootie was setting a new precedent. One that she could get used to.

In fact, Erica was so afraid that the mosquito bite’s redness and swelling was starting to fade too quickly that she decided to go out into the woods without a stitch of DEET on her skin, sit on one of the flat rocks next to a tree and wait for one of the fuckers to bite her again. Of course, she knew that it couldn’t be guaranteed the mosquito would bite her in the same exact spot on her foot, but, all the same, she had to take what she could get. Letsplayfootie was her cash cow, and she wasn’t keen on letting him go so readily after she had only just unearthed him. She wanted to please him, cater to his strange fixation. This itself becoming her own strange fixation. So when she started to go to increasingly absurd lengths to ensure that her feet (not just foot, singular, anymore) were good and bit, she wasn’t thinking clearly. Hadn’t noticed much about the recent headlines that touted how L.A. County was reporting an unusual surge in West Nile virus cases, and that residents ought to be more concerned about taking preventive measures.

Erica, instead, did the exact opposite, frequently fleeing to wilderness areas (Devil’s Canyon Trail was a personal favorite of hers, it being about a thirty-minute drive from her apartment in Chatsworth) to attract the bloodsuckers to her “pedes,” they themselves seeming to have a foot fetish of their own. On the fourth instance of doing it, Erica emerged from the wilderness with her entire body covered in the red, circular marks. Though none of them had gone for her feet during this round—much to her annoyance and dismay. “Luckily,” she thought to herself, she still had some residual bites from her last “wilderness session.” But it seemed they weren’t enough “pronounced” enough for letsplayfootie anymore, who started to retreat little by little during the week she went in for her third “wilderness session,” until he had disappeared altogether.

By the time this happened, Erica was beginning to experience what she didn’t yet recognize as symptoms of West Nile virus. Mainly because, at first, they felt like the symptoms of any “common” sickness: fever, body aches, that sort of thing. But when she started to feel paralysis on her left side, it dawned on her—far too late, unfortunately—that something else was at play. By this time, the bite marks had faded…though they hadn’t totally disappeared. And when Erica couldn’t get up from her own bed one morning, she had to call Hazel to come and help her. Or, more specifically, take her to the hospital.

Upon being informed of what the mosquito bites had done to her, Erica was furious. At herself. For being so money-crazed to have done something so stupid and ultimately reckless. About a week later, when she was released from the hospital, Erica was forced to reckon with the price tag that her foolishness had wrought. Between the hospital bills and the costs necessary for her physical therapy, rehabilitation and generally coping with life as a paralyzed person now, she was looking at the kind of hefty sum that only JustJunkies could assist her with paying. She supposed that at least she could still do her foot work even as an “immobilized” person.

The bites now long gone, Erica took measures to mosquito-proof her life, even investing in all manner of insect screens to “double bag” her already double-paned windows. She also had plug-in mosquito repellers for every outlet, with every room also constantly lit by multiple citronella candles (she’d rather die in an accidental fire than from something else a mosquito might give her). Incidentally, it was the kind of “mood lighting” that worked wonders on her new era of “content creation.” An era that found Melody, her beloved pedicurist, making house calls now that Erica was both paralyzed and free of any unsightly mosquito bites on her feet. Thus, in a sense, one might say Erica had made it through the wilderness.