When we got married, my wife had no toes.

I'm starting here because, with God as my witness, I have no idea how else to begin this.

That's the thing. I don't even know what this is.

Account, confession, obituary.

I had to write something down. I've taken photos, but nobody would believe she wasn't born.

No, stop skipping ahead. Clarity Benedict, clarity. Start at the beginning.

When I married Emily, she had no toes.

I married her because of her ex-interstities, her stories and her tall tales.

I'd always laughed them off, especially the one about how she'd lost the digits on her feet.

I'd always seen it as a fanciful way of explaining away a birth defect.

It never bothered me, but Emily grew up in an orphanage, and of course, kids can be cruel.

I'd always assumed the beach tell was a way to keep old wounds closed.

I realise now, that was naive.

According to Emily, she had been walking the beach at Overcourt, a bleak and rundown shipping town on the UK's east coast.

It was before a parents accident, so she kind of been older than four.

She'd been digging for Shark Teeth when she found about a foot below the pebbles and grey sand.

A sea slug.

This is where the tale took one of Emily's usual flights of fancy, because you see, this wasn't just any sea slug.

Throughout our marriage, she'd sworn on a parent's graves that the moist creature was the exact size, shape, texture and colour of a human tongue.

She even defiantly refused to budge on her assertion that it moved and writhed in her hand exactly like one too.

The Emilyism that made me write off the story as fiction for years was what it did after a few minutes of wriggling.

According to the wife, I'd give anything to hold a game, the tongue slug vanished in her hands, disappearing into thin air with no sound or commotion.

...