Hot dog Deirdre comes home, drops her bags in the doorway, and Evelyn appears — hot dog hands clutched to her chest, no longer flinching at her own fingers. What follows is a handful of glimpses into their life together: a dinner party where two insufferably happy dinner guests sit across from them and clink wine glasses with their feet, a quiet night on the couch, a knitting project in various stages of completion, and finally Deirdre at the piano, playing Claire de Lune with her feet. Intercut with the atrium, where Deirdre is swinging a paper cutter machete at Evelyn’s neck, and Evelyn catches her wrist with a foot — gently, almost like a caress — and tells her: that’s not true. There’s always something to love. Even in a stupid, stupid universe where we have hot dogs for fingers, we get very good with our feet.
We spend a long time arguing about the hot dog timeline. Lester insists it’s one universe with a clear sequence; Kynan pitches that we’re watching two parallel hot dog worlds where each woman gets to be the cold one. Neither of us wins. We also dig into Claire de Lune — Kynan traces it back to the Verlaine poem about a clumsy rustic dance and reads the whole thing aloud, and it turns out to be about seeing someone’s imperfect, sad beauty in the moonlight — plus what it means that Deirdre’s deepest fear isn’t being hated, it’s being told she’s already worthy of love. And that the feet playing the piano are prosthetics, worn by an actual pianist, hitting the correct keys.
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