I am dying. Leaves let go their trees and spin to the ground, cover it, close the casket on the last blades of green grass.

Likewise, boots lace up and cover what was once displayed in sandals, like nude Venus in a seashell, the glorious female foot.

Birds take flight. Darkness knocks early. Cool weather bites.

I am dying because my sexual perversion -- my foot fetish -- must return to the closet as winter approaches, covers, kills.

This late autumn day, she is an endangered species, the female foot. She is the snow leopard, prancing for the hills. She is arched, a frightened cat, and I am the hunter. If I catch her hiding in her loafer cave, I will pet her, hug her, lick her. Like a cat deserves.

This day, when heavy shoes slant thickly against winter's impending edge, I am repressed squared. I walk down the street and I no longer receive my fix of female feet in skimpy straps. I see binding boots, clodhoppers, socks, stockings.

I resort to memories of the bare leopards I have encountered, anonymous flashes: crossed bare legs and, further down, the idle flipping of a shoe on and off a tan foot; a brown cat dangling flirtatiously out of a car's passenger window on the highway; droplets of water drying on the skin of two feet resting at the end of a pool lounge chair.

But memories never help. I am locked in a cabin. The whistle of my kettle is shrilling. Take me off this fire, it says; give me relief before I evaporate into the air. They will find me at first melt.

In short, I think there's something wrong with me.

I would ask for help, but who can you talk to about such things? Shall I start sucking my wife's toes after five years of happy marriage? She has deliciously formed feet -- I wouldn't have married her otherwise -- but she wouldn't understand; no, no, she still talks about the college twerp who tried to suck her lower digits, and the mouthful he got instead.

Oh, my lovely, caring wife knows I like female feet but denies I have a fetish. "You're normal," she says. Inside, I howl.

In the dim moonlight, beneath warm covers, she asks, "What do you want, what do you really, really want; anything, I will do anything to/for you." But she has no idea what she's asking. I've heard variations of this before. People think they might understand. They draw you in. Tell me, they say, I'd really like to know.

But a foot fetish is King Kong. People misunderstand it, run from it, try to kill it. A foot fetish is a scarlet letter that is but one better than the letter assigned to gerbils in the ass. Lives combust when secrets like this are divulged. The moment you tell them the truth -- how when you see a female foot of the correct size, color, cleanliness and proportion, you feel a warm tug in places beneath your clothing, your breath escapes like the steam from that kettle, you want to caterwaul like John, Paul, George and Ringo at high harmony -- they point and betray like zealots of Big Brother (not the TV show).

Like that time on my school bus in sixth grade. My friend and I were discussing the supple virtues of one 11-year-old school starlet. She had no breasts and there was only a flicker of the tramp she would become.

I ventured to unknown territory for a sixth-grader: "She has sexy feet," I told my bus-riding friend. He grasped the concept immediately, bellowing to the entire bus, "He has a foot fetish!"

"A what?" I stammered, but it was past midnight, the glass slipper crushed. I was Charlie Brown, squared and perverted. My ears roared with blood, caught in the maelstrom of open-mouthed laughs of cruel fellow students, the cruel world gaping at me, prodding me, humiliating me.

Note to self: Don't reveal your foot fetish to anyone.

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk