The following is a short story I wrote a few years ago which I thought you might enjoy, dear readers. I think it does a decent job of showcasing my writing style (although I feel I’ve improved in the three years since this was written), particularly the personification which I love so much and employed pretty heavily in Somewhere Over the Sun. Enjoy.
Have you ever befriended a shoe?
My friend, who asked me to refer to him simply as Shoe, was manufactured at a factory in Shanghai, China on December 12, 1983. Due to a faulty machine and a lazy quality inspector, Shoe was sent out into the world without a matching counterpart.
His memory of the first few years is hazy (understandably so- if humans can’t recall anything at all from infancy, how can we expect shoes to?), so neither of us are too sure how it is that Shoe came to rest in a box labeled “stuff” collecting dust in my garage.
I found him while cleaning one lazy Sunday. He looked up at me with tear-stained laces, sick with loneliness. Because I’m old-fashioned, I took him out for ice cream. He described, more poetically than I could ever hope to, how much it hurt being a single shoe. Knowing you should have someshoe with you wherever you go, whether harnessing the same pair of feet or haphazardly placed atop each other in a darkened closet. Yet you kept going on your entire life without finding the Right to your Left.
The only time I saw him happy those first few weeks was when he was shoveling in a spoonful of orange sherbet and telling me the story of when he was hopping around downtown Cleveland, and his lace grazed the heel of a red Chanel size 5. It was as he waited to cross Euclid avenue. He had tried not to stare, but had heard a Billie Holiday album that day and his loneliness and appreciation for beauty were especially strong.
He couldn’t help but imagine a connection between them. Immediately, his mind took him to a Mediterranean beach, maybe even (he had to admit it) a bedroom floor, laces tangled all around her. He knew it would only increase the pain later, but for now he was happy to imagine her having the same sentimental fantasies.
Sometimes, it helped if I wore him, even if it was just for an afternoon stroll. It wasn’t the most comfortable experience for me because Shoe was a size and a half too small and he was adamant that I not split up a different pair to wear on my other foot. He said those shoes were quite literally made for each other, and any moment apart was excruciating. He added that the happiest moment for a shoe was for some child to knot its laces with its solemate’s and be undeniably joined. Their heaven is a power line.
When I suggested that we go to a Goodwill store to find him a friend he was way less responsive than I had expected. Like he was afraid. I think melancholy works like quick sand; no matter how long you fight, eventually you get too tired and don’t want to add awareness of the futility of your struggles to how blue you already are.
Shoe was in a state of despair, and I doubt he would have ever broken free from its grasp if it hadn’t been for someshoe else’s help.
Despite his sadness, Shoe struck me as the kind of apparel that always had an appreciation of life, in all its hugeness and complexity. He knew that though he had had a lonely life, not everyone did. Which to him meant a promise that even though his life might never change for the better, there was always the possibility that it could.
When it finally did change, Shoe sighed, letting out all the years of bottled up sadness- as if he had been waiting all along, purposely holding his breath just to see how long he could.
Her name was Lola and she was a sandal. She had been abandoned by her owner at the beach and had had to watch helplessly as her partner was dragged away by the tide. But she managed to keep her hopes up, like you’d expect a sandal to.
Though she arrived chewed and slobbered on, not just by the gentle jaws of a mangled mutt, but by life itself, Shoe immediately felt a curious attraction to her. It was a silent recognition of an otherness in her.
We were at the park that day, where Shoe liked to go late afternoons for a jog and then to watch the children play. The dog dropped her off by where we were sitting, tired of tasting leather.
She was laughing, filling the air with giggles, guffaws and snickers, and though both Shoe and I weren’t in the best of moods, we both saw the air becoming lighter, easier to breathe, irrefutably joyous.
She wobbled her way near us, shaking off the dog’s drool from her straps. With no reserve or respect for known unwritten rules on stranger-to-stranger interaction, Lola took a seat between Shoe and myself. She made us say the word “indubitably” to prove that you can’t say it without smiling.
Strangest of all was how unstrange it all felt. How she fit right in- the space between me and Shoe perfectly enough for her size 7 frame.
Even though there seemed to be a certain future of togetherness for them that first afternoon, social norms called for a period of required pre-togetherness, simply because that’s the way Things Had To Be. A period of awkward dates and exploratory conversations. Of both of them wanting to be a part of a whole already, not merely a part. Of unnecessary, unproductive shyness and, of course, of butterflies.
Shoe was nervous and, naturally, afraid of messing things up. His inexperience, he was certain, would put her off. But Lola was patient. She understood that a shoe that had spent a lonely life only had his dreams as experience. And, after all, this was what it was all about: two footwear just trying to figure it out, two someshoes feeling their way through the darkened bedroom that is life.
