Shoe Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
A
lone castoff shoe remained there in the gutter. It was a left men’s two-tone
brown and white oxford. When Jason first saw it, he thought it was a bowling
shoe. He didn’t know his men’s dress shoes, but he could tell it was a quality
shoe – not the sort of shoe that often got left behind. It struck Jason as sad.
The shoe was shined and the white was still bright. A stain of mud from the
gutter had been splattered on one side. Jason imagined the owner would hate
what had become of his shoe. Of course the owner had left it behind, so Jason
wasn’t exactly sure what the owner had been thinking. But it just seemed like a
crime – so much attention had been paid at one point to keep the shoe pristine
and yet here it was now, the pair separated, ruined.
Jason felt a strange attachment to this shoe. He had just found it
and it was still there in front of him, and yet he now had a certain amount of
nostalgia for it. Irrationally he picked it up – he knew he would keep it,
despite the fact that it was but one shoe. It had become symbolic of something
he had lost in his past – part of a dream or icon of some greatness to aspire
to. He would learn a focus and purity from the previous owner, a cleanliness of
the soul. The mud stain became the dark patch of his soul. He would clean the
shoe and show it some form of esteem and cleanse himself.
J.D. woke with a headache. He wasn’t sure where he was. He tried
to remember where he had been before. He remembered being sucked down. He sort
of thought it was a sinkhole. But he imagined that if that had been the case,
he would be trapped underground somewhere. Instead he was on the sidewalk,
clean and free from rubble. Something had happened to him but he wasn’t quite
sure what. He was in a neighborhood similar to the one he had been in before,
but didn’t recognize his surroundings. He sat up. He was going to have to move.
He knew he couldn’t just sit there. He was never going to find his way if he
just sat there.
He looked down at the ground with a sense of dread. He didn’t know
where he was going, or how he was going to get there, and he knew he had a long
hard walk in front of him. He didn’t mind the journey. He just really wished he
had his left shoe.
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