THE SHOES
I was manufactured in a factory on 7/7/1982, and shipped overseas. I was ugly from the get-go. I knew that because I didn’t sell, and ended up on the clearance rack, and finally was donated to the Goodwill, where I was bought for fifty-five cents by a flustered looking woman. I shod an eleven-year-old boy, who wore me through within six months. His mother took them back to the Goodwill. I was sold for a quarter and given to a girl. She was thirteen when she started wearing me, and fourteen when she threw me in the dumpster, where I started a new life in the bin. Before I was sent to the dump, and finally, buried, I learned a few things about the girl, which I will relate here systematically.
She was called Samantha Rose Irons. She went to a tiny school with only thirty students. All were, as one might say, hicks. Samantha Rose Irons was different. She constantly infiltrated the Blacksville Community Library (a closet with floor-to-wall shelves of books. Allegedly these books were donated by Christian Missionaries who came in the seventies.) As far as I could tell, no one else had read any of the books. Very few people in Blacksville, Alabama, could read, and those who could weren’t fluent in the language of prose.
Samantha Rose Irons’ school doubled as a church on weekends and Thursday nights. She and I spent a lengthy amount of time, both in the Sanctuary and in the library, and in the cry room. The purpose of the cry room was for young mothers to take their babies when they started bawling during the sermon. It had a couple of rocking chairs, and Samantha Rose Irons, on school days, took books from the closet and read them, comfortable, on a rocking chair.
She read them aloud quietly, and in this manner I heard the delightful tales of Dickens, Faulkner, Brunte. We read Of Mice and Men, Lolita, Bridge to Terabithia (one of Samantha’s favorites, she read it three times over in the course of six months). Pride and Prejudice was one of my favorites, although Samantha Rose Irons didn’t care for it, and gave it up halfway through. I was, and am still, sorely disappointed in this fact. Samantha Rose Irons’ and I read old Star Wars novels, and to this day I am curious as to the final destiny of Luke Skywalker, and whether Darth Sidius was truly resurrected from a holo-image, and if Anakin Skywalker was evil or not.
We also read bits and pieces of the Bible. Samantha especially loved the stories of Esther and Ruth, and Deborah, and Damarus. All of the female-empowerment stories set her spirits soaring, although I suppose she didn’t realize this.
Samantha Rose Irons’ and I read, and we read, and we read. Dictionaries and Literatures books, pieces on grammar and syntax, The Writers Handbook Nineteen-Seventy-Nine Edition, Stephen King paperbacks, romances, we got through it all.
And Samantha learned to speak for herself, and to listen. She
tackled Philosophy and the Sciences. She read George Orwell and got a grasp on politics, communism, Marxism. And finally she found power inside of herself, and I could not have been more proud.
But there were other things about Samantha Rose Irons that people didn’t know, things that she and I went through together in agonizing pain. Sometimes I was haphazardly torn from her feet before the hideous process began, other times there was such hurry that I was simply left on, dangling over the side of the bed.
Samantha kept on reading though.
I will never forget the day our lives changed for good. I remember everything about it. Samantha was (rather rebelliously) wearing a pair of blue jeans she bought from the Goodwill with money she earned running errands for the Widow Hamshire. And me. And a tucked in blouse. She was reading Les Miserables, a rather brilliant piece by Victor Hugo. She was also reading Oliver Twist, a book I found somewhat stupefying. She would read it in chapters, one after the other.
Samantha Rose Irons always snuck into the cry room during Nutrition break, and Lunch break, to read.
That day, Jimmy Theodore Daughtry was following Samantha. She flipped on the cry room light switch, settled herself in her rocking chair, and pulled Oliver Twist from her backpack.
I remember hearing the clicking sound of the rocking chair, and soft footsteps from far away. I remember Samantha’s voice, murmuring, “Chapter twenty-six…in which a mysterious character appears upon the scene; and many things, inseparable from this history, are done and performed…”
And the doorknob turned. Samantha’s entire body tightened, and her toes curled up inside of me.
It opened slowly and Samantha Rose Irons shoved Oliver Twist into her backpack hurriedly.
And Jimmy entered her story.
I cannot say as I know exactly what happened in the next few moments. There certainly was no prelude as to what was about to take place, and, considering the extraordinarily forward nature of this boy, I am surprised at Samantha’s lack of resistance.
He came straight up to her, and while all I saw were his shoes, scraping the floor on either side of me, the noise that the two of them began making made it quite suddenly clear: they were kissing.
Not the little delicate kisses on reads about, either.
It must have passed by me, having a floor’s eye view, the many fleeting glances the two must have shared. The most I recognized of this boy were his shoes, a rather lovely pair of black high tops. I learned later that these were only his school shoes, and he had a good sturdy pair of work boots for home.
After that, Samantha didn’t read quite so much in the cry room. Sometimes Jimmy Theodore Daughtry would sit at her feet while she read little ditties out loud to him, but for the most part, I was simply given the opportunity to gaze upon those near-perfect shoes of his while they slammed themselves back and forth across the room.
A far cry from elegant.
And then, one day, a plan was contrived, and set into motion. I found myself riding on a bus--a bus! And running down the sidewalk.
But I could not go on forever. I was worn through, and I could not have expected Samantha Rose Irons to keep me around. A new pair of goodly-looking tennis shoes was picked out and stolen for Samantha, and she threw me away without a second thought.
I cannot say as I blame Samantha Rose, not at all, really. It is not her fault that my fate is to be a pair of shoes, and hers is to go on exploring the magnificence of literature, love, life. I was to know death, as she would someday. That was simply not a fate we would brave together.
I am covered in layers of ground, and I too shall become ground. This is my only wish: that I should become the dust of the earth quickly, and, by a process of rapid erosion, surface, be blown in the wind, and seek out Samantha Rose Irons again, sit at her feet, and listen to her airy, curious voice once more as she discovers the mysteries of life.
