Sevenmile

Annie asked me about the shoes sometime in July, and I guess I hadn’t thought of them before that. She asked me about the mud splattered all over the sides; she asked about the big rips in the back of the heels.

I told her it was the orthotics. I did wear orthotics, for a short time – I had flat feet, and had back problems to go with it. More recently I’d found out my spine curved in odd directions around the hips because one of my legs was slightly shorter than the other. The orthotics were supposed to help with the back stuff, and they did, a little, but they also didn’t quite fit the shoes. They were a brand I hadn’t heard of before, called Sevenmiles, and my aunt had gotten them for me as a present when she drove down in April to wish me happy birthday. They were white and they got ruined fast. I’d been wearing them for three months at this point.

‘Okay, but what happened to the soles?’ Annie said, holding one of the shoes up. She did so with her fingertips, gingerly – a thin line of red dust trickled out of the eyelets.

I shrugged. I saw what she meant. The ridges on the bottom of the shoe had been worn away, grimy and dusty from what looked more like three years of walking rather than months.

‘I guess they’re just bad quality,’ I said.

‘Nuh uh. Jack, I worked at Athlete’s Foot for like, five years through highschool. I sold a lot of Sevenmiles. Trust me when I say those shoes are expensive.’

I felt a small stab of guilt at that. I hadn’t even sent a card to my aunt for her birthday.

‘Well, they get a lot of use,’ I said. Annie knew that. I liked to walk up the hill behind our dorm in the evenings to catch the sunset whenever I got the chance.

‘Jack, you got them for your birthday, right?’

I nodded.

‘That was in April.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Uh huh. Sure, So, um, last time I checked, that means it’s only been three months. Unless you were hiking the goddamned Oregon Trail, I don’t see how you could’ve fucked them up so bad.’

‘Yeah, well, maybe they’re faulty,’ I said.

‘They’re not faulty! They’re shoes for Christ’s sakes, they’re not complicated machinery!’

I shrugged again. Which I’m sure I knew would piss Annie off, but I did it anyway. I remember finding it funny, the way she used to get so mad about it, like she was convinced I was lying to her or something. Like I was a math problem she couldn’t solve, and I guess I was. It stopped being funny after awhile, though.

‘Well, I don’t know what you do to those goddamned things,’ Annie gave up, clearly infuriated. She dropped the matter, mostly because we were running late for Film Night. We grabbed a pair of beanbags and made our way down to the Central Plaza, where one of our BA professors, John Ashley, was hosting a movie night under the stars there for the Waterbridge Film Club. He held this every two weeks or so and played it on the big outdoor TV they’d installed. We’d started going so we could receive extra credit for our Emerging Media subject two years ago, but by now it’d become tradition for us to go. I think it was the Wizard of Oz, that night.

We got back sometime close before two a.m., after a short detour with some of Annie’s friends at the Uni Bar. We played cards for a bit. Then I went to bed and took my shoes off at the end of my bed. When I undid the lace, bits of red dust and long-hardened mud flaked off, sprinkling the carpet. 

I frowned. Lifted the right one up, so I could see the sole. I think that was the first time I really saw it clearly.

It had gone thin, I realised. The rubber had been all but worn off. Where ridged patterns and grooves had been for traction three months ago, the sole of the shoe was smooth, and sort of sandy to the touch. I don’t just mean smooth like the soles were getting old – I mean they were almost gone.

I checked the left. The same. I rubbed the sole carefully. Little pieces of the material crumbled off the edge when I touched it, like eraser shavings.

I rubbed the back of my head, which was suddenly quite sore. I put the shoes back down after a moment and went to bed, and the headache went away shortly, and I did not think about the soles again.

. . .

Summer came and went. I saw the podiatrist at the end of August, because I’d worn holes into my orthotics, and my back was getting bad again since I’d switched back to the original soles. The podiatrist pitied me a little – maybe it was the bum clothes and the state of the shoes, but she offered to get me a new set free of charge. Which was good. Orthotics were a lot of money, and as a university student whose diet consisted primarily of Ramen and Easy Mac and Cheese, I was a little short on that.

‘How long did you say you’ve had these shoes again?’ She’d asked me as she studied them.

‘Only a few months,’ I told her.

‘Uh huh. You hike a lot?’

I shook my head. ‘Not really. I do a lot of short walks, though. There’s a hill behind my dorm. It’s only like, half a kilometre to the top.’ Which was sort of true – the main trail up the hill was quite short, but there were several other trails that intersected with my usual one that took longer routes to the top, and some that went further. The foothills around campus backed onto Sinclair National Park and most of that had been logging land until fairly recently, so there were a lot of forest trails in the area. For all I knew, some of the trails went all the way up the mountains. 

The podiatrist looked at me, then at the shoes. Clearly not believing me.

. . .

I spent that afternoon bandaging my shoes up with duct tape. The podiatrist had recommended it for the heels, which had holes widening to the size of tunnels by now, if I didn’t want to buy new shoes. Duct tape heals all ailments.

The vacuum cleaner was plugged in at the ready next to me. I had to use it every two minutes or so because of all the red dust that kept coming off my hands and sifting onto the carpet. By the end of it, the shoes looked a little like Arjun King did when he dressed up as a robot for the Dorms Halloween Party last year. This was by no means a complimentary comparison.

When I tried on the shoes, they squeaked a little. Not much, though. With thick socks you couldn’t even feel the tape. I looked at them in the mirror. They glinted in the overhead light.

‘Hey, there, Tin Man.’ The voice came from the hall beyond my open door.

I looked up. ‘Oh, hey Annie. Dinner ready?’ Tonight was game night – once a week our floor cooked one big shared meal and got together to play board games (usually accompanied with more than a few bottles of cheap wine) and we had a rotating system to decide who cooked. This time, much to our disappointment, Liam Brautigan was cooking.

‘Not even close. Liam burnt the onions all the way down to the ninth circle of hell. What’s with the, uh… new look?’

‘Keeps the heels from tearing.’

Annie nodded slowly, pressing her lips tight.

‘Oh, shut up,’ I said as the dam broke. She started giggling uncontrollably.

‘You look like Arjun when he dressed up as –’

‘A robot, I know,’ I sighed. The girl’s hair fell over her face like a red curtain as she doubled over. ‘Yeah, yeah, laugh it up.’

‘Sorry,’ she got out between breaths. She brushed her hair back.

I flipped her off, making my way out of the room.

‘Oh, relax, I’m just kidding,’ she grinned, trailing after me. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I figure I’ll go for a walk and go cry by myself for a little while,’ I said dryly.

The grin faded. ‘It’s like, seven-thirty, though.’

‘Yeah, I know. I thought I’d catch the sunset. Test the new kicks out.’ I made a show of flashing the shoes.

‘Jack, it’s late. You’ll miss game night. You’re going to get eaten by –’

‘Mountain lions, I know,’ I waved a hand, already on my way out. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back before Liam’s finished torturing the food, I promise.’

It’s only in retrospect that I can see the way her face fell. I never noticed it back then – or maybe I did, and just didn’t care enough to think much of it.

Either way, I broke my promise.

. . .

I stayed out late, well after dinner had been cooked. I don’t remember if there were leftovers. I don’t even think I ate.

What I do remember from that night – the sunset was spectacular. The clouds had unfurled like red sails overhead, and the sky was a deep, blue chambray deepening to indigo, silhouetting the hazy outline of the mountains. There had been a sort of magic in that light, something strange and visceral and alive in those colours. It kept me up there well after the last of it had bled out into the night. I’ll remember that sunset until the day I die, I think.

August passed, taking the summer with it. Fall rode in on a cold breeze come September and dismounted. It walked and talked and rustled in the yellowing leaves that skirled along the streets, like an amiable stranger who’d paused here awhile between on his long, winding journey across the country. I spent most of my evenings up in the hills with it, walking, watching the leaves change colour. I remember they played scary movies all through October that year in Central Plaza. During study break, before our midterms, we went on a road trip up to the Rockies. We took Liam’s car, Frankie – a beaten-up old Ford that creaked and groaned and whistled the whole way there and back. I think we were lucky to make it back alive.

I’d received my new orthotics by then in the mail. They wore in fast. I had to replace the tape on my shoes about three times, and the third time I ran out of duct tape and used a roll of red electrical tape I found around the dorm. Annie started calling them my Ruby Slippers, and it was kind of funny, at first.

The tape was a very temporary fix. It was rather like trying to stop the tide. It didn’t stop my toes worrying a hole into my right shoe, which I had to patch up, and then through my left one shortly after. By the six-month mark, even I had to admit the shoes were nearing the end of their life cycle. I figured I’d buy a new pair for Christmas.

The days grew darker, and night fell faster and earlier, but if anything I started walking later that season. I went for my walks around six-thirty, seven o’clock, and most times I caught the sunset – other times, the sun was gone by the time I reached the summit, but it was pretty enough to watch the sky change colours even when it was that late, to watch it change from clear ice-chip blue to purple and finally to black over the course of hours. The stars, I remember, were beautiful that Fall. They were always beautiful up there. It was crazy considering how close it was to the city, you’d think light pollution would get in the way. But it didn’t.

I started missing things.

At first it was just little stuff. Movie nights. A date with some girl I’d met in a lit course we’d shared – she was kind of cool and spunky-looking and she had pink hair. I guess she thought I ghosted her, which I guess I sort of did, because I never saw her again. Not in class, not around campus. I missed a few lectures here and there, and I missed more than a few Game Nights – I forgot it was my turn to cook a couple times and that really pissed Annie off. I was seeing less and less of her by that point, the jokes about my Ruby Slippers had gone stale, and when I did see her she was always asking about my walks. She kept asking if she could come with me. I made excuses whenever she asked me, not wanting to offend her – eventually I just outright told her I didn’t want the company. I didn’t do it in a rude way, I just told her walking up that hill was something I did to get away from people. I was going to “recharge my social battery”, is what I said.

Also. The idea of her coming along made my head hurt.

Things between me and Annie really hit a head on the Saturday after Halloween. It’d been another Game Night – my turn to cook. My plan was to go for a short walk beforehand, get back before six. By the time I got home it was full dark, and the full moon had risen slow and yellow over the hills and the mountains behind them. It had etched them deep and smoky against the satin colors of the night, like hard grooves had been cut into it.

I remember reaching the base of the track, blinking as my watch beeped on my wrist. Nine o’clock. I frowned. Looked back to the trailhead.

Had I been up there that long?

When I reached the dorms and went upstairs, Annie was cleaning up in the kitchen alone. She was turned around and hadn’t heard me walk in. Her long red hair formed a curtain that hid the back of her head from view. A small part of me was tempted to walk past her, sneak down the hall to my room, because by now I’d remembered what I missed.

‘Hey Annie,’ I mumbled.

The girl’s back stiffened. She dropped the pan into the water with a splash.

‘Hey,’ she said, not turning around. ‘Have a nice walk?’

‘Uh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Sorry I missed Game Night, I didn’t realise how late I –’

‘We waited an hour, Jack. The stir fry I made was fucking stone cold by the time we gave up.’

‘Look, I’m sorry, I –’

‘You realise this is the third time you’ve done this, right?’ She said. Still staring at the wall.

I frowned. ‘What?’

‘No, sorry – fifth time. You bailed on the Halloween party because you weren’t feeling up to it. You forgot to cook dinner even though it was your turn the week before, because you got sidetracked and came back at like, ten-thirty at night. You said you went for a drive –’

‘I did go for a drive,’ I cut across her, irritated now.

‘Don’t lie to me, Jack,’ the girl turned around. ‘I saw your shoes when you came back. They were covered in dust.’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t remember that. I –’

‘Yeah, you seem to have a pretty big problem with remembering stuff lately,’ she snapped. ‘You’d think remembering your friends wouldn’t be…’

She trailed off after a moment. ‘Jack. What happened to your shoe?’

‘The tape peels fast,’ I said defensively. ‘Anyway, it’s none of your business when I –’

‘No. Jack. Your right shoe.’

She gestured down at my foot. My eyes followed.

At first I didn’t know what I was looking at.

There was a snarl of weeds clinging to the side of the shoe, painted in bright primary colours. The stem was red – bright, garish red, like the colour of my Ruby Slipper tape – and the smaller branches were red as well, but deeper, more of a burgundy shade. The spikes were purple and bloated. They’d punctured the shoe and the tape and had crawled their way up the heel collar – I frowned, noticed my socks had turned a dirty, red-wine shade at the tops.

I stared at the shoe. As if on cue, my head started to hurt. Somewhere near the base of my neck.

‘Jack, where were you walking?’ Annie asked me quietly.

I didn’t take my eye off the shoe. Was it just me, or were the weeds moving slightly? Like some half-dead animal, twitching and curling a little, the way cockroach legs kick slowly after you spray them? The way a lizard’s tail might continue to twitch and wriggle for a little after it fell off the animal, not realising it was already dead, or a spider when you crushed it under your heel and you –

‘Jack. Jack.’

I looked up at the girl. ‘Yeah?’ My voice sounded small to me. Like a young child’s.

‘Jack. Where were you walking?’

I didn’t answer. My headache had escalated past throbbing, now – it felt like there were hammers pounding against the back of my eye, pushing seal out of socket. I looked at Annie, then at the weeds again.

‘I think I need to go lie down,’ I muttered, skirting past the girl, into the hallway. She did not follow.

I fumbled for the key to my room, dropping it once, twice, three times. The third time it landed next to the weeds, and when I bent to pick it up, I could’ve sworn I saw one of the little thorny appendages move, curling towards the key, as if to grab it first. I snatched up the keys, stumbling into my room. I locked the door behind me.

I took off my shoes at the end of my bed slowly, like a surgical operation. I kept my eyes closed. That sort of helped with the headache, which had become much less like a headache and more like all the blood vessels in my brain were popping from the pressure, one by one.

I grabbed one of my shirts, and grabbed the weeds through the protection of the fabric. I squinted as I did this to aim, but did my best not to look at it directly. Whenever I caught a look at it felt like the back of my head was going to split open and spray out a gush of spinal fluid, spattering the bedsheets.

I pried the thing off my shoe slowly, carefully. I thought of cockroaches again, of picking them up out of the corner of your kitchen floor as its little legs pinwheeled on its back, through three layers of kitchen paper. I used my free hand to ease open the window.

Something cold and sharp slid into my wrist. I yelped, and my eyes flew open -

I stopped myself. Gritted my teeth. Don't look down, I whispered to myself, don't look down -

I threw it out. Shirt and all. I felt my stomach flip over as it disappeared into the dark. I heard a dull thud somewhere.

The headache disappeared almost immediately.

I bandaged up the puncture marks on my ankle and the one on my wrist the next day, which I hadn’t felt or noticed that night but had started to swell by the morning, turning a weird greenish colour. They looked more like tooth-marks than they did scratches, like leech bites. I threw out the sock, which had holes as well as stains. I did these tasks quickly and without thought, and I did not look at the sock or my cuts closely when I did.

I told myself I wasn’t going to go for a walk that evening. Even just thinking about it made my eyes ache. I tried to apologise to Annie for missing dinner but she wasn’t talking to me. In fact she just about ran from me. I even tried going to the library to catch up on my study, which had fallen miles behind with everything else, but I didn’t get far.

By four o’clock I found myself at the base of the hill again, wearing my shoes. I had a fresh, clean, unbloodied pair of socks on.

The autumn wind washed over my face like a cold breath. The last reddened leaves of the season skittered across the crooked stairs at the start of the trail. I felt a smile tug at the corners of my lips…

. . .

I walked. I walked under clear, glacier blue sky and the silence of the woods, as if in a trance, and no-one else came near. I remember snatches of the colours, the skeleton leaves and the deep green of the pines. I remember the long yellow sawtooth grass swaying on the open ridgeline. I remember the ghost of a full moon rising as evening set on. A smoke moon.

Just snatches. Moments.

Sometime after the sun set, my watch beeped. I blinked, the trance broken momentarily. Looked down.

11:05, the numbers read. I frowned, looking up at the yellow light slanting through the canopy. Time for a new watch, I remember thinking. I looked back down.

This time, my eyes pushed past the watch, down to the marks of my shoes. I was still walking.

I watched my shoes rise, thud, rise, thud, on red rust-coloured dirt. They made tiny scuff marks on the dust, made vague hints of patterns that were barely there on the soles anymore. I watched them land in another, larger scuff mark.

I stopped walking.

I stooped over to look at the mark, at the print that I was standing in. It was wide and hoof-shaped, maybe two feet wide.

I blinked. Then laughed a little as I realised that of course, it wasn’t a print, because it was too large. Far too large.

Then my gaze tracked upwards, and I registered with no small amount of surprise that I had left the ridgeline, that I was in the woods again. Pines here, full of long shadows. Thick, custard-yellow light left shone through the gaps in the silhouetted canopy above me. The trees seemed impossibly high to me; fifteen, maybe twenty metres high before the branches started. The trunks were mammoth-like, wide and thick and covered in years and years and years of mossy buildup. I finally registered the needles. I had to squint to see it.

They looked... they looked red in the sunset.

I looked down hurriedly. All this served to do was direct my gaze to where the sunlight caught on the edges of the other hoofprints, leading down the winding path. One after the other. All of the marks were quite similar to the one I stood in, so laughably like tracks leading down the narrow corridor through these ancient, impossible pines.

I giggled at my own stupidity. The sound echoed out into the woods and came back changed. A ripple of goosebumps ran down my arms.

After a moment, the back of my head started to throb. I looked away from the hoofprints – they’re not PRINTS, a desperate part of me hissed – and I turned back around.

Twilight sung through the trees as I walked back, and cicadas hummed a high, alien lullaby as I walked back down the path. The trees rustled, moved, shifted, in a wind I couldn’t feel from here, and my mind cast back itself to the weeds on my shoe, the way they’d seemed to move almost on their own.

I started walking faster. The cacophony of the cicadas seemed to follow me down the winding path, in time with the pounding of my headache. Before long the sound had filled my head, and it was all I could hear, that awful howling in the air –

I do not remember when, or by what way, I came back down.

. . .

The shoes broke the next morning. The glue between the soles and the fabric itself split, and when I tried to put them on in the morning the right one tore into two pieces, easy as eraser shavings crumbled in your hand. The left one was whole but seemed in even worse shape, pockmarked with holes and frays that looked like little tooth-marks, covered in layers of rust-coloured dust that for the first time I realised was not the colour of right colour of dirt for Hallstrom County, but I put that thought away because thinking about it made my head hurt. I threw the shoes away. I did not walk up that hill again.

When I graduated, I moved away. I still kept in contact with Annie from time to time. We overcame our differences, and gradually became friends again, though even that I think was on a probationary basis and neither one of us ever mentioned or joked about my Ruby Slipper shoes again. I live in Blackleaf now, as a writer for the Dale County Times. I live with my wife and two kids. It’s only a short way from Hallstrom, about twenty minutes, and maybe thirty-five minutes from the university. Even still, it feels as if I’m a thousand miles from it. From that hill. I haven’t been back. I haven’t thought about the shoes much since, if at all. I think I forgot about it entirely until now. Crazy as that sounds.

But sometime around June this year, I bought myself a pair of new running shoes. I was a bit out of shape and my old shoes were getting on; there were also a few trails by the river out the back side of our house, so I thought perhaps I’d seize the moment and get back into the habit of walking. I got a white pair, a mid-range pair of Sevenmiles I saw good reviews for online. The brandname did not ring a bell. Things were good.

For awhile.

Lately, though, I’ve started missing things. I’ve been walking a little later, a little longer than I meant to. My shoes are wearing in fast, and when I try and remember just where I walked, I come up with just a handful of snatches in my memory, just snapshots. A blue sky. A stand of red pines. Just last night the Wizard of Oz was on TV, and the kids wanted to watch – when the scene where Dorothy picks up her brand-new Ruby Slippers came on my head started hurting so bad I had to go lie down for awhile, and my wife wants me to go see a doctor. She keeps looking at me when I get home from my walks the way Annie did, like I’m some sort of puzzle to solve, like I’m a maths problem that doesn’t add up. Whenever she asks about my walks I just shrug, or change the subject, so now she thinks that maybe I'm lying to her.

And I think maybe I am.