The Weight of a Shoe by Philippa Holloway

Samuel Walker was driving in to work when he first saw the shoe; caught the flash of orange against the brooding green of the forest. Something bright in the grey of the Minnesota winter. Something different. He braked hard and reversed, worked his unlit cigarette between pursed lips and pulled into the mouth of the service road, bringing the car to rest beside a mound of gravel.

He sat staring through the windshield for minute, letting the adrenalin from the rapid braking burn off. The shoe, an orange canvas sneaker with white laces, was on top of a mound of wet builders’ sand that stood between his car and the saplings struggling for light on the edge of the forest, displayed like a fishing trophy on a desk. He shut off the ignition and listened to the engine cool. He checked his watch, knowing he had time to kill before work, checking just the same.

He needed air.

As he stepped out onto the rough dirt of the pull-in he felt the pinch of his high-shine brogues on toes that longed to splay comfortably in his boots back at the house. He rocked on his feet for a few seconds, then reached into the car, inhaling stale smoke and the last warmth of the heater as he fumbled for his lighter. When he brought his head back out he could smell only the deep wet green of the forest either side of the road, the distant tang of the print works beyond the river, and his own armpits, already moist despite the chill on the air. He closed his eyes for a moment.

He thought of the house as he stretched the cricks from his back.

Thought of the repairs that needed doing, the garden going to seed.

But it was his at least, he thought. At least it was still his.

The damp ground was soft beneath his feet, with hard stones ready to turn an ankle if he wasn’t careful. An access road beside the mound of sand led through the trees and disappeared into darkness. As he walked towards the mound and the bright shock of the shoe he tried to light his cigarette, but the breeze cut the flame down. He stopped a few feet away and lifted his suit jacket, ducking his head low to use it as a wind shield, catching the flame with the paper and inhaling. The hit of heat from the first drag was as comfortable as a sagging armchair. He straightened up and used one hand to button his jacket against the wind that was driving up the road through the valley. Spring still had ice in its teeth. He was skinnier than last year; less hair on his head to keep him warm, less money to pay for fuel now he was paying alimony.

He turned his thoughts back to the shoe, to why it was displayed so proudly on the dark, wet sand. He’d seen work boots lost off the back of trucks, getting oily in the verges, the odd pair of sneakers hanging from a phone line where the kids had been mucking about, maybe drunk. But never a clean shoe placed so carefully, so artfully, on a pile of sand.

He sucked nicotine and looked for the shoe’s partner. Nothing obvious on the edge of the road, no bright colours amid the dark green and brown of the track. His supermarket suit trousers soaked up dew from the grass at the hems as he stalked at the edge of the forest, kicking at clumps of leaves and small shrubs. A truck drove past as he stood with his back to the road. He turned at the sound, as if guilty, to look. Imagining the driver must think he was taking a leak. He hoped it was no one who’d recognise the car, the beat-up sedan with someone else’s NRA bumper sticker still clinging to the rear guard. Enough of those around, he thought, for it not to matter.

There was no other shoe.

He moved towards the one on display, noticed how dry it looked compared to the wet sand and dripping forest. Thought, Huh, and considered feeling it to see if it was still warm. But he’d read enough John Sandford novels to know that he could be contaminating a crime scene, incriminating himself by leaving his DNA on the laces. Skin cells in the wrong place, in the wrong State, could get you the chair. Or the injection. Or whatever the hell you got nowadays. He’d stopped reading the paper and keeping up with such things long ago – replaced them instead with novels where you knew the good guys were going to win regardless of the body count.

He looked around for footprints, clues as to how the shoe got to be perched so perfectly, but the sand was undisturbed by anything other than rain, its surface a moonscape of tiny craters from the drops. The shoe, however, was bone dry.

He finished his cigarette and was about to flick the stub into the long, wet grass, then thought better of it. Took it instead back to the car and added it to the dusty heap in the centre console ashtray.

The ride into town down the straight road did nothing to shake his unease. Sam parked in his usual spot in the lot and locked the car, although he thought no one would steal such a heap of junk, not even to keep chickens dry in a storm. But he locked it anyway.

Kathleen was already at her desk by the time he walked in the side door. He stood scuffing his brogues on the mat and seeing the streaks of dirt they left behind.

Evidence.

He unbuttoned his jacket standing in the blast of heat from the vent over the door, let his face unfurl in the warmth of the office. Kathleen was already checking her face in the compact she kept in the desk drawer. Her hair was piled high on her head and her make-up was straight from the movies. She didn’t look up to call hi to him, but as he sloped towards his office she snapped the compact shut with the click that punctuated his days in the office and rose to fetch him coffee.

He sat behind his desk and booted the computer, checked out the papers in his tray, feeling out of sorts because he was late, or later than usual, his routine broken. He stretched out his toes beneath the desk and thought about the pot plant wilting on the window sill, the trees beyond bursting back to life, as he felt the leather restricting his movements. He thought about Kathleen as she walked in and placed a coffee on his desk.

“Makes a change for me to bring you coffee,” she said, reaching for the empty cup he’d left there yesterday.

“Leave it go, honey, I’ll deal with it later,” he said.

Thought about her ass a little as she walked away.

Thought about the shoe.

His first meeting that morning was with a couple whose house had burned down just as the last snowfall of winter had set hard. He’d visited the property the morning after, seen it dark as a snowman’s eye where the heat from the flames had melted the yard and turned the wood frame home to a heap of soot. The woman had been crying, had pulled a blackened perfume bottle from the edge of the wreck and tried to wash it clean in the snow behind the melt line.

“I just need something,” she’d sobbed, grabbing handfuls of brittle white ice and crushing it into the glass. Rubbing hard until her fingers went red raw and the snow was a grey slush by her soaking knees.

“I just need one thing to walk away with.”

Today he was going to sit them down and tell them they wouldn’t get a cent to rebuild their life, despite their regular payments. A lightening strike is an act of God, he’d explain. All the more rare for the time of year, for the weather.

He sat and thought about God for a while, then picked up the coffee and went back out of his office, back past Kathleen and the click of her mirror, and stood by the window looking out onto the High Street. He heard Jeff and Leonie come in and called hullo to them as they hung up their coats and made small talk. Leonie was good at that. Weather, the kids, what she might make for dinner. She clammed up when something big happened on the news. Jeff huffed in response, replying in his usual series of breathy grunts and affirmations. Kathleen held them together like a mother hen, but one of them fancy ones. Ornamental.

He stared out into the street as it started waking up. Shutters coming up across the way, people leaving the pancake shack after breakfast or with takeout coffee, striding to work. He looked at their shoes for the first time. Took small, painful sips of the still scalding black coffee and noticed how they walked. He wasn’t sure if he was looking for someone hopping, someone limping with one bright orange canvas shoe tied tight and the other foot naked, or stockinged and cold. Avoiding puddles. As the crowd swelled he watched for the uneven gait of a jogger, one leg slightly longer than the other, a stumble as one bare foot landed on a stone and hurt like hell.

He noticed for the first time how short the strides were of women in heels, how carefully and skilfully they balanced and lurched. How their unnatural gait drew the eye to the ass they walked on by. Was that the reason why they wore them? Or just an unwanted side effect of fashion? He thought of his ex-wife’s walk, her fat behind swaying despite the wide sandals she loafed about in. Thought about how he’d never cared that she didn’t wear heels, that she was forty pounds overweight and gaining. It wasn’t those things he’d loved. The pain of her leaving hit him like a heart attack, but duller this time. Duller every time. He didn’t even catch his breath, just felt his chest tighten and guts loosen. He walked back to his office to deposit the half empty cup on the desk before going to the john. He had time before the Mattesons came in.

By midday Sam was on his fourth cup of coffee, standing in his office door and listening to Leonie talking about fuel prices and how it was going to affect her budget. He let her voice fill up the spaces in his head where a woman’s voice was missing. Let her concerns concern him for a moment. He thought about fuel prices and global warming, about the programme he’d seen on National Geographic the week before that foretold a world with no oil, no resources to burn. He thought about mentioning it but knew Leonie’s face would close like a barn door in the wind, that he’d be hurting her by trivialising her worries against the bigger picture, so he thought about it inside instead.

At one o’clock Sam went for a walk. It wasn’t how he usually spent his lunch hour. Most days he’d drift across to the diner for a plate of the special, share a joke with Madison who was young enough to be the child he’d never had. He’d eat and watch her dark ponytail flick side to side as she cleared the tables and wiped the counter. Her smile was like a sharpened sunbeam. Lovely and never really for him. It pierced his heart every time. He never looked at Madison’s ass. Never.

But right then he didn’t feel hungry, felt sick instead from the memory of Mr. Matteson’s tears, the way he’d choked them back while his wife just stared like a painting. Mr. Matteson had been wearing dark blue sneakers. She’d been in canvas slip-ons.

So instead of filling his stomach, he took his nausea for a stroll around town and tried to breathe some of the fresh air rolling in from the river. His shoes bit hard on his heels, made him conscious of his own gait to the point where he wasn’t sure anymore how he normally walked. By the end of the hour his arches ached, and his nose was dripping with the tight pinch of the breeze off the river.

Sam saw the flash of orange out of the corner of his eye on his way home, but didn’t stop. Made a conscious effort not to look that way.

Back home he kicked off the brogues and micro-waved instant coffee, sank into the armchair and sighed. He listened to the hum of the refrigerator for a while and thought about what to eat for dinner. The house was cold, but he didn’t feel like hauling logs in and starting a fire, so he pulled on a sweater and his wide slippers instead. After a sandwich he went into the room he and his wife had slept in for nearly twenty-seven years and began pulling boxes and bags out from beneath the bed. He opened a few to look and rummaged for a while, feeling his guts tighten at the forgotten items they’d once thought worth saving. Near the bottom of a Wal-Mart bag he found a pair of her old sandals, the ones she’d worn all one hot summer and again in the winter when they’d holidayed in New Mexico. He held them in his hands and felt their weight, sniffed them. They didn’t smell of anything. He didn’t bother pushing the bags and boxes back under the bed, just left them on the floor where they fell. Instead he lifted the blankets off the bed where he’d piled them the night before and walked out. He placed the pair of sandals by the door next to his brogues and settled down on the sofa under the blankets, like he’d done every night for nearly a year, to watch the National Geographic channel on TV until he fell asleep. He wanted to get to work on time the next morning, liked to be the first one in, to get the coffee going and have a cup ready for Kathleen when she arrived. The routine of making coffee for someone else, of measuring the grounds and listening to the cough and dribble of the machine fulfilled something in him he didn’t care to acknowledge. He liked to see her smile thanks to him.

He’d already decided to stop at the service road on the way home from work the next day. He indicated and waited for the oncoming traffic to pass before pulling in and stopping the car. As the engine cooled he walked over to the sand pile and stood squinting through his cigarette smoke at the three shoes on top of it. The orange canvas sneaker was still there, still in the same position. But beside it to the left was a ladies court shoe in dark blue leather, creased around the toes and with the heel slightly worn on the inside edge. On the other side was a child’s sandal, almost new. White with a yellow plastic flower on the bar of the toe strap. He stood awhile and breathed a mixture of tobacco and wet tree, damp blacktop and the stench from the riverside print works. He could hear birds in the trees above arguing over their territory, trying to impress the females or protect a nest.

Somewhere deeper in the trees he heard the sudden crash of a frightened deer. Just caught his scent maybe. He leaned as close as he could to the three shoes on the sand pile, screwing up his face in contemplation. It no longer felt like a crime scene, more like a shrine. A cairn. Isn’t that what they had in Scotland? A pile of stones that travellers add to with rocks they’ve carried with them for miles. He tried to imagine the owners of the two new shoes. A lady with a hole in the toe of one stocking, a chipped nail peeking through, maybe. A child strapped into the back of an SUV, crying over the loss of her favourite sandal. He shook his head and walked away.

Sam stopped driving past the pull-in. Took instead the longer route to work, looping out through the next small town, where a gas station that tripled as the local grocery store and café was the only commercial building. He stopped there once to pick up milk for the coffee on his way in, saw on the counter a baby’s knitted bootie beside the Hershey bars and packs of gum. He picked it up as the skinny kid serving him cashed up his milk and tobacco, thought, Huh, and put it down again. The mom would pick it up next time she needed bread, or beer. She’d get it back. It was a small town.

But after work one day, a week or so later, his old routine kicked in, the weight of the day distraction enough to make him follow the old route home without thinking. He had no intention of stopping until he was already indicating. As he pulled in, he could already see the pile had grown. He lit a cigarette and stepped out of the car, taking a moment to observe the heap of shoes on top of the heap of sand before getting closer to investigate. It was a mass of colour and style. A beautiful jumble. He stepped closer. Counted. Sixteen shoes and all them from the left foot. He’d not noticed that before, when there were just three, but now, as he took the time to look at each one, to visualise the possible owners, to wonder if he recognised any of them - if Kathleen would walk in the next morning on one high heel or Jeff stumble through the office like he stumbled through his sentences - he could see they were all from the left foot.

A car hummed by, but he didn’t turn to look.

He thought about the Mattesons.

He thought about Madison and her pony-tail, her quick smile.

He thought about God for minute.

He got back into the car and thought about his ex-wife sitting in the sun and wiggling her toes at the same sky he was still shivering under.

He drove home and placed his shiny brogues beside her old sandals and thought about getting a dog. Dismissed the idea within a second for the long hours he worked.

The next morning Sam set off early. Stood in the service road for a full ten minutes without a single car going past behind him. Two more shoes had appeared overnight, and yet no one was saying anything. He thought maybe Leonie might have seen, was sure she lived up this way, but maybe not as far as him, and maybe it was too big for her to talk about. Maybe she didn’t have the words.

He stood in the breeze from the river and thought about her partner, who he’d never met.

He thought about the kind of dog he would have got if he had the time.

He went back to the car and got one of his ex-wife’s shoes from the passenger seat where he’d placed them earlier. Picked up the left one. Walked back to the pile and found a space to balance it near the top. He thought about that for a while too.

Then he used his right toe to push on the heel of his left brogue. Felt the laces tighten across the bridge of his foot as the heel crowned, and then the release as it breached. The shoe came off and he lifted it, dangling on his toes, to take hold without having to bend down. He put his stockinged foot back down on the dirt, felt the damp from the ground seep in to the wool of his sock, felt each sharp stone embedded in the mud push into his soft flesh. He placed his shoe on the other side of the pile. Stood back and thought about it all for a while and then walked back to the car, his gait uneven and rewarding, getting feedback from the left foot that his right foot sensed despite its leather confines. He’d have to go over to Walmart later and buy new socks, new brogues to wear for the meetings and site visits. But for now, for a while, he could wriggle at least half his toes freely. He sat in the car and felt the brake pedal with the ball of his foot. Pressed it a few times to get used to the change in pressure, in control, from having no shoe on his foot. Didn’t want to get in an accident and have to claim on his insurance. He pulled out onto the long, straight road into town, eased his foot off the brake and let himself go.

………………..

Philippa Holloway is a writer and academic currently based in Lancashire. Her short fiction is published on four continents. Her debut novel, The Half-life of Snails, and her short story collection Untethered, are published by Parthian Books. She is co-editor of the collection 100 Words of Solitude: Global Voices in Lockdown 2020 (Rare Swan Press).

Twitter: @thejackdawspen