1.
Here are your shoes. I only wore them once.
Ever been still, nothing apparent, objects settled around you, and your heart beats off-rhythm and you’re all legs and action? Well, there I was laying quiet, letting the night hold me in its warm mouth when it happened and I found myself out, walking around in it.
I walked past the pizza place, the Y. Past Virgie’s, a conglomeration of burps, muscles, last nights, white skin and beer smiles, a pulsating circle that fell back on itself as I went by. It was too much for me that night, though I have spent many hours in similar places, laughing the hearty laugh, bright in the dim of humming brains.
I can't be certain, but I am pretty sure that even in the low light of the street your shoes showed up and people looked at them. I looked down and there they were, and I nearly walked into a mailbox, smiling.
2.
I stopped at the Dairy Mart, more or less to hear my own voice. Hello, the cashier and I said, almost at the same time.
How ya doing, he said and I wanted to thank him. I put together the intricate movements to buy a pack of gum.
Nice shoes, he said, and before I had a chance to tell him, thanks, they’re not mine, he said, My grandfather was a cobbler. He had a little shop, open early in the morning, closed by two. Nice life.
It’s a dying art, I said. He slapped back my change on the counter like he was angry. Maybe he was.
I don’t even chew gum anymore since the teeth trouble. Still, the solid shape in my pocket held the brief encounter, a sweet gentle weight. I have the unopened box on my nightstand, making its own mark against time.
3.
Outside, this sound. It had been years since I heard it, even more years since I made it myself.
The sound came from a woman and she was gone with it. The shadows of branches moved around her, always missing. She took a breath finally. Her wet eyes opened to the space between us.
I saw grief and myself: an old man with a pack of gum and a key to a dark room in his pocket, in someone else’s shoes. By tomorrow I’d have a blister, my world to consist of a fluid-filled sphere on my right big toe.
Don’t worry, I wanted to say, you’re all right. It will be all right. I wanted to touch her, smooth her forehead, to show her the tulips right behind her all closed up now, and tell her how they’d be blooming like idiots in tomorrow’s sun.
Gum? I asked instead. She moved away from me and I walked, each step closer to the distance.