Shoes

http://youtu.be/2kVrefwjsfU

The shoe maker didn’t know at first how to go about making the shoes. He often stayed up night muttering to himself about the validity of such a plan, but he was always confirmed in his plans by a voice that he was fairly certain was his wife Helen’s, reminding him not to be home late from work that day. And the sound of her voice aroused in him a new vigor to complete the project, to be on about his business, and he set back to work by candle light, dreaming dreams of his wife and children.

For months he told no one of the project. His store fell into disrepair, as did his house. Spiders built cob webs not only in the cornices, but strung up like beads between furniture and shelf space that he no longer used and that customers no longer traversed. The shoes that he had made during the war were soon forgotten as new wonders like that of flight, or trains that ran on time every time, soon took everyone’s interest. If it was possible to fly over the water in a boat at thirty miles an hour what use was there in a pair of shoes that allowed you only to do it a much slower pace? Besides, two children had been given the shoes by their parents and then left to their own devices at the beach, the parents not thinking that the children would walk out into the middle of the lake and, as a test, remove one of the shoes, and the other child, realizing the parents could see from the shore, that if he didn’t remove his shoes as well he’d just be left standing over his now drowning sibling, removed them as well. The boys both drowned and the two parents sued the shoe maker, who never bothered to show up for court and who was fined a few thousand dollars, so that government officers showed up one day and confiscated all the shoes that were left in his little shop and carried them away.

So now the shoe maker worked in an empty store late into the night, occasionally asking for certain design pointers from the interlocutor, who was probably his wife Helen. He made two hundred pairs so far without getting it exactly right. The last pair had managed the right affect, taking him back in time, but it had only been a few minutes that he’d been able to traverse, and so he kept ending up back in the shoe shop, watching himself put the finishing touches on the shoes and then putting them on, not without giving himself a few pointers on how he could make them more aesthetically pleasing, and just how to shorten the conversation that he was now having with himself.