These were the sorts of shoes that could change things

http://youtu.be/WU_DAQm79eA

After the war ended, and the boys and men trudged home in dirty shoes, looking for older children and gods or dogs to kick, no one wanted to buy the shoe maker’s shoes. The genius of them had now been lost on everyone. Their craftsmanship seemed silly, a waste of something. War had proved that everything in life was ephemeral. Who gave a good damn about a pair of shoes? Of course, none of this seemed to matter to the old man, as I recall. He went near silent after the wary anyhow, but for a few friends. He told them that he was working on a pair of shoes that would allow him to change the world, or at least, he apparently said modestly, a part of it. After a month or two he stopped returning his friend’s visits, preferring to sleep in the basement of his newly restored shop. It was said by passerby’s that he kept a candle burning all night, and that they could hear him hammering and whispering right up through the sun broke the plain of the horizon.  

Those people who were brave enough to enter the shop during those days were often surprised to hear that the shoe maker was not alone. He’d be carrying on a conversation with someone, softly polishing a brown pair of shoes and nodding along to whatever this person was saying. However, when the people, the brave ones, got close enough to him, it became apparent that he was talking to no one at all or, at the very least, that his interlocutor did not exist. When he caught sight of any visitors he went silent, dropping his work, and staring off into the corner. He no longer met inquiries of people who wanted to buy his shoes, waving them to racks and putting a sign on the counter that asked them to leave what they thought the product was worth.

It was a woman from the next city, where the streets are all paved in lead and the children stay up all night that the shoe maker’s interlocutor had a name. “He called her Helen,” she said. This detail helped clarify for the town just who he’d been spending his evenings with. No one wondered anymore if he had a secret mistress, or an assistant in training who hid in the shadows. No. He’d just been driven insane by the death of his wife like many other weak men after the war. This was a time when séances were on the wane, after a noblewoman had died of a heart attack while talking to the ghost of her dead aunt. Though it was considered odd, that a man should invent an apparition in his mind and call her Helen, at least he had not taken to calling on the house of charlatans. And so he was left alone to craft his shoes in the relative peace of his shop.