Short story: She Wore These Shoes By Karl Whitney - - - - We’re sitting there, talking: she about how we can’t go on like this, me about why we must go on like this; and during our conversation, this talk we are having – what she meant when she rang me at work and told me ‘we need to talk’ – we never really look at each other unless it’s to stare directly into the other’s eyes. Until she says that she’s leaving, and then I look at her feet. She wears pink coloured canvas shoes – Kangaroos – which I hadn’t even noticed until now. A week or so ago, in the evening, we were walking through the town and we passed a shoe shop, closed, but with the display in the front window still illuminated to attract passers-by. Walking arm-in-arm, she shepherded me towards the shoes and told me how we would go and buy them the next day, together. How they were shoes she wanted and wanted badly. The next day came and went without us making our trip to the shoe shop. We had woken up and got into a fight – silly, over nothing, tensions that were there already making us snap at the least provocation. I threw a cup, she threw a plate; we parted. Now it’s the next day and she’s coming through the front door with a bag under her arm. I had been at home all day, watching bad television and trying to cook some food for me, for her. In the bag, the pair of shoes we were meant to buy together. She tells me now that she knew things were going badly for awhile, but something made her hope that things would get better, that she could find that spark between us that had been missing for so long. I touch her and she’s touching me and it feels like a funeral, only our bodies are still warm and I’m not sure, in this metaphor, who the corpse is. Now we’re standing up from the couch and we’re organising when and how to divide up our stuff and, in a way, we’re both beginning to think about the future. I stare at her shoes. I look at mine, grey and trampled from overuse. I look at hers, brand new and radiant. I think about buying a new pair of shoes. -------- Stories | Home | About This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.