Shoe Town
Glancing at my watch, I saw that it was 6:30 PM, closing time was tantalizingly close, and my back ached from leaning over all day. Even so, the boredom was worse. Sitting around the store with nothing productive to do can get old very quickly, and you can only straighten out the display models so many times in a day.
As I started a gentle stroll around the display tables out front, I heard the bell jingle, announcing the customer coming through the door. I looked up to see a woman in a complicated pink dress, yet not complicated enough to hide the few extra pounds she was carrying. I put on my best customer service smile and dove right in.
“Welcome to Shoe Town, may I be of assistance?” I ask.
“Yes, indeed. I have an event to attend this evening, and I simply must have a new pair of shoes to wear,” she replies. With the angle her chin points at, I don’t need to guess what sort of event, and I get a good idea what sort of shoe.
“Let me see, perhaps something in a black pump? Or is that the dress you’ll be wearing to the event, something matching might be better?”
“No, not this dress. But you were right on with your first guess, with what I’ll be wearing, that will be just perfect.”
“I take pride in my work, miss, it was no guess. Give me just a moment, please,” I told her, and gestured towards the nearest chair on the floor of the shop. I disappeared behind one of the tall shelves and returned in just moments.
With one box in each hand, I stood in front of the customer and took another look at her. “If you would please brae your feet, I think I have the right shoe for your event here in my hand,” I told her, gaining an extra moment. The hair looked done up, but not well. Her short and jerky movements proved her earlier chin-point to be an act. Her initial appearance of sophistication dissolves before my trained eye. I set down the box in my right hand, and shifted the one in my left to the front. I flipped the lid of the box open as I knelt down in front of her. The shoes slid easily onto her feet, just the right size.
“My, these look fantastic and fit perfectly!” she said, with a breathless inflection.
“As I said, I take pride in my work, so would you like to take this pair?”
“Yes, they’re wonderful.”
In just a few moments, the shoes were back in the box, and I was ringing her up. She paid with a credit card, but I noted the conspicuous missing label of any precious metal in the design on the thin piece of plastic. How could she have fooled me at first?
With another sale completed for the day, I felt comfortable closing up a few minutes early. I began the familiar ritual: Flip over the “Yes We’re Open” sign to say “Sorry, Closed For Now.” Shuffle the heavy keyring back and forth to get both the lock and the deadbolt latched on the front door. Head into the back room, shutting off the floor lights, and the lighted sign out front.
The evenings after work are the reason that I still keep up this old shop. I inherited it from my father a few years back, when he succumbed to colon cancer at only 47 years old. This shop was all he had to support the family while I was a kid, and I realize now what hard work it was to keep us fed and housed. I still wish that I could thank him now, for what I didn’t when I was a kid.
Dad’s still with me, though. I never expected what I found in the locked room in the back of the store. When I first inherited the shop, it was a struggle just to keep everything in service, so I ignored the small room that I couldn’t find the key for. I just didn’t have time for it.
Then one day, after figuring out a new method to keep enough shoes in stock, but not too much, and keep them organized in the cavernous shelving system in back, I was rearranging the boxes. I found a key. It was clearly a key from the shape, but I had never seen anything like it before. I set it aside, not knowing what else to do, at first. A week later, when I opened the drawer it was sitting in and saw it, that locked room in the back leapt to mind. That night after closing, I tried that key on the locked room, and it opened the door. That was a year and a half ago, and things haven’t been the same since.
I suppose you could call me crazy. It’s true all the same though: I make magic shoes. Just like my father did. I’m sure now that this is really why my father left me the store. Even with all the hassle, being your own boss is nice, but it’s nothing like the magic room in back.
I don’t think my father wrote the book. It took me most of a year to figure out how to read what little I can now. It seems like a school textbook, the early pages contain the basic material, surely not by accident. If I hadn’t been able to get started, realize and believe what this book was on the first day, things might have happened much differently. But I could, it was written that way on purpose. The pictures helped a lot, but they only last through the first quarter of the book or so, and are few and far between by that point.
There was even a complete pair of shoes lying right next to the book, and I quickly realized they matched the picture by the first set of instructions. Dad must have wanted me to have a head start, as always. If the book itself enough wasn’t enough to convince me, that pair of shoes would have done it. They looked completely ordinary. They felt completely ordinary. When worn, they still seemed completely ordinary. But they protected the wearer’s feet, from just about anything. Sitting on the table, they were just leather and rubber, light and pliable. They still felt that way on the feet. Try as you might, though, you would never be able to hurt my feet while I’m wearing them. I tried everything I could, even slamming the door on those shoes, and I never felt a thing.
It’s almost like each separate chapter is written in a new language; progress as I work through is terribly difficult. It took a few months, but I managed to work myself up to the next set of instructions; I built a pair of shoes that let me run faster than any olympic sprinter. Don’t be surprised that you haven’t heard of this before. I knew immediately that letting anyone at all know what went on in that back room would be the end to my adventures. Surely that’s why the lock took that strange key, which I now wear permanently around my neck.
Since then, progress has continued slowly but steadily all the time. Of course, I have to run the store during the day, so it is only on the weekends and evenings that I can dedicate to my extracurricular activities. By now though, I’m convinced that one day I’ll be able to build a shoe that will let me find my father, and thank him for everything he’s given me, while he was alive, and in this special store. It’s long overdute, and I’m going to work through that book until I find out how.
Prompt: Sunday Scribblings #6. (Artistic license: this story is about shoes, not my shoes.)