Flash! Fiction by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

16

Shoes

Married, two kids, a dog, and two jobs—Ben was an ordinary guy.

In a crowd you could scan past him five or six times and not notice that he was standing right there in front of you. Around the neighbourhood he was usually recognized by who he was with—

Spots, Ben Junior, or one of the girls.

A nondescript man, an everyman, but a nobody. Got it. Next?

The writing still wasn’t paying, but it would, he said. The other job, selling shoes, was 'research,' he said. It stretched the household income, but more important was that it got him out of the house.

His wife and teenage daughter, who’d read all of his recent work, finally suggested it.

OK. The nondescript man is a writer who can’t write.

Only a few weeks into the new job and Ben had filled several pocket-sized notebooks from the dollar store with bits of writer’s material. Shoe sizes, foot odours, missing/extra toes, corns, bun-ions were of interest in the early pages. By page 11, Ben had moved on to capturing the subtle shades of customer behaviour between the polite and the ill-mannered, the modest and the showy, the parsimonious and the spendthrift, and the carefree and the mo-rose. Moods and attitudes and demeanour Ben cross-referenced with the shoes customers bought.

This nondescript man and failed writer sets out into the world to find something to write about. Next.

But that wasn't the extent of Ben's research. You see, Ben liked to wear new shoes. And he had nearly half of an entire store to choose from. Every day, every lunch hour, he would slip into a pair 17

of new unworn shoes he'd had his eyes on that morning. For twenty minutes—his best estimate of a mile—he would walk, climb steps, maybe run after a bus, and jump over spilled garbage on the sidewalk, always taking a different route.

This nondescript man and failed writer—now a student of shoe store personalities and their footwear preferences—is quirky.

What’s next?

On returning to the shop, Ben cleaned and sanitized each pair of shoes, because his ‘footprint’ was supposed to be figurative and abstract and uncontaminated but equally because he was fussy about cleanliness.

OK, very quirky, but not quirky and disgusting is what we’re supposed to think?

Studying customers as they tried on shoes that he'd worn, he liked to imagine what it would be like to walk in their shoes. On his daily walks he wondered how the new owners of his shoes would carry themselves. Would they walk with a precise, measured and decisive step? Would they walk tentatively, weaving left and right, stopping occasionally to look around? Would they swagger with arrogance and bad taste, projecting an exaggerated image of themselves?

Now we get why this nondescript man is a failed writer. And his failure as a writer spills over into this off-stage compulsion to control real people in the real world. Clever. Next.

Though tempted, Ben never interfered by suggesting the possibilities that lay ahead. After all, he said (to himself), people have to make their own choices. Nevertheless, Ben took pleasure in considering his influence.