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It had existed: a child's sneaker. Half-drowned in crabgrass, its tongue bloated from evening vapour.
On your way home from dumping the trash in the bins behind your apartment building, you fish it up, hooking a finger around the cusp of the heel. You cradle it in your arms like a newborn and leave it on your radiator to dry. Not once do you consider wearing the shoe—no, the shoe, to you, is something completely divorced from the purpose for which it was manufactured. (It’s also almost too small to look at.) You can’t pawn it either. When its fabric has surrendered its moisture and shrunken back into a reasonable shape for a shoe, you clear the middle of your foyer hallway and place it there, reverently, away from all the other shoes by the entrance.
It's there to suffer the lieutenant's scrutiny and subsequent indifference when he's over to compare case notes; the satellite-officer gives it a spiteful little kick out of his path every time he stalks through that doorway. Sometimes women visit, see it (and then everything else), and decide they will leave once exactly thirty minutes have passed.
You don't know why you did it.
You don't know why you do a lot of things. This one in particular you can't escape because you're trying to extract a *why* out of your ass and it's not coming out.
It'd be unfaithful to claim the shoe reminds you of something from the past. It's all endless dark seas there, as far as the eye can see, no landscape, no light, only the brief flicker of a *something* before it dissolves to a warm, wet *nothing .* But it has to be the vestiges of an old habit, some buried neural circuit that fires in the dark. Why else can this happen? Day after day for a few weeks, it is there, and you think of it, the contours of its worn soles, the crumbling faux-suede, the presence of it persisting in the night like an uninvited houseguest. The urge to remark about the existence of the shoe consumes you. You write in the margins of a rent invoice, in small scrawl,
"There is a shoe in the hallway."
Then you leave it in the same dumpster you found it near. The sentence about the shoe, yes, but also the shoe itself. Unlike before, you know exactly why you do this and can list several reasons (e.g. it's a tripping hazard, it smells, it's hideous, it makes people wonder about the child it was once attached to, etc.) What made you bring the shoe in from the cold is not what makes you throw it out.
So then there is no shoe in the hallway, and the satellite-officer frowns at its abrupt absence—plus the shortage of things to kick—and if the lieutenant notices at all, he doesn't show it. The women continue to leave prematurely.
Four hundred years ago, the scholars of the edge of the world believed in a fundamental difference between the forces that built cities and the ones that tore them down. The best entroponauts of that generation would die to that belief, until they stopped thinking it—until they authored their anguish on the handkerchiefs sewn by their mothers or, if the little slips of fabric unraveled into dust and fell through their fingers, had them tattooed on the widest swathes of their skin.
"There is no more shoe."
Caught in a hiccup of grief between dusk and dinner, you scratch this one-line treatise onto the back of an extra fax copy of a vehicle documentation form, in the middle of the blank page. You, marring fallen snow with a line of rhythmless footprints. You, scraping a fingernail across skin dusted with powder. It's a requiem to the Harry that is killed twice for good measure; not only is he erased, he is written over.
The pen bleeds out of ink before you can write "shoe" and it's never written—a knock from your door and you brush the paper to the side of the kitchen counter to make way for takeout boxes (a Value Family Meal's worth of cheese biscuits, but this time not all of it's for you).
You will forget about the shoe entirely, as you will someday do with the tie and the car. When, in the temporal syrup of a distant Sunday morning and the context of a routine kitchen sweep, you stumble upon those four small words again, you'll trace your fingertip over the immortalization of an absence—which in turn is the immortalization of another absence, one of a failed presence indicative of a larger presence that failed, that once upon a time the shoe, which is never mentioned now or again save for a single sentence on a lost billing invoice, inexplicably yet immutably, had been in the hallway. That, by extension, you had undoubtedly existed as well, in a different form and another life.
Vast and cold, this will soothe you like nothing else.