Legal Theft: Shoes (698 Words)

It’s been said a girl can never have too many shoes (AN: or ‘whites,’ as autocorrect would have you believe), but Adrienne suspected her collection wasn’t what they had in mind.  To be particular, her largest collection were of round metal ones that were nailed onto the foot every four to six weeks.  Luckily, not to human feet, to the four-legged creatures that had occupied Adrienne’s every thought since she was old enough to say “howsie.”  She had started collection the odd horse show she found in the field in the odd hope the farrier could reuse them.  She would knock off the mud, thinking the farrier could bend them back into shape and tack them back on the hoof for another week or two of life and dave her a few bucks.  She would pile the shoes on a wide window ledge inside the barn and there they would collect dust, grow some spiderwebs and eventually completely rust.  Adrienne was thirty-four and had long ago learned that these lonely shoes never would never again be tacked on to a hoof, but still she picked them out of the grass and tossed it on the ledge’s pile.

Even Adrienne’s human closet was a dreary competition, horse clothes easily outnumbering their ‘normal person’ counterparts.  From bras to pans and socks, barn grime coating the majority of her wardrobe, but the greatest disparity lay in her shoes.  Bundled together in a tote bag were two pairs of heels, bejeweled dress boots, nicer clogs, flip flops some rarely-used water shoes and a pair of running sneakers.  The tote was unzipped on the rare occasion she would look uncomfortably out of place wearing some barn shoes somewhere.  Grocery stores and other likewise errands did not get that luxury – if someone minded the faint smell of manure while picking out cereal, they could wait thirty seconds and it would pass.  The floor of her closet, on the other hand, was overrun with summer boots, winter boots, schooling boots, show boots, paddock boots, tall boots and a few back-ups in case a pair needed mending and she didn’t want to dirty her show boots in everyday schooling.  She had muck boots for stall cleaning, cowboy boots for general barn work and rainy day boots to keep the worst of the mud off another pair when the barn yard turned into a lake.

While most of the population might get sore wearing dress shoes or heels for several hours, Adrienne lived her life in a boot heel.  So long as a dressy heel wasn’t too high, her feet didn’t mind, allowing her to dance at a club without the desire to kick out of the shoes and walk home barefoot.  Once or twice however, Adrienne had made a terrible decision to do her day of shopping in her tennis shoes and suddenly the unfamiliar desire to lose the shoes and grab something, anything else to wear was quite strong.  She nursed the bottoms of her feet that night, apologizing for abusing them, promising more comfortable shoes next time.  A passing thought whispered that she might have something insanely wrong with her that hundred dollar sneakers with arch supports, conforming structure and cushioning would make her so sore while her plain, flat-soled, stiff leather boots would let her walk for hours on end.

She waved at that thought as it passed by, stared out the window at the rain and wondered if the mud would persuade another steel shoe to loose its grip.  That old stone ledge was beginning to fill up, out of room for bent nails and rusted steel, but there were other windows, other ledges and she had no intention of ever stopping.

This was my original piece for the Legal Theft Project this round.  I would tell you to go see what was done with my first line, but autocorrect deemed it would not be so, but if you want to see what happens if you turn the word “shoes” into the word “whites,” go check it out at http://apprenticenevermaster.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/legal-theft-flash-fiction-whites-357-words/
Tune in same time, same place in two weeks for another crazy installment of Legal Theft Project without any autocorrect mishaps (I hope)
And yes, this post may or may not be a little autobiographical… okay, pretty much all of it is 🙂