Writing Workshop

Two weeks back The Mr came home early from work and I rushed to our local Barnes & Noble bookstore for the weekly writing group. Alas!They had disbanded months ago and I returned home quite crestfallen. Somehow I thought meeting my long lost friends would help resurrect the dormant writer.

I came back and found a few short stories I had written at my last few visits, as late as Feb 2007. To appease my broken heart, I shall post couple of them and assume I wrote it just now :p

Prompt: Write a scene in which shoes figure prominently.

The Shoe Fairy

Did you know you could see a person's entire life just by looking at their feet...their little dreams tucked behind their worries, their fears and their prejudices, all as clear as the overgrown toe-nail?

In my twenty years I've seen them all. Like Rajammal, the English teacher at a famous school in the city. She came to me every fortnight to mend her sandals...Sandals that were an imitation of the original, bought from one of those dime-a-dozen pavement stores that have cropped up all over the city. Bad leather that bit into her flesh as she ran to get onto the 7.40 A.M bus, already brimming with half the city in it.  

By now there were more stitches made by me than by the original shoemaker. I asked her to throw it away but Rajammal insisted there were few more lives in them...her tired smile telling me what she left unsaid. Money that could be saved and used elsewhere.

Then there is Vikas, the neighbourhood Romeo. Oh! He never sets foot into my shop, but would instead park his bike under the tree and stand on the pavement waiting for his girl. One look at his shoes with those funny check marks, I knew this was a boy who knew no struggles.

I always knew Vikas' girl had come by the click of her heels on the stone. I've always wanted to hold those shoes in my hands, feel the softness of pure leather, admire the workmanship that crafted those wonderful straps...straps which elegantly caressed those feet. How did one maintain balance and grace while walking on such thin heels?

Every month those feet were caressed by a different pair of shoes; flat-heeled red shoes in March, those chocolate brown sandals in April, embroidered silk shoes I never thought existed but in story books...she had them all. 

Then one day, those feet entered my shop...my gunny sack covered floor with a tarpaulin for a roof shop, my two-by-two pavement shop...the Shoe Fairy entered it. I looked up at her face as she dropped a plastic bag at my feet.

"Amma wants these fixed" the angel said.

I opened the bag and the worn out, brown sandals of Rajammal stared right back at me.