The Perfect pair of shoes

And if it weren't for the word, I don't know where I'd be. Not that word. Any word, though some are better than others. The word of velvet the word of stone the word of brittle yellow pages. The dust and the bone ash and the fine root hair. You think someday the sun will break, it will blow out, rain shards of egg-colored Bakelite. This sun of broken green bottles and clear glass, the dried up Wild Irish Rose, smelling of angry bees. This sun of enormous slides and swings and filthy chained tires under 395, the highway. Brick and algae, mold and slate and slugs, the things that give deceitful comfort in memory’s hard-spiked box, this shattered sun plinking and rattling, cooler than you'd expect, a dirty yellow hail slowly turning black, tumbling us into blindness, drifting under ten thousand typewriter keys, nothing but word dust after all.

And then it seemed that life should consist of more than chewy brown loogies, like lung dust wetted with worm jizz and worked into a gritty paste, so I quit smoking. It's Saturday afternoon and my wife is dreaming. Paint her with cinnamon and paint her with oil. An accident of limbs and breath. Pile her high with rabbits, the deep fur and bright eyes. Bring her the fresh, sharp sheets and smoothed off regrets, I wish I could. I wish I could bring her, right into her dreaming, bring her a dolphin riding a manatee. I wish I could bring her the perfect pair of shoes and leave them where she would find them. I mean the perfect pair of shoes.

Of course they will have style, style too fresh and original for my words to describe. But these shoes will also make her feet smell like fresh strawberries and feel like liquid satin on clean, soft skin bathed in spring sun, rolling, limbs akimbo just after. These shoes will match every item of clothing in her closet. These shoes which I would sneak into her dreaming will be on sale. There is only one pair and it fits her--both feet, each shoe. Every other pair was destroyed by funky dream fire. These shoes she will find and bring home from her dreaming to flaunt, these shoes will make me eat my words. "You did," I will say. "You found them. You were right. The perfect pair of shoes." "And they were on sale," she will say.