Of Orphaned Boots and Other Things

It was his night to have the kids, and Tim was determined to make this one count. He’d been losing them lately. Once a week wasn’t enough time to feel connected.

So he took them to the beach. It seemed perfect—fun, yet unstructured enough to give them time to talk while playing. The kids always wanted to go to a movie, and that hadn’t been helping.

Unfortunately, work ran late, and Tim didn’t have time to go home and change before he picked them up. When he told them the plan, his daughter sneered.

“You’re going to the beach in jeans and work boots? Nice.”

She was 13, which was probably part of the problem.

His son—ten, and easier—liked the idea, so Tim forged ahead. When they got to the water’s edge, he stripped off his boots and socks and rolled his pants up most of the way to his knees.

His daughter rolled her eyes. “Embarrassing.”

But once they started splashing around, they seemed to have fun. The kids got their shorts and t-shirts soaked, and while Tim had a fleeting thought of how mad his ex would be about that, he didn’t worry about it too much. They were enjoying their time together and actually doing it together for once. That was the important thing.

He did worry, though, when it came time to leave, and he discovered one of his boots was missing. He dragged the kids up and down the beach looking, but it was gone.

Shit, he thought, but didn’t say aloud with the kids there. Those were expensive boots.

“Why would someone steal one boot?” his daughter asked.

“Maybe one of those big birds took it,” his son said. “To make a nest.”

Tim said, “It could have washed out into the water.” They spent some time staring out at the waves, but if the boot was there, it had already sunk or floated too far away to be seen.

“Well, come on,” Tim said. “It’s getting late.” He had a spare pair of boots he could wear to work tomorrow. Not as good, but they’d do. He scooped up his socks but left the orphan boot lying on the sand.

“Aren’t you going to take that one?” his daughter asked.

“No point. Not much I can do with one boot.”

As the kids got in the truck, Tim thought about the next family to come to this stretch of beach. Why would someone leave one boot? the kids would ask.

Because things never work out the way you expect, Tim thought, and he drove his kids back to their mother’s house. 

Crazy

Her children thought she was crazy. Her friends—well, acquaintances would be more accurate—thought she was crazy, too. But her children were grown with lives of their own, and the fact that she had second thoughts about referring to her friends by that name told her she wasn’t required to take their opinions under consideration.

Her husband’s opinion would have mattered, but his death two months ago had sparked this crazy venture, anyway.

So Martha bought a VW van, chose not to renew her lease, put her things in storage and took off to see the country.

The idea had been simmering beneath the surface for years. She’d married young, had children young and had missed out on the adventures young people were supposed to have. She’d talked with her husband about getting an RV someday, and he liked that idea, but she knew, somehow, that wasn’t really what she wanted. RVs and RV parks were accepted retirement adventures. She wanted something even crazier.

When she set out in her van, she had no itinerary, no reservations and no plan. She would start by heading west—that was all the planning she’d done. When she was hungry, she’d eat. When she was tired, she’d sleep. When she saw something interesting, she’d explore, whether that took two hours or two weeks.

“And what happens if your van breaks down?” her daughter asked. “What happens if you can’t find a safe place to park? Are you crazy, Mom?”

Yes, she supposed maybe she was. And she liked it. 

Mirror Image

Carol was fascinated by reflections. It started with a childhood trip through a mirror maze when the circus came to town. She’d mocked the thing when she was outside—a real baby attraction for sure—but it became a different story once she was in there.

She got separated from her mom and brother. She could see them—could see two and three of them. Each time she ran forward, though, she just smacked into glass. She came close to real panic before her mom finally put a hand on her shoulder and said, “It’s tougher than it looks, isn’t it?”

Ever since then, she’d been unable to pass by a mirror without stopping to stare into it. Storefront windows became whole other worlds when the sun was at the right angle. Lakes were her favorite, though. Lakes not only made reflections, they made reflections she could dive into.

When Carol was underwater, she thought about the reflection on the surface above her and felt she’d actually stepped through the looking glass. She’d broken into the world on the other side of the mirror maze, the one where her mother and brother had hidden from her so long ago. Sometimes she made a game of seeing how long she could hold her breath. She liked to stay down long enough to be sure the water over her had settled and stilled to show reflections again.

There weren’t many opportunities for the breath-holding game now that Carol was an adult, but she still paid attention to the reflections. There was a bridge she drove over every day on her way to work. She always watched her car’s reflection race along the water beside her, and she wondered what it was like in that car, the one hanging under the bridge rather than over it, the one filled with icy lake water.

It might have been an accident. It might not have been. She might have been paying too much attention to the reflection and too little to the road, or she might have had a momentary lapse of sanity. Perhaps the reflection itself had cast a spell over her. In the crazy few seconds between the time Carol’s car slammed into the guardrail and the time she realized she was going over, Carol was as surprised as if another driver had crashed into her. Except no driver had. She couldn’t blame this on anyone but herself—or her mirror self.

The car filled with water. Carol fought to get out, but even as she fought, another part of her mind wondered what it would be like once she couldn’t hold her breath anymore and she truly became her mirror self. What would it be like to exist only as an image, something to be seen but not touched, something only half real?

That’s what ghosts are, she thought. They’re reflections. I wonder what the mirror is?

She stopped fighting to get out. She realized she couldn’t wait to step through. 

Still Here and Heading South

It was a useless exercise—he knew that. No one would ever see his name because no one existed. He was the last person on earth.

He didn’t understand how it had happened. There was no bomb, no apocalypse, no mass disease. He had simply woken up one morning to discover every other person had vanished. Over time—and there’d been 126 days of time so far—he’d begun to suspect it was really the other way around. Somewhere, on the real earth, he was the one who had mysteriously disappeared in his sleep. Maybe he’d slipped into a parallel universe. The police had probably quit looking long ago, and his family was probably starting to give up hope. Meanwhile, he carried on here. Alone.

It could have been worse. He was lonely, of course, and he had no electricity. But all the inanimate objects had stayed here, so he had plenty of canned goods to eat, and a bicycle to get around and bottled water to drink. He wouldn’t die unless he chose to make it happen. The jury was still out on that—so far he was okay.

Plus, he had meaningful work to do. It might have been useless, but it felt meaningful to him, so that made it important. He wrote his name everywhere he possibly could—on the sides of buildings, on sidewalks, in the sand. He always wrote the date with it, and a brief note about which direction he planned to go next. It wasn’t likely anyone else had slipped into this parallel world with him, but it was possible. If so, he wanted to make sure they wouldn’t miss each other.

Even if there was no one else, the work was important. He still existed. He wasn’t gone. His name was a way to proclaim that.

James Kincaid. 9/16/13. Still here and heading south.

It was enough. For now, at least. 

A Fair Trade

Tommy was a giant, but he was a very little giant—just now four years old. As such, he was always forgetting things and doing things wrong.

Like his blocks. He knew it was important to pick them all up before he went to bed. The end of the giant day was the beginning of the human day, and if he left his blocks lying around, a human might find them. He knew that. But no matter how hard he tried, it seemed like there were always four or five that got away from him and he forgot to go looking for them.

“You’re going to lose those blocks, Tommy,” his mom would say. “Some human’s going to think they were made for him, and you’ll never get them back.”

“I know, Mommy,” he’d say. “I’ll be careful.”

But he was four years old, and it was hard to be careful. One day it happened just like his mom said it would. Tommy got up in the morning and found that some of his blocks were missing. He discovered them cemented to the ground by the unbreakable bond that happened when a human found a giant object and used it for himself. Humans had built a tiny playground beside Tommy’s blocks. They were lost to him forever.

“Don’t come crying to me,” his mother said. “If I told you once, I told you a thousand times.”

Late that night, Tommy snuck out of bed to spy on his blocks. A man and a little girl came to the playground. They were so tiny Tommy could crush them—except he couldn’t, of course. Giants couldn’t touch humans.

The man sat on one of Tommy’s blocks while the girl played on the swings. Then she came over and climbed around on the blocks while the man told her to be careful.

“They look like a little giant kid left his blocks lying around, don’t they Grandpa?”

Tommy made a fist. So give them back, he thought. But he couldn’t say anything.

The man laughed. “You’ve got quite an imagination there. I’d hate to be standing around when one of those block towers fell over.”

The little girl chewed on her lower lip. “I bet he’s sad we took his blocks.” She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a handful of tiny objects. “I’ll leave him some of my marbles. That way it’s fair.”

The man laughed again. “You’re a card. You sure you want to leave those?” She nodded, and he said, “Okay, then. Let’s go get some lunch.”

Once they left, Tommy snuck out and picked up the marbles she’d left. He had to pinch them between his fingernails they were so tiny, and he’d never be able to use them for anything, but having them made him happy. He went home and put them in a bowl on his display shelf.

He slept well that night. Maybe humans weren’t so bad after all.