I was walking in the park with my dad when my shoes broke. The whole heel just snapped off. I picked it up and it was made out of bread. Really dry stale bread.
“Why are shoes made of bread, daddy?”
“Why are your shoes made of bread?” he said.
“What?”
“No one else’s shoes are made of bread. Only yours.”
“What?”
“We thought it’d be funny. We can’t believe you never noticed.”
“What?” I was almost crying now. “Why? I don’t understand.”
I sat down on a bench and pulled the rest of the shoe off. It was all bread. The whole thing was bread, except for the laces, which were made out of liquorice.
“I bet your shoes are bread as well,” I said.
My dad just chuckled and pulled off one of his shoes and showed it to me. It wasn’t bread at all it was leather on top and rubber underneath and laces made of lace or whatever it is laces are made of.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why your shoes came from the bakers in a brown paper bag rather than from the shoe shop in a shoe box like everyone else’s?”
“They sell shoes in woolworths.”
My dad just look confused and I was too distraught to explain why that was a justification of any sort and then he laughed and there was a crowd around us now and they all laughed too.
“He’s only just noticed he’s been wearing bread shoes all these years!” someone said and more and more people came over to look.
I jumped off the bench and tried to run away but the crowd pushed me back and I fell to the floor. My dad stood over me and started to crumble my broken shoe over me and then he pulled the other shoe off my other foot and crumbled that over me as well until I was covered in bits of shoebread. The crowd started shouting “BREAD! SHOE! BREAD! SHOE!” over and over again, and some of them started throwing bits of bread at me that they’d brought with them in bags to feed the birds on the pond but the birds would just have to go hungry today there was more important things going on.
I sat up. I looked at my dad and wept his name as he strode toward me. He picked up his shoe from the bench and hit me with it, right across the cheek. There was a cheer from the crowd and then they started taking their shoes off and throwing them at me as well and I collapsed to the floor and gave up any attempt at resistance.
In the distance like a dream I could hear my sister saying, “Mummy, mummy, come and look David’s just found out his shoes are made from bread!” and I heard my mother laugh and the pair of them hurried over but by the time they got there I was buried beneath a great tomb of shoes and there was nothing left to see.
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Notes:
1. Written on February 8th, 2017
2. This never actually went on the undex because it was dead by then
3. But it was supposed to go there