Fred Aiken Writing

November 4, 2022

Weekend Down a Hill

the war path of childhood etches itself into skin
that never wants to fully heal

and looks sunburned whenever examined up close
what could be melanoma, but i’m no doctor

i think, though, that it should probably be look at rather than covered
up in long sleeves soaked in someone else’s blood

dripping down the sidewalk where skateboards pile high
into a mangled pyramid reaching out to an undefined zenith

pointing feverishly at power point slides meant to capture youth
and show the future, or a past

riding as fast and demurely as possible down a hill that redefines gravity
until the moment stops…and bones tear asunder

November 4, 2022

Green Shoes

“Do you have these in green?”

    “No.”

    “But you didn’t check.”

    “I don’t need to. I’m confident that during my last inventory check that there were no green pairs of those shoes.”

    “But how can you be certain?”

    “Because I know this store….a helluva lot better than you.”

    “What?”

    “Nothing. Is there any other pair you’d like to try? I’m certain we’ve gone through every single pair of shoes in this store, but if there’s a pair that you’d like to retry, then I’d be happy to go in the back—”

    “You only go in the back for a cigarette break.”

    “That’s not true. I’m looking for the item that you requested.”

    “But then you always come back up smelling like an ashtray.”

    “That’s Hubert, another one of my esteemed colleagues. He takes his breaks back there. All of them. Especially his smoke breaks. There’s no way to get the smell out of the store.”

    “So essentially you’re saying that you don’t have these shoes in the color green, and you’re not going to go into the back to check?”

    “Affirmative.”

    He had the defensive body stance of someone in retail that had worked far too long with far too little patience. I could tell he wanted to yell, scream, and kick me, maybe in that order, but then again I shouldn’t pretend to know another person’s creative process.

    I knew they didn’t have any green shoes. I knew it before I walked into the store. Truthfully, I don’t think I would enjoy green shoes. I wouldn’t be able to tell if they were dirty from mowing the lawn. I feel like I might be the type of shoe wearer that would get a particular color shoe, and then experience a series of unfortunate, yet unavoidable, messes that would ruin the shoe’s color.

    But if I’m being perfectly honest…I saw Bob’s suicide note. I knew he was on the verge of something that he would regret. Or at least I assumed he’d regret. Can a corpse regret anything? Perhaps the soul can.

    Either way, I took in on as my duty to ensure Bob didn’t go through with his plans to commit suicide. Even if that meant spending all day asking him dumb questions about green shoes.

    “Would you guys be able to custom order these shoes in the color green?”