I first saw the shoe lying in the dirt on the bus route I took to work every day. It was a deep brown, darker than the ground on which it lay, and it looked terribly lonesome just sitting there, unloved. I remember thinking how odd it was to see one shoe abandoned, and how odd it would be to lose one shoe and spend the rest of the day loping about with one bare foot. Then the light turned green and I didn't think about it again for a week.

The next time was a Saturday and I was shopping with my friend Lana when I saw it in a storefront.

"Look at that," I said, pausing to look in the window.

"At what?" Lana asked.

"That shoe."

"What about it?"

"Doesn't it look out of place? It's all worn around the heel, and the top is faded and a little tattered."

She shrugged. "Isn't that kind of the style now?"

"Maybe." But that wasn't it. This was the same shoe I'd seen a week before, lying on the road. Not the same style, not the same brand -- the same shoe. Not even the missing half of the pair, which I suppose would have added to the mystery rather than clarifying it. "Can we go in and look?"

"At some old shoe in the display?" Lana grabbed my hand. "Come on, Frank. We have to meet Jake and Beth for lunch." I let her drag me away, but my eyes were on the store window until it was out of sight. Shoes didn't just move from the street to a shoe store.

Except apparently they did.

It turned up again the next day at a job interview I was conducting. The interview was going badly -- the applicant seemed like a nice guy, but showing up wearing only one shoe is a bad start.

"What happened?" I asked, mingling genuine curiosity with a civil compassion. Or something. He looked at me like I was nuts.

"Nothing. What do you mean?"

I stammered. "It's just that your shoe. . ."

"What about my shoe?" His eyes lit up briefly. Metaphorically.

"Never mind," I said. "Let's get started."

He didn't get the job. I didn't get the shoe. But things were definitely starting to take a strange turn.

On the way home from work I noticed it again, this time on the other side of the street, and it was enough to make me start in my seat, causing a faded old prune of a lady to glare at me across the aisle. These shoes -- this shoe -- shouldn't be able to do this to me, I thought. Shouldn't be able to do this.

I got home, where my roommate Karen had left a necktie on her doorknob to show she had company. They had left their shoes outside the door -- four of them. Two pairs. Low-slung black pumps for her, freshly polished Doc Martens imitations for him. And no beaten up brown loafers to be seen, thank God.

In the kitchen I started making dinner, humming to myself until the noise from Karen's bedroom got embarrassingly loud and I had to turn on the radio to drown it out. The squawk from the box was loud enough that I didn't hear her come up behind me, and I hit my head on a cupboard when she spoke.

She came over to take a look at my head. "Jeez, Frank, I'm sorry. Are you bleeding? Do you need anything?"

"No, no, I'm fine," I said, brushing her away. "You just startled me."

"Okay, if you're sure." And she picked up right where she must have left off before my concussion. "So, would it be okay if Ted spent the night?"

Still rubbing my forehead, I opened the freezer door to get some peas. "Hmm? Oh, yeah, sure. Just try to keep the noise down." I found it hiding behind the peas.

"Were we. . ."

"Huh?" Karen was blushing. The shoe was gone. "No, no, I'm just joking. I mean, I'm not joking, but you weren't, uh, loud or anything. Karen, if I went crazy would you start looking for another roommate?"

She shut the freezer door for me and walked me to a chair. "Are you okay?"

I put both palms on the table. "It's just. . . This is crazy." I stopped. "I just keep seeing this shoe everywhere."

"This. . . shoe?"

"It started about a week. . . two weeks ago, maybe. I just saw it by the side of the road, you know, no big deal. But it's been cropping up more and more, now. And it's always this one shoe, this one old brown loafer, and it's always the same one, all alone. It was even in the freezer, for God's sake! What the Hell is going on?"

She put a hand on my arm. "Frank, calm down. I'm not sure what you're saying, exactly, but you just hit your head and you're probably not in the best state of mind right now. Maybe you should like down for a while? Do you want to go to the doctor?"

"No, no. I'm fine. I just. . . Maybe I do need to lie down. I'll be in my room."

"Okay, then. Oh, and Frank?"

I stopped in the kitchen doorway.

"I promise we'll be quiet." She smiled.

That night I dreamt of shoe stores and cupboards and roommates and a small dog named Fluffy that escaped off her leash while she was being walked by a man with one bare foot, and I awoke with a strange clenching feeling in my throat and a rock in my stomach. I was cold with sweat and my feet were trapped in the sheets I must have tried to kick off in my sleep. It was three-fifteen and the apartment was as quiet as it was dark. Only the raindrops against my window broke the silence, with a passing car's headlights flooding the room with shifting shadows.

Had I closed my door, or had Karen done it to be nice? I was still having visions of soft fabric and of stray dogs trailing leather cords from around their necks. My throat was dry and I needed water.

The bathroom tiles were icy against my bare feet but I hardly noticed, and the water was too good, too wet for me to care. I splashed some on my face, washing off the salty film of sweat. That was better.

A car passed by, one cracked headlight showing me. . . No, it was just a reflection of the tree outside. A deep breath, and I went back to bed and dreams of Fluffy.

I didn't see the shoe again for another week, when I came across it hanging from a power line at the end of my block. I was half-tempted to pick up a handful of stones and toss them at the shoe until it fell to the earth, but that idea felt wrong to me. Like I would be breaking some unspoken trust between myself and the shoe.

Not for the first time, I considered seeing a psychiatrist. But the shoe was gone when I came home and any inclination toward seeking counselling disappeared beneath the desire to figure out what was going on.

"I'm seeing it again." "Seeing what?" Karen was sitting cross-legged on the couch in an old flannel shirt when I came in the door.

"That shoe. I've started seeing it again."

"In the freezer?"

"No." That broke my tension a little. "No, not the freezer, at least. But it was hanging from a power line on the way to work."

"And you're sure it was the same."

"Yeah." I paused. "I think. Yeah."

"And why does it matter?" She got up and turned down the volume on the television, came to join me in the hallway. "Who cares if it's the same shoe?"

I hung up my jacket in the closet. "I do. I want to know why this damn thing keeps cropping up."

Karen shrugged and walked back to the living room. "All right. But come watch TV with me for a while. It'll take your mind off things."

So I sat down on the couch beside her and put my feet up on the table, watching the screen around the outline of my grey and green argyle socks. But it didn't take my mind off things. It seemed like every commercial was for Dr. Scholl's, or Gold Bond, or some sort of waterproofing spray, and I kept thinking I saw that damn shoe in every ad. Finally I excused myself and went to my room to be alone.

Okay, I told myself. That's quite enough. You're going to drive yourself crazy.

I paused.

Tap.

It was coming from my window. Well, from outside my window.

Tap tap.

I pushed the curtain aside in time to catch sight of another pebble hitting the glass and falling to the ground. Tap. The culprit was nowhere to be seen, but I opened the window anyway, sticking my head out. No one. But something caught my attention in the tree outside.

"Okay. That's it." I climbed out onto the window sill and then the branches of the tree, which seemed sturdy enough. I was right: The soft brown material, worn and faded, scuffed around the heel. I was holding it in my hands when the branch broke.

It was a two story drop onto my back on the hard packed lawn and everything went red, then black, then more than black. Just. . . blank.

I woke up in the hospital on May 23rd, at 4:17 p.m.

The only other person in the room was in the other bed, asleep or unconscious, and it took me a moment to figure out where I was, to remember what had put me there. How could I have been so stupid? To climb out into a tree was bad enough, but to do it because of a shoe. . .

The shoe! Where was it?

I looked around the room. Nowhere. I tried getting up but a burst of Technicolor bubbles in my eyes convinced me against it. Nothing to do but wait for a nurse or doctor to come and check on me.

It was half an hour before anyone looked in. The nurse who stuck her head in through the door, and then her whole body when she saw I was awake, was nice enough. But there was a mosquito in the room, a small brown speck with a grey aura that buzzed my ear whenever I stopped paying attention to it.

Karen came to see me that evening.

"Hi," she said. "They told me you were awake."

"They must have been lying," I said.

She laughed and sat down beside me. "Just what were you doing climbing out on that tree anyway?"

I grimaced -- from memory of pain or embarrassment of motive. "You don't want to know."

Karen looked at me for a second, then her jaw dropped, just slightly. "No." I closed my eyes and nodded.

"No," she repeated.

"Yes." My eyes stayed closed.

"You didn't."

"Yes," I repeated, opening my eyes. "But I had it. I had it in my hands, if only for a second."

"You're crazy. You know that?"

"Maybe. But at least I know it's real. It was there." The mosquito buzzed from ear to ear around my head and I swatted at it fruitlessly while we sat there in silence.

"So that's it then?"

"I guess. I haven't really thought about it. I hope so."

They let me out of the hospital a couple of days later and I went back to work on Monday. They were all very understanding -- I was careful not to go into too much detail -- and everything went fine for a month.

Then on the first of July the building Karen and I lived in burned down. Nobody died but suddenly I found myself without pretty much everything I had owned, and I had to stay at a hotel for a few days. My room was small -- I couldn't afford much until the insurance was figured out, and even then I probably couldn't -- but it was enough. At least it wasn't on fire.

I had to go shopping for clothes to replace some of what I lost, and on a whim I looked in at the shoe store where I had seen the shoe with my friend Lana. The window displayed a variety of high heels, men's dress shoes, and sneakers, but not the shoe I was looking for. Undeterred, I went in and asked the clerk about it. After some description, she slipped into the back room and came out with a blue and silver cardboard box in her hands. I took the box from her, removed the lid, pulled out the tissue paper and. . . there it was.

"How much is it?" I asked.

"I'm afraid it's not for sale," she said. "It's simply a display shoe. We were using it in a promotion when you saw it, but it's not for sale."

"Oh." I replaced the paper and put the lid back on the box, then handed it back to the clerk. "Thank you," I said.

I came back that night. The stores were closed, the restaurants had disgorged their patrons and only a couple of flickering lamps lit the street around me. They had it in there. They had it and they were keeping it from me.

The window shattered easily, and more quietly than I had expected. No one even noticed me slipping in through the hole I had made. I was careful to shield my flashlight from the outside and made my way to the back room. Thank God for service industry laziness -- the box was sitting on the top of a pile, waiting to be put back where it belonged. I smiled. Soon it would be back where it belonged. Where it really belonged.

Grabbing the box I stuck it under my arm and strolled casually back out through the broken window. Why didn't I think of this sooner? I could hardly suppress a giggle as I walked back to the hotel, and when I shut the door to my room behind me I gave up and the laughter overwhelmed me. I had it. I had it! The goddamned thing wouldn't be able to ruin my life anymore. I had it.

I tossed the lid across the room and for a second the shape of the tissue paper made me freeze. But no, it was there after all, the single brown shoe with the frayed top and the worn down heel. The same shoe that had lain at the side of the road. That had sat in the store window. That had hung from a power line, rested in a tree, hidden in my freezer, snuck into my bathroom, burned down my apartment building. The shoe that would never cast its shadow on my life again.

I got the metal waste basket from beside my bed and some newspapers I had bought on the way home from the shoe store the first time and I stuffed the shoe, the box, the tissue paper and the newspaper all into the off-grey can. This was it. I sprinkled on some butane I had borrowed from my sister and lit a match.

The last of the flames went out as the sun came up. I had watched the whole thing burn, the box the paper the shoe the whole thing and it was a wonderful sight to see the metal waste basket filled with ashes and tiny fragments of rubber and leather. The whole contents went over the railing of my balcony and I smiled. There. My life was in order again. Everything was back to normal and I had nothing to worry about. Except.

Except whatever did happen to the other shoe?

The End

Bio

Jamie Rosen is a writer and musician living in an igloo in beautiful downtown Canada. Previous fiction has appeared on-line in places such as EOTU Ezine and Ideomancer. You can learn more about Jamie at the website Cannot Find Server.