Old Man and Shoe By Tom Whalen

An old man was in love with a shoe but didn’t know what to do. Sex with a shoe, I mean, hey, even sex at my age with anything … but still …

The shoe, by the way, wasn’t his shoe — it’s not like he could make free with it — but the shoe of his neighbor. As to whom the foot the shoe belonged, he lusted after it, too, and with it he also didn’t know what to do for the same reason. Sex with a foot, I mean, hey, even sex with any part these days … but still …

One day at the bus stop, he blurted out his feelings to the shoe, which didn’t know what to do either until the head attached to the foot that lived in the shoe told the foot to tell the shoe what to do, i.e. ask the idiot to marry it.

They marry and move to the edge of town into a house shaped like an old woman’s high-top, which acts as an aphrodisiac to the newlyweds. The old man’s passion for the shoe and the foot and the body to which the foot is attached is insatiable, and soon they have so many children he doesn’t know what to do.

The mind manufactured from the electro-chemicals in the brain housed in the old man’s head reasons the only way to save the object of his affection and their progeny is to do away with himself — manner unspecified — which he does, leaving children scampering riotously in and out of the house’s eyelets, dangling from laces, scraping dirty feet on the underside of the tongue; and in the kitchen, its drawers and cabinets agape, their mother, distraught, exhausted, perhaps even demented.

© 2016 Tom Whalen

Tom Whalen lives in Stuttgart, Germany, where he, too, doesn’t know what to do. http://www.tomwhalen.com

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