Soles

by Kay Brandt

  The racks swayed with the sputtering air conditioning. I did my frightened kid ritual of reaching around the wall for the bathroom light switch before I felt safe about entering. Once inside, I locked the door and caught myself praying to my ghastly fast in the mirror.

  My reflection had taken a drastic turn for the much, much worse. I didn't recognize my disfigured image with a purple and lumpy nose, lacerated forehead, blistered mouth and bruise-covered neck.

  The cold water ran from the faucet, and I drenched my head, drinking handful after bloody handful from the dirty tap. Stripping naked, examining my fractured ribs and the massive bruise spreading across my center, I scoured through the medicine cabinet. There was a bottle of crusty, long expired mouthwash and a small tube of toothpaste that had turned to chalk. Treating the chalk flecks like gold, I finger brushed my nasty teeth then dunked my head into the sink again. The fermented mouthwash was poured through my hair and washed the top layer of grime off. A granule of soap existed on the rim of the sink and was put to use, scrubbing out my rank armpits and musty lower half.

  Feeling fairly minty fresh and mildly gross, I patted myself dry with an overused hand towel and stood in the humidity, praying for the bleeding to coagulate so I could get on with my work and make a million dollars by morning. A million dollars? The words repeated over and over in my mind. Was I really getting paid that large sum or was she just a lying sack of demon shit? I asked myself. What would I do with the money anyway if I can't ever leave the store? Why did I take the job in the first place? What the fuck was wrong with me?

  Too depleted to come up with answers, I decided to once again tempt fate and jump out of the bathroom nude. I stood in the stockroom for a few, loud heartbeats before strutting my naked self through the weirdly warping stockroom. Stacks of boxes, strewn sneakers and the piles of tube socks vanished. The stockroom reverted to its former glory when masters ruled it. Or when madmen ruled it. Either way, there wasn't a trace of Aunt Grace's cheap made-in-China decade. Even the hair on my arms darkened, and scars appeared on my fingers—exactly where Jonathan had damaged his.

  Whispers of Melinda's drunken slurs floated in the musty ether. Her accusing words towards Jonathan, the endless hatred and hostility, wafted over my head as her voice did when I was a child. I saw shadows of various women taking turns on the fitting chair. The walls were cleared of cobwebs, and the coveted tools of the shoe trade were proudly mounted on the wall over the workbench.

  On the bench hung Jonathan's well-worn, brown leather smock. It still smelled of him and I held it close, like a hug from a dead man. Where it came from or how it was placed on the chair suddenly wasn't a question that needed to be asked. Why ask why in a haunted tomb?

  Spread out on the desk were Jonathan's prized collection of tools―the ones I'd been forbidden from touching―laid out for use. The dainty slipper was front and center, glowing with a golden aura, waiting to be reborn.

  Snapping fingers in time with my white boy swagger like a dweeb, the leather smock was wrapped around my nakedness, and tied lightly over my battered hips. It nestled against my chest, covering my mid-section, groin, and the top half of my legs. Inhaling the scent of oil, grease and glue, I felt empowered, connected to my bloodline. I tolerated the pain in my broken ribs from the weighty leather smock like a man, gritting my teeth, keeping a stiff chin.

  “Shoes, it's time to meet your new maker!” I shouted out, sitting my bare ass cheeks down on the woody workbench with a wince, instantly splintered. My balls retreated into my abdomen and I shivered like a freezing dog.

  My rant went on. “Just so you know,” I said to the room, “I'm not into this shoe-making shit at all. I'm only doing this because I don't want that bitch coming back here angry. Did you see the look on her face and the fire thing she did with her hands? Fuck.” And then I got angry. “I'm just doing it for the money! Insta-fucking-millionaire!”

  Disclaimer stated, I let the Orphic energy guide my banged up hands to meet their destination. Deconstructing the shoes unmercifully, destroying the work I'd previously accomplished, I got down to the last embellishment and plucked it out. Nothing was left but the wooden skeleton and leather soles. It was time to rebuild.

  I threaded a long, sharp needle without force and knotted the end. A spotlight from hell shined down on me and the shoe as the operation began. It was seductive the way the needle plunged into the textured fabric, how it pushed against resistance, and punctured a path around the edges, bringing together leather and silk in a harmonious blend. Minute details and ragged seams were mended meticulously. With love I sewed the beads, sequins and added a few rhinestones found stashed in the desk drawer.

  And then, the shoe was finished. The final product was glorious, gleaming with luster and brilliance, like a priceless gem no woman with unlimited funds could refuse. I looked up to the heavens and outstretched my arms. “It's done,” I said, holding back tears. “I did it. I've made my first shoe.”

  “Jonathan?” said a sultry, feminine voice. “I'm not disturbing you, am I?”

  Hearing my father's name called again, I tweaked my neck to see who it was. Shockingly, a third gorgeous female had arrived, wanting the infamous shoemaker's attention.

  “You said I didn't need an appointment,” she said. “You're not busy, are you?”

  A sheer dress enveloped her statuesque curves. The soft tapping of her heels on the cement drew my eyes to the sexy laces winding up her calves, tied with a bow that rested under her knees.

  This vision stirred feelings within my latent, insecure, immature sex drive. I wanted to be with her, feel her, and experience what she came to give... or get.

  “Yes, hello. I'm busy at the moment,” I replied, sounding like an awkward fool—a lot like Jonathan. “I have to finish. A few more stitches and it'll be done.”

  “Looks finished to me,” she said, noticing the obvious.

  Buying time wasn't an option. I had to let her see it happen. The needle wasn't finished with me. It stabbed the middle of my palm, cutting all the way through to the top of my hand, before knotting its thread.

  “Oh fuck!” I couldn't breathe with the soaring pain coursing through my impaled hand, wrist, arm. The needle continued, stabbing through the slipper and tied it to my hand like a button to a shirt. “That's a shitty thing to do!” I yelled at the needle, aimed at my palm. “Don't do it again!”

  I whacked at it with my free hand, but couldn't catch it. The needle was too fast.

  “Jonathan, what's wrong?” Her voice was like a spoonful of thick honey. “Is that my slipper?”

  “I wish.” The needle gashed me a second time, then went for a third, sewing the shoe to my skin. She just watched me bawling and screaming without a care or concern. Her eyes were fixated on the glittery shoe.

  “It looks like mine,” she said, convinced I was lying.

  Finding cutting shears, I snapped the metal blades together manically, threatening the needle, cutting at the thread which couldn't be severed. “It belongs to someone else! No matter how bad the asshole needle wants it to belong to me.”

  Her sparkling violet eyes dimmed, revealing a deep sensitivity. “I'm hurt. You said mine were priority.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “that was said to a bunch of women, but not by me.”

  “I would offer to come back,” she said, “but I don't want to.”

  “No?” I replied, gulping as she came closer, feeling the slipper embedding into my palm. I was willing to cut my own hand off, opening the scissor, placing the blades on my wrist.

  “No,” she purred, “I want to stay and feel my new pair for the first time.” Graceful hands undid her sheath, and it slipped open. I drank in her red lace bra and panties, like an elixer for the pain. “I've been dreaming about them, Jonathan, and I can't wait another day. I'll sleep here if I have to. I'm not leaving until they're on my feet.”

  “I'm afraid I don't know the shoes you're referring to.” Involuntarily, I talked in Jonathan's voice.
“There's only this single slipper.” I lifted my hand and showed her the situation. “And it belongs to someone else.”

  A look of serious upset crossed her face. “No, that is trash,” she stated angrily. “Mine are far more beautiful. Don't tell me you've forgotten.”

  I preserved my opportunity to touch her, and mimicked my father's passive, say-anything-to-please approach. “Absolutely not. Yours are the most important. However, I need to retake your measurements.”

  “What?” she asked with a high-pitched tone. “After making me three previous pairs you suddenly don't know?” Shifting her weight from hip to hip, her sexiness cooled, no longer flirting. “I see. You want me to lay down on the fitting chair, don't you? You're too polite to say exactly what it is you want suddenly? What's gotten into you, Jonathan? You're acting like a stranger.” She winked at me, touching her iridescent skin. Opening her dress wider, she asked, “Is this what you're needing?”

  My legs buckled, caught by her stunning beauty. “Uh,” I stuttered, “I'll be right with you.” One hard scissor slice and the shoe finally dropped from my hands, landing on the bench with a thud. Turning to her, ashamed of my lack of masculinity and boney bare ass, I tried to act cool. Unclothed except for the greasy leather apron, I didn't have a fighting chance. I asked, “So, you were saying? Or asking?”

  “Shhh...” She took me as I was, drawing me in, not bothered by my appearance. My shuffle to her was embarrassing, like a famished puppy prancing to a meaty bone.

  Licking my lips, her allure was suddenly offset, and I stopped in my impish tracks inches from her weirdly vibrating body. I reminded myself she wasn't real.

  She reached for me, and grazed my chest with her glowing fingertips. Her touch jolted through my spine, forcing me to stand straight. She placed my aching, swollen, cut hands on the smooth curve of her waistline. Following her lead, I went a step further and slid my fingers down to her lower back. Soothing circles were traced on my groin as her hips rotated and pressed against mine. I'd never felt anything so magical and I was desperate for more of her.

  If I die now, I thought, I'd go willingly. She's so familiar, like I'd known her my entire life, yet I had no idea who she was. The fear of losing her was worse than the fear of dying. Who was she? I don't remember seeing her as a kid.

  “I was asking if this,” she said with a gentle hip thrust, “If this was what you needed.”

  Warm, luscious breaths tickled my neck and face as she spoke. Her mouth burned a trail over my cheek and then our lips fused together in a fervent exhibit of lust.

  Mind blanking out with lurid excitement, I was sucked into a sickening vision. We weren't making out in the center of the stockroom. I'd morphed into William. My soul rattled with their connection, and I felt their love pound through my heart.

  The ghostly gorgeous woman I kissed as my grandfather had taken me to the fitting chair. She laid there, legs spread open and secured in a lover's embrace around my hips. I hovered over her, lost in forbidden passions, dripping sweat and saliva on her exposed bosom as I rocked my apron-covered groin against her red satin panties. The heat between us was unreal, and my hips gyrated forward and back, lost in a whirlwind of sexual want and need.

  “Take me,” she insisted, exploring under the leather apron, desperately clawing at my thighs. “I'm yours! I give myself to you!”

  Erect and throbbing, I was ready to do what I'd only experienced in horny fantasies, but my penis didn't feel like my own either. It was bigger and very experienced, aimed for entry as she lifted the apron and pulled me towards her. But then I saw a terrible thing—her arms were strapped down to the fitting chair, her hands flexed like claws, flailing against the restraints to break free. It wasn't pleasure on her face, but terror, wailing for the sadistic situation to cease.

  I gasped, my sexual intentions abruptly halted assessing the rapidly changing scenario. Blood coursed down her chest, pooling in her pelvis. Unwrapping her legs from my body, I witnessed her mangled feet and missing toes, the victim of a razor's edge. Scanning the floor, then my own hands, I saw no weapons or mutilated body parts, but the rage I felt inside my gut was real—and waiting to fully unleash. “Oh no, oh no, oh NO!”

  An invisible barrier of time and space prevented me from disturbing what had wrongfully scarred the past. The putrid disfiguring was mine for the viewing, a helpless witness to a horrific crime. Against my will, my hands sliced and diced the lovely woman. Her feet, calves and knees were brutally cut open, and she begged me to stop, she begged William, but it was too late. William had gone too far. He wanted her dead. She bled out and I saw her blood dripping down the side of the fitting chair.

  Silently I screamed. My pain and horror reverberated through the stockroom, and the walls closed in on us, spinning into a tomb of murderous destruction.

  And then an obnoxious bell chimed out, like a noise from a hell-bent vortex calling us home. It was a warning, or a reminder, or something else—I didn't know. The stockroom filled with rays of grimy, yellow light, illuminating giant bugs, and other scary-looking creatures. The light wrapped around the woman like a laser, turning her flesh black as she took her final breath. In a second blast of light, the women was gone.

  Alone in the stockroom, the waves of madness ripped through me. The rolling racks moved, harder than before, and then clanked together like chomping teeth. Observing the lone slipper on the workbench, it twitched and flinched, charged with life.

  Sprinting for the back door, I didn't care about being naked in the back alley, or running through the parking lot or down the block without clothes, screaming like a lunatic.

  But the door was locked.

  Laughing hysterically, spitting, crying, then collapsing in a heap, I drifted off in a sickly, soupy sleep. My head was filled with the eerie sounds of the chimes that had rung out in the stockroom. Kill me, I thought, and take me out, too. I was willing to do anything and endure whatever, just get me the fuck away from the store.

  Nothing came for me, not a sound or spirit. My only comfort was the trail of blood that dripped from the chair and pooled around me while I slept.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “We need to speak to the maker,” three electrified, female voices barked in unison, waking me from my death sleep. Their pale faces hovered over me, like I was a specimen on an alien spacecraft. I heard myself silently pray: beam me up.

  “No solicitors,” I grumbled. “Didn't you see the sign?”

  “Where is he?” One of the bizarre triplets mechanically darted her eyes around the stockroom without moving her head.

  “He's expecting us.” The second identical sister kept her focus on me. Her hazel eyes were vacant, but the rest of her face resembled Jonathan's and I wanted to reach out and slap it.

  “Get out of here,” I replied, rolling onto my battered shoulder. The musty stench infiltrated my nostrils and I coughed up a mouthful of blood. “The store is closed.”

  A low-pitched hum came from them—the kind of sound that causes insanity if heard for longer than sixty seconds.

  “Cut it the fuck out!” I yelled, covering my ears, thrashing on the floor. But the noise upped in volume.

  “We want to meet our father,” they hummed louder.

  “Not again,” I said, kicking one of the psycho clone triplets in the stomach. She released a quick stream of hot air, like a popped balloon.

  “We need to meet the maker!” They screeched together, clawing at me with their dirty French- manicured fingers.

  Crawling away from them, I grabbed a staple gun for protection. “The store is closed, bitches!” I fired a warning shot, popping little metal staples at them with no affect. “Get out before I call the cops!”

  They were undaunted, even as the staples stuck in their pasty skin, and continued to demand of me. “They need to be matched. You need to keep them alive.”

  The stapler emptied itself, and I threw it at them, yelling bloody murder as the triplets laughed in unison. “You need to get out
of here!”

  Suddenly, they duplicated, mass producing themselves until a herd of insane identical sisters filled the stockroom. This was it, I thought, the store's going to eat me for breakfast.

  I screamed and screamed surrounded by madness, outnumbered by demon sisters bent on resurrecting the dead.

  Deliriously, I gazed at the mass of frenzied clones mutating into a sea of seething killers. They grew fangs and turned on each other, committed to a deadly battle. Girl upon girl, bent on total obliteration of the perceived competition, they ripped and clawed, shredding their duplicates without mercy.

  The noise they made was unbearable. My head throbbed and I frothed at the mouth. Zoned out to the sound of their bloody war, through squinted eyes I watched their ripped bodies fall into the hungry jaws of the racks. And then I heard screaming, loud and guttural. It was me, screaming at the site of mismatched boots coming towards me—originals from the hellish eight.

  “Oh no!” I yelled at the boot, “NO!”

  And then my head spun to the side, hit hard by a blunt, hurling object. Cracked and seeping, I held my head, kicking at whoever attacked me. Rapidly losing consciousness, I blinked into the fading light, and saw a twisted but familiar face. It was Aunt Grace, holding a bat, and raising it over me.

  “Auntie...” I called to her. “Don't hit me. I've been a good boy.”

  But she wasn't listening, deaf from the evil echoing in the room. Her glossy fingernails sparkled as the bat came down, and sent me into darkness.

  ****

  Aunt Grace stood by my side, a steely pair of scissors in each of her hands. I'd been put back in my rancid, filthy, torn clothes and my limbs were strapped to the fitting chair. She was talking to herself, mindlessly ranting about me being the evil spawn that ruined her life. “It was for the best, Rolie, I suppose,” she said with a mournful look in her eyes. “If you really think about it, there was no way any of us would've survived if it hadn't happened.” Then she lit a cigarette and puffed on the filter.