The perfect shoes were finally on sale. He ordered them while standing over his bathroom sink. In the time it took the shoes to arrive, a windowpane popped from a decaying frame, one cabinet knob dropped half an inch lower than its mate, and the kitchen floor grew filthy. He thought about what to wear to the office the next time he worked in-person.
On shoes day, he grabbed the box off the patio and saw a wood frame rising from the construction site next door, jail bars through his postcard-sized view of the water.
It’s a ritual. He sits on his bed, facing the mirrored closet door, and slices packing tape with kitchen scissors. He holds the box and enjoys the weight. Opens it and smells sharp rubber. Feels the pleasant scrape of rough canvas. Sun through the window gleams off the polished midsole. Sun through the window backlights him before the mirror, a silhouette in the new shoes. A silhouette in the shoes again.
He had a pair when he was twenty-nine. Walked to the train on the way to grad school. Ditched ‘em when he moved to an apartment that didn’t have a wooden fire escape.
He had another pair when he was thirty five. Remembers his newborn’s milk-foam spit-up sinking into their criss-crossed laces.
Had a third pair at thirty-nine. Has a picture of them in the step-and-repeat at an overwrought preschooler birthday thrown by some dicks who worked at Google. Everyone in L.A. has a side hustle and he remembers asking Google Dad what he does when he’s not working. Google Dad looked mystified by the idea of not working, then became an Air BnB scammer a couple years later. They stopped speaking because Air BnB drives up rents and the silhouette was yet to buy a condo. Just shoes.
If he wears the shoes he can be twenty-nine. He can be thirty-five. He can be thirty-nine. He can look at a photo of himself and not guess the year by his outfit. He can be timeless. He’ll have a uniform. He’ll have style. He’ll have taste that’s only perceptible if an X-factor compels someone to look twice. All of this worry over the shoes will make him look like he got dressed without thinking. He’ll be effortlessly chic. French girl.
Hammering from the construction site pulses through the window. Sun toasts the silhouette’s neck as he shoves the shoes in the closet. He’ll wear them again at home, relishing the time when they’re his to consider and he doesn’t have to sit with the guilt of putting energy into this instead of the window frame, the cabinet, the kitchen floor.
During summer, he’ll unearth the shoes from the depths of his closet and it will pack the same rush as tapping Complete Order. He’ll wear the shoes when the weather is hot and his steps are lighter. He’ll wear the shoes with the second pair of khakis. He’ll wear the shoes with shorts after he covers up the bad leg tattoo. He’ll wear them to a theoretical event where he sits more than he stands and doesn’t have to leave to walk and cram breaths into his chest.
Back on the patio, in old clothes and pool slides he actually wears to the pool, he wipes construction dust from the seats of his family’s bikes, the chair the old owner left behind, the janky fountain the HOA was dying to install. A neighbor passes by with his dog, asks what he thinks of the new fountain, says the fancy condos next door will be good for property value. The silhouette tells his neighbor he liked the open space before the fountain. Finds his shoulders rising at the water’s incessant trickle. Worries about the renters down the block getting priced out. Wants to take his first sip of coffee watching bruise-purple dawn spread across the gleaming black harbor. But feels tone deaf for complaining when he owns property near the salty California water and has unworn shoes lying in wait.
The neighbor compliments the socks he bought when he missed his father then follows his dog away. The silhouette wipes silty dust from his phone screen and sees that the shirts have shipped. Oh, he ordered shirts in the middle of doing dishes, wiped soapy hands on his apron while the cutlery soaked. If he finds the right shirts he can always wear those shirts. And when he wears the shirts he won’t have to think about shirts and can worry about something else. The hammering is too loud. With each blow, his brain bumps his skull.
He likes working on-site because he can lay out his clothes the night before and can’t change his mind in the morning without waking everyone up. During his two-hour commute, he runs one hand down the sweater’s front while the other hooks two fingers under the steering wheel of his 2008 shitbox. The sun rises over the Porsche dealership by the freeway in Irvine. At work, he spends the day alone in his windowless office.
Three years ago, he wore a band shirt to the beach. A normie dad friend asked him what it was. He never felt less ready for life than he did while sheepishly describing French punk to a really nice man in a polo shirt from Kohl’s.
When you’re in the shower alone you don’t have to wear an outfit and you can listen to whatever you want. He’s doing just that when the French punk cuts off and he sees the doorbell app lighting his phone. He soaks the bathmat hopping out to swipe the delivery driver in. He retrieves the package in his bathrobe. The fountain rushes. There’s no hammering. His mind’s bumpy and sun-dappled, a plain of those oval-shaped ice cubes they used to put in Cokes.
The ritual takes place after the cocoa butter sinks in. The shirts are weighty to the point of surprise. Stitched in a way that feels endless. Confident that his body is dry, that it won’t make the clothes too clingy, that his lotion won’t smudge the cotton, he pulls on the shirt and it doesn’t touch his gut. He pulls the closet door closed and stands before the mirror. The light in the room is mellow and indirect, drizzling over him. The construction site is silent. The completed condo building looms outside his window, shiny, empty, eight-bit. And before the mirror, he sees a face from now in clothing from the past.
***
Chris L. Terry is author of the novels Black Card and Zero Fade, and co-editor with James Spooner of the literary anthology Black Punk Now. Terry was born to a Black father and Irish-American mother and is a Lecturer in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego.
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image: Chris Kubik Cedeño https://www.flickr.com/photos/chriskubik/
@ckcwrites
Rejection Letters 