Those Red Shoes

The shoes had been there in the tree for as long as anyone could remember.

        He laid beneath the oak tree, staring up at the old tennis shoes swaying back and forth from their laces.

They had been there as long as he could remember. Almost everyone in the town had tried to climb up and get them down over the years, but to no avail. They always happened to be on a branch ever so slightly too slim for whoever wanted to get to them.

And so they became a local legend. The red, grimy tennis shoes in the old oak tree that nobody could get to. The location was such that it would be too much trouble to drive a truck or carry a ladder to get them down, and by this point, nobody wanted to. The shoes had become as much a part of the tree as the leaves or branches.

And so they swung there, in the breeze.

He wondered who they had belonged to. He’d asked once, when he and his family first moved to this town. He had been exploring, looking for other boys his age, when he’d come across the tree and the group of kids trying to climb after the shoes.

He’d not received a particularly satisfactory answer. One boy thought they must be some prank by one of the parents in the town (even though they’d apparently been there longer than that). Another said they were from some guy who’d been famous and wanted to test people who came after him (this seemed to be the majority opinion of the adolescents in the town). One girl, a sister to one of the boys, had suggested they might be a fairy’s shoes made bigger by magic, but was laughed down before she ran away crying.

He wasn’t sure what to believe. So he sat there, and watched others try and fail to reach the coveted tennis shoes, but always wanting to climb up once more, because this time they’d grab them for sure.

Years passed, and the shoes continued to swing, never seeming to grow any grimier than they already were. Storms had no effect on them, and even when the oak tree was hit by lightning five years previously, both the tree and the shoes had survived.

He had taken to spending most fine days beneath the tree, listening to the leaves rustle in the ever-present faint breeze, noticing how the light flickered between them and hit the shoes in that specific way unnameable to all but a few. Yet something was different today. Without removing his eyes from the shoes, he pulled out a sketchbook and began to draw, adding a narrow pencil stroke there and a wider one there. 

He found himself wishing he had watercolors, so that he could capture the exact shade of grimy crimson red that stood out among the vibrant green summer leaves. Looking down at his finished work, he found himself surprised by the sketch he had made. He wondered if the little girl from years previously had been right �" were these fairy shoes, enhanced by a magic unknown to man? Standing up, he decided to enter this sketch in a contest he had seen online, something he’d previously felt his artwork too inadequate for. 

Maybe the shoes weren’t meant to be taken down. Maybe they weren’t a test as all the children seemed to believe, as much as something else. He smiled.

He wondered if he was the first person to realize what the shoes actually were.

Inspirational.

Author's Note

Written as part of a flash-fiction challenge. Prompt - "For as long as he could remember, a pair of old sneakers had hung from that tree."

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[Chris]

You turned a fair tale - even til the end. Kudo's.