saturday night shoe

You ask what I do, and I tell you I’m labourer.  And it’s not far off, I suppose.  All of us, from the president of a cosmetic company down to that weird chatty guy in the mail room with the mismatched shoes, we’re all labourers.  We labour.  It’s what we do.  When it becomes clear you’re not satisfied with that answer, I add how I’m like a street photographer, only I don’t use a camera and I’m something of a misanthrope.  I’m joking about the misanthrope part.  I’m being facetious.  You’re not laughing, and instead, you regroup.  In your head, you’re rearranging the words in your question.  You, you’re a professional.

The name of this scene is When Interviews Go Wrong.  You pull your cinnamon hair back over an ear, and shift your slight weight in the chair.  Mustering for battle, you take a sip from your Toasted Graham Latte and ask, “How would you describe your method?” From the sly inflection and subtle smirk, I can tell you really think you have me.  You take a decisive bite off your Mini Snowman Donut.

I tell you how I create something from nothing.  It’s supposed to be impossible, a violation of the laws of nature or something, but I do it.  I go on at length about the smithy in my mind and the pint-sized me in there, a diminutive blacksmith, hammering away at ideas on an anvil.  He makes figments into the physical.  This blacksmith, he has all the rippling muscles I was never given.  He wears a tough leather smock to protect himself against the chimerical sparks exploding like supernovae off these rough thoughts.  When you cut me off, I’m in the middle of describing the beads of sweat dripping from the blacksmith’s forehead as he leans over the forge, heating abstractions to a more malleable, workable temperature.

This Starbucks, you chose the location because of its blandness.  You had heard how fanciful I could be, and you thought this might keep me grounded.  Don’t think for a second I don’t recognize and appreciate your moxie.  “Very interesting,” you say.  “I wonder if you could elaborate a little on the ‘creating’ part.  Where do your ideas come from?”

Where do they come from, these unformed concepts?  A lot of them, they are indeed from the everyday, borrowed from mundane goings-on around me.  A handful, I steal from private conversations between strangers.  Some arrive in loads of ore by horse and cart straight from the grand kingdom of Shambhala.  Others turn up in loads of ingots stacked in shipping containers aboard boats sent all the way from Lyonesse; these, these are among my most prized.

As I pry open each sizable wooden crate, the radiance of my flickering torch bounces off the kaleidoscope of hammer marks beaten across the beautiful faces of the oval ingots.  Down in the inky black of the ship’s cargo hold, my face is aglow, not only from light reflected off this newly arrived treasure, but in happiness.  Each ingot features the image of a majestic horse stamped above an indecipherable word of exotic symbols.  They’re stacked at least fifty deep in the crate, and—

You interrupt me again when, this time, you reach across the table and close the voice memo app on your cell phone.  The interview, it’s over.  “Sorry,” you say.  “I didn’t mean to interrupt – continue.  You were saying something about crates?”  The Mini Snowman Donut reduced to crumbs on the tabletop, you dab at the corners of your mouth with a paper napkin.  My mouth slightly ajar, the d from the word ‘and’ still hanging from my bottom lip, I’m trying to remember where I left off.  Crates.  Something about ingots.  With the side of your hand, you’re obsessively sweeping every tiny crumb on the table into a minuscule pile in front of you.

I tell you not to worry about it.  “It’s not important,” I say.  The one thing I don’t tell you about these ingots, as exquisite as they are, they’re fleeting, fragile.  Look at one the wrong way, and it’ll disappear.  Mishandle one, and it’ll shatter into infinite useless pieces.

I’m studying the tabletop between us, an intricate mosaic created of broken tile and sealed with some kind of liquid polymer.  The tile has been carefully broken in a factory somewhere so that it’s broken but not too broken.  The mosaic pattern is imperfect but not too imperfect.  The colours are unobjectionable.  The whole thing, it’s some kind of strange imitation of an imitation of art.  The table next to us features the exact same design.  Every table in this place is identical.  You, you reapply your lipstick.  A red, its name is Saturday Night Shoe.  It looks nice.  I’ll write a story about it later on.