A
man rattled a box of matches in his pocket. He liked the sound. With his other
hand he shook, then opened a cigarette pack to look inside. He never could tell
if there were a lot or a few cigarettes in the cardboard pack; he just knew it
didn't make a noise if it was new or if it was empty. There was one cigarette
left, which he carefully extracted and placed next to the matches in his pocket.
He put the empty cigarette packet away as well. The vendor on the corner would
sell him another, from just beside the grocery store where this smoker had been
sent to shop. Lighting
the cigarette took time. Sometimes he forgot to take it out before striking a
match; sometimes he took out more than one little inflammable stick, had to put
the others back, and start all over. Mostly he couldn't help falling under the
hypnotic trance of tiny sparks and slow, blue and yellow fire. He was standing
immobile like that, eyes in the flame, when two fellows in tattered clothes asked
him for a spare. Dazed, he held out the burning match. "Leave
it, his noodle's half cooked," said one of the pair to the other. "Noodles" resounded
in his head, rumbled his stomach.  He
really couldn't say what happened next, so absorbing were his thoughts, but he
found himself before the grocery store as if by sudden transport. His cigarette
was a hot caterpillar of ash heating up his fingers. He dropped the butt, stamped
it out, and burned a hole in his sock. He had no shoes; only woollen stockings,
slightly damp and blackened from the pavement, clad his feet.
"Oh,
no. Mother," were his words to himself. How could he explain losing his shoes?
Remember he must.  He
forgot shopping at the store, went back in search of those shoes. Some paces on,
a bench looked familiar; but his memory, all in all, was without many anchors
or buoys; so he kept walking. He had been sitting on that bench earlier, wondering
if those men had seen his mother cooking noodles. Or maybe noodles had been on
the list she had given him to show at the store. Had long, white sticks been lying
on the table beside a noodle bowl at home? When no one was watching he would poke
the sticks in his ears or his nose, and look at the funny reflection in the toaster.
White ears, he would have white ears, said his mother, if he kept on smoking.
He didn't know why, but he was sure it was true: white fingers and white toes
too. That was how his shoes had come off, to check his toes for pallor. The outer
footwear had remained on the bench when his socks had gone back on. One covering
layer, no more, had retained his attention.
He
walked by a pair of shoes strung atop a piled pram.  The
shoes were his; they weren't on his feet; and those were the men in shabby clothes.
He ran over, pointed to his feet and nodded at the shoes. One of the fellows began
to curse but the other nudged him in the ribs. They tossed the shoes to the ground
and pushed past on their way. He was struggling with the knot when a policeman
frightened him before helpfully freeing the ties. "Yes,
thank you very much," he knew how to go home. There, his feet were shod.  Only
the little flaps were wrong - they shouldn't be tucked under - and he couldn't
do up the laces himself. None of that mattered; he wouldn't have to tell mother
his shoes were gone and he didn't know why or where or when.
 |
He
made it to the house just fine. No groceries were bought that day; and dinner
was delayed a bit.  Other
than the unlaced shoes, his urgent request for a particular dish puzzled his mother.
She couldn't accommodate it though; noodles really had been first on the grocery
list. |
