A Heaven of Others Read Free

palm down, one half always unknowable. Unknown, I touched my nose with a knuckle. It was a nose, the one I got from Aba’s mother, my grandAba’s Queen and a knuckle. I turned again wildly as if to shatter the window of the shoestore and there it was three times thrice undeniable. My face was full open to seep. A squishy squashed olive from the tallest and only tree in our largest and only garden. Out back with the benches and bush. A pond small and dry. To have nails instead of features, dimples their heads, the lineaments of my face each a pure length of rust, nails and their heads bowed reverently as if hammered by hate, lowered out my temples just then shook with a laughter. My tongue burned. I couldn’t contain myself. Let it all hang out. Spill it, Yon. It was a hole in my stomach I bowed forward to—taking three steps back from the reflection to accommodate my goggle—a jaggedly pulsing hole, edged in a heat that was furious, through which my eyeless sockets first beheld the first fully naked naked woman (no, not even the Queen) I had ever remembered.

Shoes
     

 
     
     
    S hoes. Shoes. Shoes. And Shoes to pair good measure. There were always shoes. Never shoe. No one in my house (meaning in our apartment on Tchernichovsky Street, which Aba always called The Road That Should Have Been Named After Bialik) had ever said Shoe. Had never said I can’t find a shoe. Had never said I lost my shoe. As in just the word. Like singularly all alone. Or even Where the EXBLEEPLETIVE is my shoe? Asked Have you ever seen, smelled or touched its pleather, tasted your own foot in your mouth and its shoe along with it, heard it sneaker from behind an approach? And never when you’ve decompressed, becalmed yourself enough to ask What have you done with my shoe? Or Where has my shoe walked off to? Ever. Shoes were to be kept together, preferably, to the Queen, to be kept tied together, two shoelaces—or are they four? or one?—left knotted, strangling one another until the morning of our fingers would worry them separate, apart. Loose and achy. Laces to lie exhausted upon the lemonmopped linoleum gasping for air. Limp and then finally—maybe once a season for me when I was living and growing (speaking terrenely), maybe only every five, six or even every ten or so years for Aba and the Queen—when they died they would be tied together again, then bagged to go to the Poor. In bags of plastic brought home from the Mega Hypermarket built atop the grave of Pierre Koenig, I never knew who he was until now though I knew Pierre Koenig Street. A General vs. the Nazis in Africa then the Poor, wherever they were and whoever too, as I never knew the Poor but the Poor knew my shoes. Made for Kazakh feet. For Ethiopian feet on a boy probably three years younger than I, once was. For whom they’d still be small, pinching. A shoe for their foot, the Poor’s: one huge hungry, shoesucking, laceslurping monster with an xillion stomptromping feet.
    My son should study Aba always said My son should study the podiatry of wandering, All of the pedestrian interpretations of Exodus and then laughed until the Queen slapped him on the scapulate, his back as broad as that of an ox. But I at not ten nonyears had had the opportunity to study nothing at all until the first fully naked girl who was also the first totally nude woman I had ever remembered, beheld for the first outside the celestial shoestore stared curiously at my shoes, then knelt down and examined them, sniffed at them and even lightly licked with the quick tip of her tongue engreening in the ether. Then What are they? she asked in a hundredthousand voices all trying to say as One, Whose force measured me, knocked me over with Why? and so I rose and said to her what they were They are shoes I said to her that shoes like these are for feet like these are for walking like this and then to Show not just Tell as Moreh Kulp always said I walked away from her for ten steps and then to her again