Welcome to a Fiction Friday Post.

What is Your Shoe?

On Wednesday during chat at The Writer’s Chatroom I mentioned a short story I  read is following me around.

It is the mark of an excellent writer when long after reading a character, plot line or theme stays in the forward reaches of our minds. That place we access in idle moments, letting the dog out to hurry, mixing paint on a butcher’s tray or simply watching the shower curtain as we sit down to pee.

I love a poem or a short story. Both, when well done are art forms. I feel privileged to receive such gifts from writers. The story I want to share with you came up in The Writers Chat Room. I said it had to do with a shoe and it was following me around. But I did not have the title and I couldn’t reach the book without some physical gymnastics. But before I went to bed I climbed up on the edge of the trunk and fetched the book out of my canvas and watercolor bag.

I told the people in the chat room it was about a shoe. Saying it is about a shoe does not do it justice.

The reason Float follows me is because every family has a shoe. Something plain to see. Something that bothers everyone on some deep and hidden, yet, obvious level. If after reading Float you claim your family does not have a shoe.. then I suggest you look a little closer.

My families, foster and biological all had them. We might look at them askance as if they were a distant blur in a telescope eyepiece. A galaxy that disappears if you look at it directly.

Reginald McKnight is the author of He Sleeps(Picador, 2002), The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas (1996), and I Get on the Bus (1990), among others. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Georgia.

In 2016 his short story Float was published in The Georgia Review.  Float was awarded The Pushcart Prize and appeared in the 2018 Pushcart Prize publication from The Best of the Small Presses. This is where I found it.

The complete story is online for your reading pleasure. It is a short story, it won’t take much of your time but I am warning you, this shoe will follow you in days to come. How long? I’ll let you know. For now, I can picture it vividly.