My Father's Shoes

They had been thrown into a bag, then thrown into a closet, then rescued from a flood by a cousin, and even though they were never mine to begin with and I had no right to claim them, here they are, with me: my father's shoes.

Thinned, in places, by first steps. The laces undone.

I have had the urging of a new story within me—the inarticulate and cresting rise of want, the half-crazy urgency to put some broken part of me upon a page. There is a story here, but no shape or plot. There is mood, madness, fear, and not a thing that approximates a strategy.

My father's shoes are like a story at its start—strange, suggestive, still.