Jimmy lived a dull life in a dull job in a dull country. His job was numbers. Columns of numbers. Everyday he would take a ledger full of numbers, multiply them by another set of numbers and write the results into a third grey coloured ledger. Giving birth to a new column of numbers. Sometimes he wondered if his boss merely rotated all the ledgers each to day just to keep Jimmy busy.
The high point of Jimmy's day was the walk into work. He passed a shoe shop. A wonderful riot of colour and light. In the middle of it's spangled window display was the most amazing pair of high heels that any shoe maker has ever produced. The finest leather, dyed a delicate shade of pink, that could make an angel sigh. Finished with a pink silk lining. Jimmy fell in love with those shoes. One day at work, as he thought about some numbers and stroked his bald head it suddenly occurred to him that he was going to own those shoes. He was going to run away to New York with those shoes. He knew in a flash it was right. After that the dull skies, the grey town and the numbers in their grey ledgers stopped meaning anything.
The people in the shoe shop were so nice when he went in to buy them. He supposed that working around so many colours and wondrous objects of desire probably made it difficult to be unpleasant. They were understanding when he asked for such a large size and when he told them his little white lie. That the lady friend he was buying them for would be so pleased when she got her gift. For her ``birthday'' don't-cha know. The shop assistants smiled, they understood better than Jimmy knew. When Jimmy got back to his grey bedsit and opened the box the light that spilled out from the high heels filled it with the first colour the room had seen in years.
Within a few weeks Jimmy had resigned from his job and with some of his life savings had booked a flight to New York. After the terrible dullness of Jimmy's home country, ******** (hidden to protect the guilty) New York seemed like a whole new world. The noise, the bustle and the hustle. The streets with numbers instead of names. Jimmy loved it. This was the kind of place, he realized, where you could happily do operations on numbers. His hotel room was 23 floors up with a view of the Manhattan skyline. Jimmy knew this was the place to be with such a great pair of shoes. He opened the box and that great light flooded out. He picked the shoes up and touched the silk lining. Then he slipped his feet into them, stood up, took a step and fell flat on his face.
A bit surprised he picked himself up and tried to walk again. He fell again with a joint popping thump. He tried again, and again. Each time it was the same half a step and a jarring fall. Slowly it dawned on him, he wasn't going to be able to walk in those shoes. Being a resilient sort Jimmy wasn't too depressed. After all here he was in New York, with a world of possibilities. Jimmy opened the hotel window and put the beautiful pink high heels out on the window ledge. He realized that he'd just have to be a woman in sensible shoes. That's exactly what he did. He checked out and headed west, to California. Where (s)he built a happy colourful life as a woman in sensible shoes, selling beautiful high heels to people who could walk in them.
Things weren't so rosy for the pink high heels though. After Jimmy put them out on the ledge a woman walking down 8th Avenue saw them. By the time the fire department arrived a huge crowd had gathered to watch. A cradle went up on a long arm from one of the fire trucks with a fireman and a negotiator in it. The high heels were terrified and it took the negotiator nearly an hour to talk them down. Made more difficult by the fact the high heels spoke English with a thick accent. Eventually they were brought to safety but the whole experience had traumatized them so much it took years of counselling before they could cope with going anything higher than the third floor again.
As told to me by A.C.
