By: A.C.
Being a person with what I see as a creative imagination, and others might see as wild untrammelled fantasy, my wee brain cells start to hum when I see something odd that feeds my imagination.
Take for instance a single shoe or trainer sitting by the roadside. We have all seen them sitting there for no apparent reason.
There is ever only one shoe, and they are usually of good quality. My immediate thought is: ‘how far did this person have to hop home? Is there a prosthetic leg missing a shoe? As prosthetic limbs are something that seems to get handed into Lost Property Offices at Railways Stations and never get claimed apparently, one has to ask why. What was happening on the train that somebody lost prostheses?
However, I digress from the solitary shoe mystery. I then go further and give the shoe a living status and imagine that it has had enough of being walked on, and is a revolutionary, as it is a fed up of its lowly status.
Maybe it has decided to change employers because of its undervalued status – but only one came out on strike. So is there somebody out there just now, who is sitting in their house scratching their head as they wonder why they are missing one shoe?
So what else could be going on? Could these shoes be the answer for UFO abductees? Just like bait for a fisherman, maybe the aliens lay a trap on the ground, using a two –pound coin, which when picked up activates a portal, and the poor unfortunate disappears in a cloud of dust, and wakes up, miles from home with skinned knees, in very dishevelled state with only one shoe wondering where they have been for the last 12 hours.
Sounds like a good excuse for somebody who has had a very good night out on vast quantities of the falling–down water.
Then again, maybe a bored child strapped into a seat in the car picks up their mum or dads trainers on the back seat and deftly flicks them one at a time through a window. If the wean does not have a rattle to hand, then maybe a trainer gets thrown out of the motorised pram.
I think the answer must be more banal. I always see these trainers or shoes on a road near a local gym. I think that these lonely expensive trainers were purchased along with the equally expensive gym membership, and as the tired, red –faced executive leans against his or her car trying to find their car keys before they collapse, the shoes are put on the roof of the car.
In the total absence of solid reasons as to why a good shoe is lying at the roadside, I will just have to keep my imagination turning over.
So keep your eyes open for that single shoe sitting forlornly by the roadside, and maybe your imagination will start to work overtime like mine.