Freak
The call girl comes in and looks down
at all my shoes, which I keep by the door.
It seems a natural place to keep them.
“Why do you keep all your shoes by the door?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Where do you keep yours?”
“Well,” she says, “I keep one pair by the door
sometimes, but the rest I keep in the closet.”
“My closet’s full,” I say.
“Where is the closet?” she says.
“There.”
“I mean,” she says, “it’s like you’ve got a whole
Oriental thing going here or something, all
these shoes by the door.”
“I have always kept them there,” I say.
“Really? It just seems strange.”
Finally she comes over
to the bed.
Afterwards, while dressing, she looks
again at my shoes and shakes
her head and laughs.
When she’s gone, I sit staring at those shoes by the door,
feeling like some kind of freak.
Mather Schneider lives in Tucson, Arizona in the Sonoran Desert. He has two books of poetry, Drought Resistant Strain and He Took a Cab, available on Amazon. He has another book of poetry and a book of stories to be published in the next couple of years. He is a cab driver and is married to a beautiful Mexican woman.