Dark and Deepest Red(20)

But the shoes dried as fast as if I’d left them out in full sun, and still did not move.

I did the same thing in the shower. I let the spray soak my hair and clothes and all of me as I worked to get the shoes damp and pliable. I fluffed up lace sheets of soap bubbles to loosen them from my arches.

The satin only slicked and then dried. My feet did not squish inside the lining. There wasn’t even space between the cloth and my skin to let water in. The seal was tight as wax over wood. I couldn’t even feel my feet inside the shoes.

I turned off the water, fevered and out of breath.

I dried off, and found everything sharp within reach. Scissors. A letter opener. A kitchen knife with a good enough grip that I wouldn’t slip and accidentally impale myself.

I took each to my family’s beautiful work.

My hands went at them. My hair, tangled and wet, streamed in my face as I dragged each sharp point through the beaded patterns.

The blades only left soft imprints on the cloth. And in seconds, even they faded.

I went at the shoes harder, driving the sharp points into the cloth, pulling them across the beading.

They did not give.

The scissors, the letter opener, the knife left no cut in the fabric.

I kept at them until I wore myself out, my heartbeat and breath so hard and fast I fell to the bathroom floor, the red shoes dragging me down. They felt heavy as iron. They had such weight, and fighting them took so much of me, that they pulled sleep over me like heavy curtain.

These shoes would not be pried off, or torn away, or even slashed.

They had sealed to me, like they had become part of my skin.





Strasbourg, 1518


Lala walks into the light. She senses the stain of her own words, a weight on her skin. But in the same moment she feels how she has been stripped bare of something that once kept her to the earth. It is as though, all her life, she was held together with a little bit of the stars, and now that part of her has been spooled away. It has been drawn back into the sky. And now what remains of her is crumbling to ash.

The sun and the noise leave her dizzy and unmoored. The clatter and rasp of a wooden stage going up at la Place Broglie is so loud she feels the bones in her head are coming apart.

A rounded thing, warm and soft but with a hard core, strikes Lala’s skirt.

She reels back, and it tumbles to the ground.

A pear, bruised and sun rotted. It has gone mushy enough to leave a wet, sticky trail on her skirt.

For a moment, Lala wonders if it has fallen from a cart.

Until she notices the woman staring at her.

The miller’s wife. The mother of a girl who dances. She stands with her hands dropped to her sides, her fingers wet from the rotted fruit.

A spoiled apple strikes Lala’s hip. She does not see where it came from.

She faces the stares of the close-gathered crowd. The preparing of the stage for the great dance carries on, but those not hurried along in the bustle pause to watch. The fishermen bringing up pike perch and bream from the water. The currier fitting boots. The apothecary taking money for a tincture he insists will guard against the fever. Even the ladies in their striped skirts, attendants pausing at their heels.

Lies that satisfied the bailiff will do nothing in the face of the Strasbourgeois. Any rumor about her and Tante and some lesser Italian prince will crumble to dust. This is a city that slaughtered starving peasants for revolting against their usurers, and Jews for nothing but their faith.

They say that for all things in heaven, God has created a corresponding match on earth. They say there are as many points of light in the sky as fish in the sea. Lala can only imagine what the Strasbourgeois consider her celestial mirror to be. Some dark star. A glint in a constellation that, as it moves across the crystalline spheres, brings misfortune and deadly magic.

This is a city where the story they choose to believe about you depends on how well they think of you, and that story can shift as suddenly as the wink of those stars.

Just as a limp courgette strikes Lala’s leg, a tall, fair-headed girl pushes through the crowd.

“There you are!” Enneleyn cries, in a voice so pointed Lala knows it is for show. “Do you know how long I’ve gone on looking for you?”

For a moment, Lala blinks at Enneleyn, unsure if her friend means to distract the crowd from its scorn. Or, if she is really so oblivious as to not know where Lala has been, why she stands in the murk and mire of this disdain, thick as spring mud.

Which of the two is no simpler to guess than a throw of dice. To a girl used to silk and pearl pins, all the world must wear a shined gloss, like a delicate frost on a yule morning. How easy it would be for such a daughter to overlook anything ugly befalling a girl like Lala. But then, it was Enneleyn who recounted the full story of the color red, of its banning within the city walls. How often men must speak freely before her watching eyes, how empty they must consider her pretty head, when in truth she is always listening.

The crowd murmurs back to their business, caught by Strasbourg’s most beautiful daughter.

Enneleyn takes Lala by the arm. “I’ve thought of the perfect dress for you to borrow.” She leans closer, and whispers, “If we believed everything every fishwife ever said of us, we’d never leave our beds.”

Lala lets Enneleyn pull her along, trying to ignore the glances thrown her way.

If it is not rotted vegetables, it will be pine cones and acorns next.