Old Shoe

Red alert! Red alert! An object of egregious and dismaying odour has, this afternoon, made its presence known in the elevator!

I discovered it on a mail run this afternoon. The first thing I noticed was an obnoxious stench, which was evident in the hallway long before the doors slid open. I didn't think much of it, to begin with: there are often smells in the hallway. Cooking smells, mostly, and garbage smells, and the occasional vomit smell on a Saturday morning. This building's a haven for people in town on temporary business, actors and businessmen and students on their parents' dollar, and they're not always the tidiest of sorts. They put rubbish down the chute without tying the bags properly. They burn toast and hide dogs in their apartments. There's a certain lived-in aroma.

Today, it was more of a living aroma, if you see what I mean. You know when a leg of lamb, for instance, walks out of your fridge on its own steam, sprouting green stuff and orange stuff and a disturbingly full head of hair? That sort of smell, but with a thousand layers of malodorous complexity. It was a little froggy--swamp-like, that is--and a little meaty, with a disquieting boozy undertone. There were fungal subtleties as well, delicately unpleasant, like a squashed-up Indian-pipe. Underneath that, there was mud, and under the mud, the soft corruption of a rotting tooth. I was puzzled. This was a scent for the deep forest, possibly somewhere in the vicinity of a deer carcass, not a nineteenth-floor hallway in the heart of downtown.

The elevator doors hissed open, and there lay the ugliest shoe I've ever seen, smack bang in the middle of the carpet. It was grey and worn, with a Velcro closure and wooden beads glued into the sole. Vileness emanated from it in waves. I picked it up and stuffed it in my pocket. It wouldn't go in all the way. Whoever left it must have had enormous feet. I could jam both my feet in there, if I felt so inclined.

Returning to my apartment, I sequestered the shoe in a grocery bag, and the grocery bag in the solarium. Standing in the immediate vicinity of said bag, one catches a bit of a pong, but it doesn't seem to be spreading further. (Damn good thing, too: it's already befouled every hallway in the entire building, plus the lobby!) I wrote a note, which read as follows--

--and pinned it to the bulletin board by the mailboxes. If the owner of the offending footwear does not step forward within a day or two, his feculent flip-flop will be taking the proverbial long walk off a short pier. (That is, I'm throwing it in the harbour, where the barnacles will settle over its impurities, entombing it forever in a crustaceal shroud.) I don't expect anyone will ring about the shoe. I can't imagine anyone wanting it, or, more to the point, being willing to own up to it. I wish they would, though. I've so many questions: how does one walk onto an elevator with (presumably) two shoes on, and get off with only one, and not notice? Why are there beads glued to the insole? Isn't that a little uncomfortable? Finally, just where had the owner been walking in those shoes? (Perhaps that last one's a little rude.)

This is a song for your dirty old shoes,
The ones that you toss and the ones that you lose;
The ones that were shiny, but now they're old news;
And the ones in the rubbish bin singing the blues.

So sorry, old shoe; you're not needed no more--
You're as stretchy and loose as a middle-aged whore.
You're as grey as the sea, and you're tired to the core,
And the last time I tied you, your laces both tore.

I don't think I'll miss you; you're floppy of tongue
And spongy and pinchy and hopelessly sprung.
Forgive me, old shoe, but it's time that I bung
You straight in the dustbin, and that's my song sung.