Hiram’s stockings were checkered and sheer. One had slid down its leg. There was not much leg there. The skin was chalky alabaster, speckled brown. Hiram’s trousers rode high on him. He belted these at the bottom of his rib cage. If you look around the world, you’ll notice elderly men wearing pants in this fashion. Hiram’s were green and a mismatch with his socks. The shoes, as I have said, were black, and they were massive. They held my attention. I should say that they held me under their spell. I reached out to take a flower that lay across a shoe’s toe. As if responding, this shoe moved toward my hand. Of course, this was only Hiram shifting his foot. But it seemed to me, down there on my belly on the reeking carpet, as though this fat black wing tip had become self-activated, that it had decided, all by itself, to proffer its white bloom. Obviously, Hiram’s wing tip was not alive. I knew this. It’s just that the shoe looked so big up close, and so oblong, so impressively thick-skinned, with its laces like whiskers and its toe that glistened like an animal’s wet nose.

I wanted to pet it.

Perhaps, if I caressed the shoe, I might like myself better. I have found it calming, from time to time, to make a small gesture expressing abjection, and to really get in touch with feelings of loneliness and shame.

I crawled toward the shoe. It was Hiram’s right shoe, not the left. It rested beside its mate inside the open metal cage formed by the walker’s tubular framework. The shoe was a foot away from me. I was flat on my stomach. One dozen broken lilies were in my hands. These flowers were barely more than denuded stems. The stems were bent and their fallen petals lay scattered across the carpet. I inched forward. I suppose you could say I was sneaking up on Hiram’s shoe. I dragged myself along; I stayed low; I tracked my quarry. The carpet’s rank musk smelled delicious. I breathed in the smell. The shoe waited. It seemed to regard me. Tiny impressions punched in the uppers made lacy, delicate arabesques, heavenly swirls in the black leather.

Such thick soles.