The Year of the Shoe

A child, perhaps, one of many, sat, arms folded
at a desk painted the color of seafoam – also one
of many. The wood had not been sanded; often,
it splintered the sides of her hands as she lashed
slippery knots of alphabet around the pack of dogs
leaping from her throat. Afternoon fell in slats
upon her so that she was at once brown and yellow –
light crowded with the honking of cars, flies
and their notions of sovereignty, falling sanely
on the police who directed traffic to and from
the school, notorious for their sticks and the pigs
they shared their living rooms with. I say perhaps,
because it could be anyone in that country, during
that time, who had a secret, or was a secret, in that
there were many whose kidneys had not been
spilled in the fields, nor were found blue and tangled
among roots of the mangrove, nor like thunderheads,
vanished once the ditches were flooded, the streets
waist-deep in shit. Nothing was less remarkable
than that child, her waiting a pinky bone among
the rows of waiting, for an afternoon sticky
with papaya juice and tumbling into the leaves
like kites, her obedience no more than the other
obediences, which combined rendered a room of sixty
first-graders quieter than grass waiting for the spade.
Quiet was the price of a nation to call our own – every-
one knew this – and so she did not hear the bullets’
laughter in the spines of East Timorese girls, boys
clapped to dust in the red hands of the Santa Cruz
cemetery, no, the child’s memory of that year
was of the rock she felt in her shoe minutes
before dismissal, how she tried to ignore it,
how it bit back with its single tooth, so that at last
without full consideration of the consequence, she
slipped out her foot and reached down to turn the shoe
over. A small click where rock hit the floor, and
looking up, she met the gaze of her teacher, like lava
hardening or the night that stumbled in like a drunk
through the door of the shack, where she had once
visited with Mother to see that a teacher lived much
like the police, with pigs not for eating, but for breeding
and selling to keep the lamps lit. But a teacher’s words
were second only to Father’s, so that day she licked
the tips of the sentence like goat-meat: stand
on the bad foot, in front of the classroom, for one hour.
The child watched her friends peel away, like husks
and hair from a cob of corn until the rows were
fat with their absence, guilty knee trembling
under her weight. She would hear none of the hard
whispers between Teacher and Father, who soon enough
would take her home and lie her face-down
on the sheet with the faded pink and purple flowers,
to paint pink and purple flowers of his own on the backs
of her thighs with the zinc – zinging – of his belt. For this
was what it took to survive, a secret among secrets,
while whole islands burned and the sea watched,
remembering nothing, filling shoe after shoe
piling on its floor like toothless mouths
with its own quiet and ambition, that it should
be the first and the last, the only year there ever was.



Copyright © 2022 by Northwestern University. Published 2022 by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.