My project will never be complete. So many shoes. I find them in abandoned homes and looted stores, and bring them here to fill the sidewalks. In this way I can pretend I am not alone. These are not empty shoes scattered around me, I think. They are people. Mothers pushing trams. Businessmen making deals. Children skipping to the candy shop.  For a while I lined them up nicely, each shoe next to its match, but that looked to me as if the people had stopped in their tracks, which, if I am honest, is what happened. So many of them gone now, stopped forever. So I changed my tactic. I threw one shoe here, another there. And in that way, life seems fuller. All these people I encounter as I wander the empty streets, they are slipshod, crazy, and completely human. But oh so quiet.

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Published in Fine Linen Magazine, 2015