by Olivia
I was eight when I found those red shoes in the bin. They were cherry red and the stubby heels on the back were begging me to take them out of their misery. So I took them home. They were a little scuffed and big, but they gave me a sense of wonder in this time of war. My mother didn’t notice when I slipped them under the bed. She barely noticed anything now. Her eyes were always fixed on the door, waiting for a knock that might bring bad news. My brother was at the front. My father had never returned. At night, when the windows rattled from distant bombs, I’d pull the shoes out and slip them on. I’d walk quietly across the cold floor, pretending it was a grand stage, that the cracks in the plaster walls were just part of the set. In the shoes, I wasn’t just a girl hiding under threadbare blankets. I was someone brave, someone who danced and didn’t flinch at sirens.
One afternoon, while smoke curled up from beyond the hills and the sky turned a dull blue, I wore the shoes to the market. The soles slapped against the pavement as I walked, loud and proud. People stared. A man said something under his breath. A woman gave me a look—half pity, half anger. I think she was judging under those emotions. So when I got home I shoved them under my bed and wept. I wept for the hope I was losing. I wept for the world. Mostly I wept for myself. My mom was losing her mind by then and would ask me at least twice a day where my brother was. I never knew. Why would I? She doesn’t know that I gave up on the idea of him walking through our rickety door. I never pulled the shoes out because of this sadness. I left them there. Their red brightness muted by dust and shadow.
I ate my bread in silence while my mother stirred her tea with a spoon that had long lost its shine.
“Have you heard from him?” she asked. Her voice was soft, like she already knew the answer but needed to ask anyway. I shook my head.
“No, mama.” She just stared at the door.
The days blurred after that. The rations got smaller. The sirens came more often. I grew quieter. Sometimes I imagined the shoes whispering to me from under the bed—“Come back.” But I didn’t. I didn’t have it in me to put them on.
The sky turned a strange green before going dark, and we were told to stay indoors. I sat in the corner with a candle and tried not to think about the cracks crawling up our walls or the quiet that came after distant thunder. Mama sat across from me, her hands trembling around a cup of water she didn’t drink.
And then, as if possessed, I crawled under the bed and pulled out the shoes. I brushed the dust off with my sleeve and stared at them. They looked smaller now. Not as eye-catching as I remember. It’s like war took light from everything. I set them in my lap while my mom looked at me disoriented. I answered their whisper, but still was stubborn to replace my holey shoes with them. I held them like they were made of something more than fake leather and worn-out dreams. Like they were stitched together with all the pieces of me I hadn’t figured out how to protect.
Years passed since that cherished moment and the outcome of the war became certain. We could win. Outside, someone shouted. Then silence. Then the distant hum of a plane too close for comfort. I looked at my mother. She was rocking slightly now, humming a lullaby I hadn’t heard since before the war. Her eyes were glassy, lost in a memory I could never reach. I suddenly felt older than her, and that terrified me. I clutched the shoes tighter.
“I’m still here,” I whispered, though I wasn’t sure who I was talking to. The shoes? God? Myself? My brother? I was tired of hoping. Tired of holding up the world with nothing but a pair of red shoes and a child’s imagination getting worn. But I also knew this: if I let go of those shoes completely, I’d lose whatever piece of myself had survived the past few years.
The final moments of the war did not end with a single cheer or a final siren. It ended slowly, like a wound healing from the inside—quiet, aching, almost unnoticeable at first.
That winter, things got worse before they got better. The market shelves stayed empty. The soldiers marched through town less often, but when they did, they looked thinner, tired, more like ghosts than men. My mother stopped asking about my brother. Not because she remembered, but because she had finally forgotten. She spent most of her days sitting by the window, muttering songs or staring into the street. Some days, I thought she was fading. Like she might float right out of the apartment and never come back. But she didn’t. And neither did I.
I started going to the church basement where other children gathered. They handed out soup, sometimes bread, and stories. A volunteer named Marta gave me a small notebook one day.
“Write something,” she said, “even if it’s just a single word. That’s how we stay alive even after we have won.”
I wrote "Red."
So that night, while my mother slept in her chair and the wind rattled the windows in a calm way, I sat by the door. I slipped the shoes on. They didn’t fit the way they used to. My toes pressed to the ends. The heels made me wobble. But I stood up anyway. And I danced. Just a little. Some for my mom. Some for my brother and father. In the dark. Quiet enough not to wake her. Because the shoes were still beautiful, even in a world that had lost its color.