thick soled hard rubber white shoes

thick soled hard rubber white shoes

fiction
edward w pritchard

The man was sitting about three rows in front of me and to my left on the outside seat of bus eight from the University to downtown Morgantown. I was staring at his shoes and had been for five or six blocks as the bus rumbled through the narrow twisting streets of the Campus.

There was something ominous about the shoes. Wide soled with hard white rubber about three inches thick. The shoes had the look of hazardous chemical spills. The man must work in the coal industry out toward Westover. There was no coal dust on the shoes or on the man's orange industrial work uniform. He was perfectly clean. Still he harbinged the look of death or at least gas masks and hacking coughs caused by exposure to poisonous chemicals.

A Mother got on the bus and must have had the same premonition about the man for her and her little daughter dragged their packages through the narrow aisle of the bus to the back rather than sit near the man in the thick white shoes. All the front seats near the man were empty although the bus was crowded.

A few  months later I had a horrible dream that the man on the bus was a serial killer and was chasing me and the little girl who had been on the bus that day with her Mother. I woke in a sweat with a vivid picture of that little girl in my mind's eye. The girl in the dream was wearing the actual red dress my Mother had bought me back when I was four to go downtown Morgantown to see the Coal Mining museum with  relatives in town from Cleveland, Ohio. My Dad wanted to show his brothers the  coal mining museum because their  Grandparent had worked in in the coal mines for over forty years.