Numerology

Original short ficion

My whole life is in hock to numbers:

What do the scales say? How low is my bank account? How many days do I have left to live?

This kind of morbidity isn’t in my nature, you understand. Or at least it wasn’t, until the shoes. They’re a lovely pair of shoes, to be fair, and I needed some new ones. Except they’re not new. They came to me from the feet of a dead man.

*

It went like this:

Cacophonous impact. Crunching metal. Hissing valves. Pillar of smoke. And the shoes. I crept up, inaugural visitor to a new menagerie of tragedy. ‘Hello, are you ok?’ I called, even though it was obvious. Coming into view, I saw grey hair, a red and bulbous nose, chapped lips issuing a sally of blood.

Before I knew it the whirlpool of sirens and high-vis. Body bag and wheely stretcher. ‘Here,’ said a man, probably a copper, ‘take these.’

They’re a beautiful pair of blue suede shoes. Smart shoes, which I’m not accustomed to wearing. I prefer my cycle cleats, the clack of them on tarmac or the assurance of their insistence on softer surfaces. But I took them because I thought he meant me to take them and give them back at some future point. Turns out, no. He just meant take them.

*

Tonight there is a storm and I’m walking in a dead man’s shoes. The rain is coming down something special, filling the dried-up crevice of the trenches along our country lanes. The way it goes in my village is, apparently, if you get given a dead men’s shoes, you have to wear them and finish the man’s journey. You only get to learn this lesson after the fact, or nobody would wear shoes. Seems a bit unfair, if you ask me, but a people have to have a code to live by, otherwise where is the meaning? Still, I’m not happy with that copper.

Ever since I stuck on this dead man’s shoes, I’ve been obsessed with numbers. I’m watching the days of my life count down towards zero and quicker than I’d have hoped, even in better times. Everywhere the numbers haunt me: kilograms, steps, degrees, dates, pounds and pence. You might ask why a man who knows he’s going to die soon is so interested in things like money and the weather. And I would say: leave me alone, I’m a victim of circumstance.

I trace my steps back to the scene of the accident, sloshing through the mud in my blue suede dead man’s shoes. The car is still there, hugging the great oak which doesn’t return the embrace. It should have been moved by now but that’s public services for you these days. I walk up and stick my head through the window.

The odometer whispers a dirge in the dark. My eyes adjust to the gloom and watch it as it ticks. Ticks down. Down. Down.

10 miles left.

9.

8.