Hard to keep shoes in this world,
people steal them, they walk away.
- Naomi Shihab Nye
shoelaces
a ggb production
...
At age five, Kyo didn't get the whole tying-your-shoelaces thing.
Well, he knew why you had to do it. It was one of those things you were supposed to learn how to do yourself, the same way you had to learn how to brush your teeth in the morning without anyone telling you, or pour your own milk into a cup without spilling it all over the table so it dripped onto the floor, and you had to clean it up with the roll of paper towels, but only with one sheet because the whole roll was too much. But that wasn't the point, and the point was that big kids didn't need anyone to tie their shoes for them, and neither did Kyo. The only problem was that Kyo didn't know how.
Kagura-neechan tried to explain it to him multiple times, and maybe he was kinda sorta starting to get it, but then she'd start talking about bunnies and trees and bunnies going around trees and Kyo didn't understand what Momiji had to do with any of this. So Kyo had thrown his shoes in the creek. It seemed like a good idea at the time, although Kagura got really mad because of it, and Kyo spent the rest of the afternoon hiding in a tree.
He had to explain to his mom, later, what happened to his shoes, but she didn't get mad at him like Kagura did. Instead, she'd started laughing. His mom never laughed. It made Kyo really happy. He didn't really get what his mom thought was so funny, but he told her about how Kagura-neechan was going on about a tree and a bunny and the tree going around the bunny... no, wait, it was the other way around... and his mom started laughing harder, so much that Kyo could see tears getting squeezed out from the corners of her eyes.
She wasn't laughing anymore when Dad came home and she told him that Kyo needed new shoes.
Why?
He lost his old ones.
How? Why weren't you keeping an eye on him? That monster shouldn't even be allowed outside!
Kyo was sitting under the table while his parents argued and their legs moved through the kitchen, behind the chairs that made fort walls around Kyo. His dad was always angry. Kyo wasn't scared of him, but he didn't like the weird feeling he got whenever Dad was around. It was like meeting a stranger who should have been familiar.
Kyo had been drawing a picture of a beetle with crayons on paper, because he'd gotten a good look at one while he'd been up in that tree. Kyo had noticed it crawling on the branch by his hand, and then it had crawled onto his hand. Its legs tickled and were scratchy. Kyo had shifted so his back was on the trunk of the tree and he could lift his hand to get a better look at it. The beetle was black, and shiny, and the parts that were shiny looked blue. That's what Kyo was trying to draw now. But he didn't want to finish it anymore.
He didn't get why Mom kept apologizing to Dad. It wasn't her fault. It wasn't like she was the one who threw his shoes into the creek.
A/N
One day, I'll actually write a full short story instead of these little one-page wonders. Obviously, today is not that day. Let's pretend it's awesome, anyway.