Blessings From the Prophetic Women’s Footwear Specialist

Fiction, Brigid Cawley

At the entrance to Bloomingdale’s, a street preacher was shouting about Judgement Day. He locked eyes with me and boomed, “The Day of Reckoning is upon us! Are you prepared for the end times?” 

I didn’t respond; I was holding my breath because the weather app said the air was still toxic.

Indoors, my surroundings felt equally perilous. I was supposed to buy dress shoes for a friend’s wedding, but I’d been a raw nerve for weeks, since the wildfires or maybe earlier, and everything at the mall grated on me. Clothes hangers screeched, the lights made my head ache, and at every turn, I was confronted with my own reflection, wan and scared. Fear clotted in my veins, and now the words “Are you prepared for the end times?” had embedded themselves too.

The end times, the end times. The tag on a pair of ash-colored heels claimed they were silver. I shoved them back onto the shelf, ready to give up after only ten minutes. The wedding wasn’t for another month, anyway. I’d cross that bridge if I got to it.

My despair was all-encompassing, from the state of my shoes to the state of the world, and the only thing I felt I could safely look forward to was going home and taking a nap. I nearly left then, hopeless and empty-handed. But the Prophetic Women’s Footwear Specialist found me just in time.

“What are you looking for, sweetheart?”

The voice came from behind me. I spun around, startled, and was face to face with the shoe salesman. (At this point, I only thought of him as “the shoe salesman,” because I didn’t know that “Women’s Footwear Specialist” was his official title, and I didn’t know that he could predict the future.)

The shoe salesman wore an immaculate suit and loafers, and his cologne was so strong it masked the smell of smoke drifting in through the sliding glass doors. His tie was patterned with an abstract design that reminded me of an Escher optical illusion. A labyrinth of stairs, or department store escalators.

“Sorry, cutie! I didn’t mean to scare you.”

I gaped at him. Residual thoughts of the apocalypse stuck in my mind, and I couldn’t get any words out.

The shoe salesman chuckled. “You’re too cute! Not a shoe person, are you? No need to worry. I’ll take good care of you. Come with me.”

He glided towards a nearby display shelf. I followed, mostly out of a confused sense of obligation. I felt so tired I may as well have been sleepwalking.

“You have good timing! This is the last day that we have these boots on sale. You know this brand? Of course you do. They’re like Kleenex; they set the standard for what rain boots should be. Very sturdy, but stylish, see? What size are you? Wait, don’t tell me.” He looked me up and down and decided, “Six. Yes, that’s right. Have a seat, dear, relax. I’ll get them.”

Was I a size six? I would have to take his word for it. The shoe salesman’s speech flowed uninterrupted as he rifled through boxes. I sank onto a couch and let the current of his voice carry me.

“I’ve worked here forever, sweetheart. I know these things. Six. You have tiny little feet. Do people tell you that all the time?”

He presented a shoebox with a flourish, placed it in my open hands. It reminded me of taking communion, back when I still went to church. I nearly said “Amen.”

“Size six, here we are. Sneakers off. I know, I know, but you’ve got to try these. Don’t be shy, pop them on. They fit, don’t they? What did I tell you?”

The rain boots did fit. I wondered if he could guess my height, too. My weight. If any of my moles were cancerous. How much plaque was in my arteries. 

“Go on, stand up, have a little walk around.”

The shoe salesman held out a soft, manicured hand. I took it and stood. A receding voice in my head wondered if I really needed these boots in a city that only has a handful of rainy days a year. But there was something reassuring about them, their weight and impermeability, and even more reassuring was the shoe salesman’s nod of approval.

We were at the cash register then, and I wasn’t sure how we had gotten there. The last few minutes were a gentle blur. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so calm.

“You need these shoes,” the shoe salesman said.

I drove home with the shoebox in the passenger seat, heavy enough that my car beeped at me until I buckled its seatbelt. The farther I got from the mall, the stupider I felt. When would I ever wear rain boots? I decided that I would go back the next day, return them, and buy the shoes I actually needed for the wedding.

The freeway was jammed with traffic. Inching along, I glanced at the drivers around me, trying to read from their expressions whether they were commuters on the way home from work or civilians fleeing some type of disaster. I couldn’t tell. I struggled to differentiate between boredom and fear. On the radio, two reporters were having an empty conversation about some indeterminate subject.

“I don’t know for sure. And there are so many factors that could change things.”

“Yes, it’s really impossible, at this point, to know exactly when that will be.”

“Or if it will even happen at all.”

“Most likely, it will.”

“Most likely, yes, but we don’t really know.”

“No way to know.”

At some point, my heart had started beating so hard I could see my chest moving. A therapist I followed on Instagram said you should notice physical symptoms of anxiety, accept them, and then let them pass. Maybe it was a heart attack. I’d always assumed that if I died stuck in traffic, it would be while trying to outrun a meteor or tsunami or meteor-induced tsunami, but this could be it. I was midway through playing out a new scenario in my mind, in which I suffered a heart attack in the middle of a meteor-tsunami catastrophe, when it started to rain.

The rain snuck up on me, blown in quickly before I noticed the dark clouds. I fumbled to turn on my windshield wipers, forgetting which way to push the lever after nearly a year of disuse. By the time I had found a parking spot two blocks from home, it was pouring. Rain could mean mudslides. Flash floods. Invasive plants drinking it up, kindling for the next fire. I started to open the car door, then closed it again. Water rushed past, several inches deep. Had the rain always smelled so chemical? I wondered what it was dredging up. My sneakers were the most impractical kind, canvas with ever-growing holes where the fabric met the sole. In the corner of my eye, the shoebox sat patiently.

The boots were a perfect fit, just as they had been at the mall. I stumbled through the rain, clutching my sneakers to my chest. The rain boots thudded steadily beneath me. My feet were safe. It was the safest I’d felt in a long time.

Once inside my apartment, I stopped at the front door, dripping wet, staring admiringly at the boots. The good fortune of buying them minutes before the first rain of the year seemed so impossibly precious, I was afraid to take them off. Surely the moment I did, stepping farther inside with wet clothes and dry socks, my luck would run out, and I would be on the precipice of disaster again. Instead, I sat on the floor, water pooling around me, trying to cling to that feeling of security just a little longer. I looked inside the damp, now-empty shoebox and found a business card. It was glossy and pristine, and I couldn’t help feeling a bit of reverence as I lifted it out and read: “Women’s Footwear Specialist.”

I wore my rain boots to the mall the next day, dodging marooned earthworms as I plodded down the long-dried sidewalk. Rain wasn’t on the forecast, but it hadn’t been the day before, either. It seemed the more reliable weatherman was the Women’s Footwear Specialist. 

The street preacher, stationed at his usual post, pointed at me and shouted, “We deserve the wrath and judgment of God!” It felt like a bad omen that he had singled me out again, despite my agile dodging of eye contact. Dread began to climb back up my throat. 

Trying to calm myself, I counted my breaths and footsteps as I passed through the sliding glass doors and into the mall’s shock of air conditioning and perfume. A song played over the speakers that was either about a breakup or violent political turmoil. I told myself that this time I would find the dress shoes, but really, I was waiting for the Women’s Footwear Specialist to find me.

I hovered by the Nike display, feeling defeated already. I was too close to the door and could hear a muffled voice struggling to remember the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. The moment he hit on it–Conquest–a soft hand tapped me on the shoulder. 

“I know those boots!”

The music and the street preacher faded to the background as I turned towards the Women’s Footwear Specialist’s voice.

“It’s lovely to see you again, darling! I was just thinking about you.”

He wore the same tie as the day before, but on second examination, the pattern looked more like stylized birds flying in neat formation. I was struck by the urge to hug him, but resisted and smiled widely instead.

“You know, this is perfect, because I was kicking myself for not showing you these shoes yesterday. I mean, the rain boots are perfect, we both know that. But we also have these adorable clogs that are so you. Don’t move a muscle, I’ll be right back.”

Waiting on the couch, I imagined being a mannequin, never needing to think or move or pick out my own clothes. I tried to sit as still as possible, but my trembling fingers gave me away. Maybe the Women’s Footwear Specialist could sell me gloves, too.

He returned quickly and presented me with a new shoebox, already opened to display a pair of brown suede clogs.

“Size six. You didn’t think I’d forget, did you? Try these on. They age beautifully, basically scuff-proof, kick it against something and it doesn’t leave a mark. Plus, they provide great arch support and lots of room for your toes. Go on, wiggle your toes.”

I wiggled my toes.

“These are perfect,” he said, “because you can just throw them on and go.”

I was meticulous, chronically early, and had never in my life been in a scenario where I needed to throw shoes on and go. But my arches were very well-supported. My toes could wiggle, which I trusted was important. The Women’s Footwear Specialist offered me his hand again, and I took it eagerly.

I felt invincible as I began my drive home, windows rolled down and the new shoes riding shotgun, but by the time I was back in my apartment, my energy had run out again. I dropped the clogs by my door, then performed my nightly ritual of scrolling through social media and news sites until falling asleep, blanketed in a sense of impending doom. I slept for seventeen hours.

When I woke up, the world was ending.

That was my first thought as my eyes shot open and I felt my bed shaking, heard a deep rumble somewhere in the distance. The end times. Bombs falling, I thought, spilling out of bed. A tornado. I threw on shoes. Another raging fire. I stumbled outside, searching the sky for storm clouds or explosions, but could find nothing.

I stood on the sidewalk, trembling and disoriented, as neighbors trickled out of their houses. An earthquake, they tittered, typing on their phones and chatting lightly to one another. I couldn’t understand how they weren’t all panicking. The earthquake had passed, but I imagined aftershocks to come, ravines opening, tsunamis washing us all away. Who knew what could happen next? I sat on the curb and put my head between my knees, on the verge of tears or throwing up, and stared at my clogs. The new clogs.

The Women’s Footwear Specialist’s voice echoed in my head, saying I could “throw them on and go.” He had known my size. Had sold me these shoes and the rain boots just before I needed them. The Prophetic Women’s Footwear Specialist.

Forty minutes later, I was back at the mall. The man outside was losing his voice, so he sermonized into a karaoke microphone. “The signs are all here,” he croaked over feedback. “Our society has strayed too far from God. Will you be rescued from the coming wrath?”

Inside Bloomingdale’s, I got straight to work. I gathered shoeboxes: leather boots, tennis shoes, slippers, shoes designed for hiking and nurses and playing pickleball, stopping only when I couldn’t carry any more. I arranged them around me on a couch, a fortress of cardboard and rubber, and waited for him to return.

“We’re on a shopping spree today, aren’t we?”

The Prophetic Women’s Footwear Specialist stood above me, an LED halo behind his head. His tie’s pattern was one of waves and arcs.

“Hey, look who it is! It’s good to see you. I’m so obsessed with you in these shoes. Did you feel that earthquake earlier? Seven point one, not too shabby. Oh no, no need to cry, sweetheart.”

He’d noticed I was crying before I did. I wiped my nose with a sheet of tissue paper from the nearest shoebox.

“I can see why you’re back. We all need a little retail therapy sometimes. I know, I know. Looking for some recommendations?”

I nodded. I was done with stumbling blindly into the future like everyone else. Done with hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, hedging my bets, living in the moment, learning from the past, accepting it and ignoring it and changing it. None of it really worked. But he knew. He had prepared me for the rain and the earthquake. And he could save me again, for the price of a pair of shoes.

The Prophetic Women’s Footwear Specialist grinned, eyes twinkling. He steepled his fingers and contemplated the shoes I had gathered. “Well, I’m always happy to offer some guidance.”

I didn’t pay much attention to the shoes he picked out for me next. All that mattered was that I had them. He bagged them up, I paid, and strolled out the door brimming with confidence. As I passed the street preacher, one swift kick from my scuff-proof clog sent his karaoke speaker skittering into the gutter.

Over the next few weeks, I bought eight more pairs of shoes from the Prophetic Women’s Footwear Specialist. I opened a store credit card; he called me his favorite customer. I never ended up getting dress shoes, which was just as well. On the day of the wedding, I was too tired to get out of bed.

I haven’t needed any of the new shoes yet, but I’ll be ready when I do. I keep them lined up by my door and sleep with socks on. I am prepared for anything. I am more terrified than ever before.

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Since receiving a BA in clinical psychology from Tufts University, Brigid Cawley has moved to Los Angeles, where she stubbornly maintains her favorite pastime of traveling on foot to cafes and libraries. She tends towards writing stories about people searching for meaning and control in frightening worlds like and unlike our own, and has had work published in Boudin, Atticus Review, and Wilderness House Literary Review.