The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Other Shoe
by Marge Simon

He was a big man, tall enough, and his shoulders could stand two bushels of grain.  By day he worked the docks of a river so vast you could tell time by its tides.  He lived alone in a tin-roofed shack near the pier, avoided rum, spoke only when he had to. But that was before the Chemical War — like Agent Orange, only a hundred times more potent.  Now the buildings along the river were dark and still.

He sat on the bank, gazing sadly at the great river. Once a frothy blue-gray, carrying barges and fishing boats, it was sluggish and rust colored. Almost a color match for the shoe that had belonged to her, the only thing left to remind him. He’d found it by the campfire, brought it to the spot where the river turned southward to the Gulf. On a whim, he’d stuck a few pathetic purple flowers in it. A token of their love? Not exactly.

She was the last woman on earth –as far as they knew, they were the last two people. All the food was gone. No surviving animals, no fish or birds. Even the vegetation was dying or poisonous. They were starving. He was a big man, a strong man, and he was very hungry.

Idly, he wondered what happened to her other shoe.

Fiction © Copyright Marge Simon
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Marge Simon:

The Demeter Diaries
by Marge Simon and‎ Bryan D. Dietrich

‘The Demeter Diaries’ is a record of love and longing and the inevitable horror that arises between the minds of Mina Harker and Vlad Dracula as they court one another in waking dreams. The dialogue, written in both poetry and prose, imagines a psychic connection that develops between the two even before Dracula arrives in England. As Dracula makes his way from Transylvania to Whitby on the doomed ship Demeter, the two would-be lovers transmit their thoughts across the waves and lands that separate them, alternately wooing and terrifying one another with the idea of love eternal and all the dark delicacies necessary to ensure it. Front cover art by Wendy Saber Core, interior illustrations by Luke Spooner.

Available on Amazon!