by Siddhant Mehta
As it stands in this world of ours, scepticism has the right to call itself realism from time to time. It’s a safe bet, you see. Nobody has anything to lose if you bet on the Sun to rise in the east or if you expect rain to be made up of water. What about betting for the other guy? Well, when it turns out to be true, and miraculous things do happen, it makes for great stories and hopefully you can get a three picture-deal with Guy Ritchie.
This doesn’t happen very often. Try and sell magic once in a while and you will find that with a willing audience and the power of belief, you could actually get close to a sale. There was an advertisement in a magazine about a shoe. Good stories about magic and miracles usually start with an advertisement or some sort of promise. This happened to be about shoes.
There was this city filled with people. They were white people mostly and they wore jackets and boots...this doesn’t seem politically correct. It was a generic place somewhere in Europe or North America. That should be fine. Everyone at this point is submerged and controlled by the joys of media saturation. Everyone is told what to wear and eat and think. Of course, there are the iconoclasts, who travelled the world, adopted Buddhism, became vegan and preached to all and sundry about Global Warming. Around this time the sale of Birkenstock slippers went up as did organic food and that is how they became mainstream without realizing it (stupid hippies!). Anyway time to get back to the ad.
It was about shoes and it was in a magazine. It wasn’t printed or paid for but it was a piece of paper with a Polaroid picture stuck to it. The text was simple. “Magic shoes: Made by hand with love and care. There is only one pair.” To describe these shoes would be a sin to the written word and all that is beautiful and sacred. Artists through time create masterpieces that need to be described in detail by generations of educated and sensitive critics and na...oh forget it. They were purple. And a little bit shiny. The ad specified that they were size 40 (that’s European size, they would be UK 7 for men for all you shoe-know-nothings). There was an address for a shoe store there too.
A young boy found this magazine which had the ad in it. The magazine was about gardening. For some reason, he had to know something about how to grow basil. He thought to himself, “Hmmm, that’s my size. What a coincidence! (RE: convenient plot device) I shall go to this store and see these shoes.” So he went to the store and it was about 10 minutes away. Sandwiched between a Levi’s megastore and an enormous sports store was a tiny boutique store which sold shoes. It was nothing to look at really, so let’s not describe it.
Inside this store, there were really nice shoes. You could probably go to the sports store nearby or the huge mall at the end of the street and get the same ones that were in this store. It really seemed amazing that the owner defied logic and business acumen when it came to this crucial aspect of making money. No matter, the boy entered the store and went up to the counter. He gave the kindly old owner the advertisement from the magazine and asked about the shoes. The kindly old man smiled a kindly old smile and reached under his kindly old counter and pulled out a kindly......new box. Inside the box were the shiny purple shoes. The boy was in awe. The old man said “You know these shoes are magical right?” The boy nodded. He was still a bit dirty from fumbling around in the garden but he seemed to feel like a Baron or a Viscount when he tried the shoes on. “Lolz! Viscount!” he thought to himself.
The man asked the boy to wish for it to rain chocolate or snow gelato or something cool like that. He closed his eyes and concentrated as hard as he could. Nothing happened. The old man said to him “It’s clear that you don’t believe in these shoes.” The boy was ashamed. He wanted to believe, he really did but he was too old for fairy tales. He wanted the shoes though because he felt like he could make it happen. The boy asked the old man how much the shoes were for. The old man told him the large sum of money that they were priced at. The boy’s heart sank. He told the old man about the orphanage and his misfortune and about more hardship till the old man interrupted him by simply saying “I can see the iPhone bulge in your designer blue jeans.”
Foiled by Apple, the boy muttered under his breath about Steve Jobs’ fascist coup of the modern teenage mind as he shelled out note after note from his Gucci wallet. The boy left the store determined to make his dream come true with his magic shoes. The old man counted the cash and put it into his safe which had scores of rolled bank notes in it. He pulled out a box with more of the same shoe ads in it but to his credit at least every shoe was different. He was definitely laughing his way to that yearly cruise to the Caribbean. So there you have it, sceptics. Once again victory is yours. You just didn’t believe. It’s raining now. What flavour might it be today? Passion fruit! Life can be so much fun with the right footwear. Sceptics usually wear lame shoes like red Converse All-Stars or any kind of Converse All-Stars. Converse All-Stars are never really fun.
Siddhant Mehta is a 14-year-old stuck in the body of a 23-year-old, currently living it up in Amsterdam. He loves graphic novels, movies and sometimes peeing into air-conditioning vents. You can stalk his Facebook account by clicking here.
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