The Red Slippers
by Marcia N. Lynch
My brother told me that it wasn’t stealing if the cherry tomatoes were on our side of our neighbor’s fence. But his amendment to the 8th commandment didn’t explain why we only ate tomatoes when no one was watching. It wasn’t long before we were using small sticks to poke the juicy tomatoes through to our side of the fence.
The first week of August was the annual Huggins Hospital Street Fair. We always went the first night of the carnival, and I headed straight for the Rummage Sale tent. The aroma of roasted peanuts mingled with the stuffy smell of baked dust under the canvas tent. I might find Angora sweaters, old wood and rawhide snowshoes, or Victorian beaded purses. The best items were donated by the rich ladies of Sewell Road, where the freshly painted summer cottages had grass lawns sloping to the lake, in place of pine needles and sand. This treasure hunt was my delight.
Looking up at me were two cats’ faces embroidered on a pair of red, felted slippers, with tiny ears and stiff whiskers. One of the faces was indented, probably packed away for a long time, but his crooked face made me want him even more. They needed me as much as I desired them, I reasoned.
The volunteers weren’t looking. I slipped through the slit in the tent, and they were mine. Except they weren’t mine. I hadn’t merely poked them through the fence, I had entered the garden and taken the forbidden fruit for myself. The greasy skeleton of the tilt-a-whirl glared down at me like the serpent come to life. I was a thief!
Back at our cabin, I pushed the cats under my bed. I didn’t even try them on for fear that I would sprout a cat’s tail and ears like poor Pinocchio in the donkey’s pool hall. I tried to sleep. But, like a demon mosquito, the guilt buzzed in my ear all night. The innocent kittens had transformed into feral tabbies, and I couldn’t wait to be rid of them.
The next morning, I feigned interest in going to town with Mrs. Morris so she could buy a new crossword puzzle at the Camelot bookstore—Now I had added false witness to my repertoire. She dropped me off at the Fair Grounds, and I walked the sawdust trail of repentance and poked the tomatoes back through the fence. The slippers were returned to the Rummage Sale table, and as I left the Tent of Meeting, the sleeping carnival rides were curled up and purring in the morning light.
About the Writer
Marcia N. Lynch’s experience as a storyteller comes from working as a children’s film editor and from having been written into the story of Christ’s redemption. She studied sculpture at Mount Holyoke College. Sculpting, like film editing, requires an artist to cut out anything that does not relate to the primary subject matter, and these two disciplines have honed her storytelling skills. Marcia lives in Arlington, Virginia with her husband of 38 years and has three grown children. She surrendered to Christ in 1975.
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