A Piedmont Porchlight Story by Ol’ Big Jim

The ad was a single, cruel line of text in the classifieds section of The Piedmont Journal, nestled between “Lost Cat, Answers to ‘Whiskers’” and a notice for a lawn mower sale. It wasn’t an ad so much as a confession. A confession printed on cheap paper, inked in a world that kept on turning.

“For Sale – Baby shoes. Never worn.”

He wrote it himself, his hand shaking so much the letters were jagged, like a child’s first attempt at writing. His name was Paul, and the house was too quiet now. It had always been a quiet house, but this was a different kind of quiet. This was a mean quiet; a quiet that had teeth.

The shoes were the first thing he’d bought. Not a crib, not a blanket, not even a single tiny onesie. He’d seen them in a shop window three months before the due date. They were impossibly small, soft as a whisper, and the color of a summer sky. He’d stood on the pavement, a man in his late forties who thought he’d seen all the surprises life had to throw at him, and felt his heart do something it hadn’t done in years: it swelled. He bought them on the spot, carrying the small box home like it was a crown jewel.

He’d put them on the mantelpiece. A promise. A tiny, blue, knitted promise of the laughter and chaos that was coming. He’d polish the mantelpiece every Saturday, carefully lifting the shoes, dusting the space beneath them, and setting them back down exactly as they had been. A ritual.

Then the world cracked open.

The silence in the delivery room wasn’t a mere silence. It was a vacuum. It sucked the air out of his lungs and the color out of the world. His wife, Sarah, her face pale and damp, didn’t cry. She just stared at the wall, her hand limp in his. He went home alone that night, to a house that felt like a museum exhibit titled “The Life You Almost Had.”

The shoes on the mantelpiece were no longer a promise. They were an accusation. Every time he looked at them, they screamed, ‘You were a father for a day.’ They were the color of a sky he would never fly in with his son.

For weeks, he couldn’t touch them. They sat there, gathering a fine layer of dust, their blue seeming to dim a little more each day. He started to hate them. He started to hate the mantelpiece. He started to hate the house.

The breaking point came a month later. He was cleaning, trying to force some normalcy back into the suffocating quiet. He picked up a photo of him and Sarah on their wedding day, smiling, full of a foolish, boundless hope. He looked from their faces to the shoes on the mantelpiece. The hope in the photo looked like a lie. The shoes were the truth.

He walked over, his legs feeling like lead, and took the box down. He opened it. The shoes were still soft, still impossibly small. He held one in his palm, and it weighed nothing. It weighed everything.

He couldn’t throw them away. That felt like a second death, a final, brutal erasure. He couldn’t keep them. They were a stone in his heart. So, he decided to sell them. It felt like a betrayal, but it was the only kind of betrayal he could stomach. A betrayal that would put the object, at least, to use.

He placed the ad. He didn’t put a price. He just wrote the line.

The phone calls started the next day. They came in waves, each one a fresh stab.

“Hello, I’m calling about the baby shoes.”

“Yes,” he’d say, his voice a monotone.

“Are they a size 3? My boy is just starting to walk.”

“No. They’ve never been worn.”

“Oh. Are they second-hand?”

“No. Never worn.”

“…Oh. I see. Thank you.”

A young woman called, her voice bright and hopeful. “I’m due next month! A boy! Can you hold them for me? I can pick them up this afternoon!”

He couldn’t speak. He just held the phone, listening to her breathe, to the life in her voice, and he felt something inside him crumble. He hung up without a word.

Finally, an old woman called. Her voice was gentle, cracked with age. “I saw your ad,” she said softly. “I don’t need them for a baby. I make shadow boxes. For memories. I think… I think I could give them a good home.”

He agreed to meet her at the Coffee Cup on Center Avenue. He brought the box, wrapped in brown paper. She was already there, a tiny woman with kind eyes and hands that trembled slightly. She didn’t ask any questions. She just placed a ten-dollar bill on the table and slid the box towards her.

She didn’t open it. She just held it in her lap, like a precious thing. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” she said, not to him, but to the box. “Full of all the things that never were.”

He nodded, his throat too tight to speak.

She thanked him, and she left. Paul sat at the table, the ten-dollar bill feeling like a hot coal in his pocket. He ordered a coffee he didn’t want and sat there for a long time, watching the people walk by, living their lives, their arms full of groceries and children and laughter.

The house was still quiet when he got home. But it was different. The space on the mantelpiece was empty. The accusation was gone. And in its place was a hollow ache that was, he realized, the first honest thing he had felt in months. It was the beginning of a new kind of quiet. The kind you could, maybe, one day, learn to live in.

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New Yesterdays can be found at: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.