Anyone who’s been to my house can vet for my love of shoes. More specifically, boots. And even more specifically, platform boots. I’m talking sky high. The kind that are virtually impossible to walk in. With square toes and chunky heels and real leather, of course. In platform boots, petite sized jeans actually fit me. 

So you can imagine my initial excitement when I came across a hand-lettered sign on a storefront this morning: GIANT SHOE SALE DOWNSTAIRS.

On second thought, I found it strange. The store sold office supplies. And it only has one level. I’ve never so much as laid eyes on a staircase in that particular establishment (and there are, by my count, exactly 4 elevators in Sheridan County). Where, then, would one have to go to find these so-called sale shoes?

Down into the basement, of course, where the creepy shoe killer would be waiting.

Granted, my imagination tends to run to the extreme. Every time I see a flatbed truck on the highway loaded up with long pipes I’m convinced that I’m going to get impaled. Right through the windshield. Straight through my heart. I absolutely refuse to drive behind a loaded flatbed truck. 

I can’t sleep with a closet door open in my bedroom. I won’t go anywhere near a parking garage at night. And pretty much every time I exit a store, I check beneath my car for a man attempting to slash my achilles tendon.  (Especially when I’m leaving the Y. One never knows about the effects of steroids on third-generation ranch hands.) With such a susceptible mind as mine, it’s a good thing I don’t watch as many political documentaries as I do horror flicks, or I might have to go out and, uh, protest something.

Speaking of movies, this weekend I watched two biopics in which the female secondary characters were so naive about what their boyfriends were up to that I found myself thinking they were “asking for it.” These are the sterotypical chicks who run upstairs instead of the hell out the front door while the killer is after them with a meat cleaver. Just asking to be cheated on, or chopped into bits!

 Sometimes, though, I genuinely believe that naivete would be preferable to paranoia. It’s never so much fun to meet a new person and watch his eyes flick, just a second, on his infant daughter and be convinced that he’s molesting her. Of course, it’s better than asking him to babysit.

It’s easy, too, to wish for a sunny worldview when I’m alive, achilles intact, and safe from closet monsters… Easier yet to attempt a few steps in platform boots without a gigantic pipe sticking out of my chest.