She had lost her shoes, she remembered that much.
They had been blue and worn- the white outline around the sides starting to come undone around the soles. They weren’t her favorite pair of shoes by any means, just the only ones she owned.
And now they were lost.
Was that why she had gone out on the street? To find a new pair of shoes?
It must have been.
So, she had gone out on the street to find a new pair of shoes. Maybe this time she would get leather ones, ones that could last through winter, keep her dirty toes from the oncoming cold.
Melody shivered now, already feeling the kiss of frost seeping into the air around her. The weather changed like a slow onset of poison here. Making its way into all the cracks and crevices before finally taking over.
Shoes, she thought, I need shoes.
That was her only mission.
The wind that picked up her faded red hair brought along the sounds of the band. They had been here for weeks now, celebrating their creation of destruction. The soldiers had taken her city easily, the occupants too weak to fight, too strung out from the long war to hold off the mass of opposing men for long. It should have been embarrassing how easily they had caved. Given up.
Melody wasn’t embarrassed. She just needed shoes.
They were looking for people, the soldiers who brought the band. They were looking for people with stars on their arms. “The stars have 5-points”, they had told her.
There were signs everywhere, plastering on the chipped lamp posts around her city. The signs held promises of rewards, held promises of compromise.
Like shit.
Melody may not have been the brightest student, but she knew in war there was no such thing as compromise. The whole point of war was to distinguish a winner and a loser. The thing she didn’t understand is why it took so damn long to do so.
She was passing the shop that used to be a bakery. Years ago, when she had shoes and a mother and a father, she would frequent the place on her trek back from school.
The man who owned the shop had known her name, her favorite color, her favorite pastry. The baked goods had hit her nose well before entering the store, wafting down the street to the innocent passerby that rushed along the cobblestone squares.
Now, the shop was empty, the windows broken, the smell of fresh bread, fresh pastries faded and forgotten.
She wondered if the band, if the soldiers, wanted a pastry. Too bad they wouldn’t get one. She wondered if the soldiers knew what they had done. She wondered if the soldiers had her shoes.
Melody continued walking, and if she closed her eyes she could almost imagine that the band’s percussion was a parade down mainstreet, not some sick song of victorious men.
One foot in front of the other. Take a step, find your shoes. She knew of a place for her new ones, a place where the unstill, unsmiling, life-like dolls were dumped before the smoke started every night. If only she could get there soon enough, her toes would stop being so cold.
The sky was black when she got to the pit. There were too many. Too many shoes, too many life-like dolls. They looked like her neighbors, her friends. Everywhere. And it smelled too, smelled like something worse than death, worse than her mother’s roast beef. They are dolls, Melody said to herself. Dolls who don’t need their shoes anymore.
She had almost convinced herself by the time she found leather ones that fit.