Dance Shoes (Volunteer Sewer Rescue Force)

“The guests should be here any time now, be ready!” I heard my mother shout from downstairs.

What guests? I wasn’t aware that anyone else was supposed to join us that night. It was just a small family occasion. Why would anyone else be invited?

I put on my freshly ironed shirt and went downstairs. The table was full of snacks and drinks and there was a smell of apple pie coming from the kitchen. Wonderful. I grabbed a tall glass with salt sticks and sat on the sofa, comfortably leaning back. There was an ad of toothpaste playing on the TV.

“What guests are you talking about, mom?” I asked as she entered the room with a steaming hot apple pie in her hands.

“What do you mean ‘what guests’? Anne is coming along with her husband, Peter,” she replied in a perfectly casual tone as she placed the pie on the table. Then she turned around and simply left.

My heart skipped a beat, and then another one. Did I hear that right? An ex-girlfriend of mine–one that I used to date a few years back and who just got married last year–was invited “along with her husband, Peter” to our family meeting? What the hell was going on?

“They have arrived! Come over and greet them, son!” my mom yelled from the porch.

I got up, put the salt sticks back on the table and shakily made my way towards the front door. My heart was pounding like crazy. Would it really be her? And most importantly, why?

Once on the porch, I realized it really was her. There she was, the same as before, with her waist-length blonde hair and ice grey eyes. Simply stunning.

Fixated as I was on my once beloved, dazzling Anne, I completely failed to notice her husband approach. He was already here, shaking hands with my parents and exchanging hugs and kisses with them. Everything was so perfectly natural and they looked so happy to see each other again. Except that they had never met before or even knew about each other’s existence.

It was my turn now. Peter turned towards me smiling and extended his hand. He was dressed extremely elegantly and seemed somehow dignified. “Hey! It’s great to see you, man!” he said as we shook hands. Then he hugged me briefly and turned towards the carriage.

The carriage? There was indeed a carriage parked in front of our house and Anne was standing right in its door. There was also an astonishing white horse that pulled the carriage. I must have failed to notice this as well.

At that very moment I began to question my own sanity. My ex and her husband were invited to our family meeting and everybody was acting as if that was perfectly normal. On top of that, they arrived in a carriage, and once again I seemed to be the only one surprised by that fact. I pinched myself just to be sure, but everything was still there.

From the carriage, Anne’s voice could be heard. “Shall I wear my evening shoes or my dance shoes?” she asked Peter calmly and gracefully.

“Your evening shoes, please,” he replied with full conviction. “They suit you well,” he added with a fleeting smile. There was a barely noticeable hint of disillusionment present on her face as she nodded and disappeared into the carriage, most likely in order to put on her evening shoes.

My parents and Peter started making their way into the house, talking and laughing, without any apparent intention to wait for Anne. My own intention was the opposite of theirs, and after a while she reappeared. She descended the carriage stairs very slowly and gracefully, all the while holding the edge of her dress in her tender hands.

At a very gentle and perfectly steady pace–resembling that of a ghost–she was now making her way towards me or the door. My heart was racing as I couldn’t help but keep staring into her ice grey eyes. As she got close to me–without stopping even for a moment–she briefly turned her head in my direction, smiled and said, “Hey.” Then she simply entered the house.

So did I, as there was nothing else left to do. The scent of jasmine and white flowers–her perfume–led me straight back into the living room. The party was well on its way, apparently. All of them were chatting and laughing like good old friends. The image was rather surreal.

“Hey, son, come over and sit down!” my dad said and pointed to a free seat just next to Peter. “Where have you been?”

Right behind you, I thought to myself. I ignored the question and instead made my way to the designated chair in silence. The apple pie was almost gone and so were the rest of the food and the drinks. Where have I been, indeed? Perhaps it was, after all, a fair question to ask.

“Let’s go for a walk, shall we? It will be getting dark soon,” my mom proposed excitedly. Everybody got up and headed over to the front door without saying anything, but otherwise smiling all the time. A quick glance through the window revealed that the sun would indeed be setting very soon.

I got up as well. I didn’t want to keep the guests waiting again. Yet there was nobody in the house anymore. I hastily ran up to the door, put on my shoes and my jacket and left.

Once outside, I realized it was much darker than it should have been considering what I had just seen looking out of the window. No matter; the surrealism of it all was all the more complete. I also realized that there was only Peter outside. He was peacefully staring into the distance, away from the house.

“Where is everybody?” I asked as I approached him.

“They have already departed. I decided to wait for you and ask you to tell me the story of your ferret,” Peter replied.

“Um, sure, I’ll gladly tell you the story of Kiki la Petite,” I said, pretty surprised, ignoring how he even knew about Kiki. “How long have they been gone? Couldn’t they have waited a little?”

“Oh, they’ve been gone a while now. You sure have taken your time!” he said and laughed. “Shall we?”

And so we began our walk. I told him about how Kiki la Petite appeared in my life; how she had been very sick and so her previous owner had decided to put her down; how it turned out–after the good-byes and the tears and the owner’s departure–that Kiki was actually doing pretty well. And so she needed a new home and she got one. Sure, she was a very senior ferret and yes, she was sick, but it wasn’t her time quite yet.

Peter appeared to be genuinely interested in the story indeed–at least at the beginning. However, as we entered a more urban area and as we strolled through the empty streets, his interest–or rather his focus–began to wane. He was increasingly getting lost in this own thoughts. Was it the bittersweet story of Kiki la Petite that triggered in him a response of this sort?

As we were passing by a manhole cover, he abruptly stopped and he began staring right at it. He turned his head in such a way as if he were listening out for something. Confused, I did the same thing. And so we both stared at the manhole cover and listened out for whatever may come. Then he nodded his head and breathed a sigh of relief.

There was something very nostalgic and dark in his expression. Some very old thoughts and images seemed to have captured his mind; thoughts he was powerless against and images that haunted him.

“Is everything alright?” I asked with genuine worry. “You seemed to be elsewhere.”

“I’m very sorry. Please, allow me to tell you a story now,” he said as he looked intensely yet emptily into my eyes. Almost beggingly, in fact. There was a story inside of him that needed to be let out.

“Of course,” I said. “Please, begin.” And so he began.

“When I was a child–eight or nine years old–something very odd started happening in our school. Children from all the different classes–including my own–would, one by one, stop appearing in school. The teachers, smiling, kept telling us that everything was surely fine and they would be back shortly. Yet the number of empty desks in the classroom and empty boxes on the attendance list just kept growing. It all seemed very strange indeed, but we just kept going on with our lives and games. After all, it’s not very unusual for schoolkids to get sick often and be absent.

“Every now and then, as my friends and I were passing by a manhole cover in the city, we would briefly hear a child’s cry for help coming from below, and then it would stop. We mentioned it to our parents and the teachers, of course, but they all just laughed politely and kept telling us that we were simply imagining things. You know, like children our age normally did. What could we do? We were just kids.

“After a while, the smiles on our teachers’ faces started to wane and our parents stopped mocking our imagination as more and more children would go missing without a trace. The police finally launched an investigation. They looked everywhere–including the sewers–but no kid was ever found, neither dead nor alive. What they did find, though, were some of the kids’ belongings inside the sewers: backpacks, clothes, toys. Scratch marks, too. But never the kids or their bodies. They never returned, contrary to what the teachers had been promising us all along.

“No more children disappeared after that investigation; 24 kids had vanished in total. The mystery was never solved and, after a period of mourning and fear, people began to resume their lives. What was strange, however, was that people slowly began to forget that the whole thing had ever taken place.

“Can you imagine that? People who have lost their children now claim that they have never had them at all. Records from the investigation have all vanished and the old newspapers and attendance books are nowhere to be found. Of course, there are no graves.”

I suddenly came to realize that we were now inside a sewer. Knees deep, we were slowly strolling through the smelly and dirty stream of wastewater. I simply acknowledged that fact. Resisting reality is always futile, however surreal it may seem.

“But I never forgot, and neither did my friends. We couldn’t allow any more kids to go missing and to be forgotten; to simply vanish from the face of this earth. One or two years later, when we grew up a bit and when everyone else had already mysteriously forgotten, we formed a special team. A kind of ‘volunteer sewer rescue force,’ if you will. Equipped with flashlights and makeshift weapons, at least at first,”–he moved his jacket a little to expose the revolver that was holstered there–“we would silently sneak out every night and scout for any potentially missing kids in the city’s sewers. Our parents never suspected anything. We kept all the equipment in an old abandoned barn not far from here.

“We continue until this day. Even if no vanishings have since been reported and the sewers have long been silent, it remains our duty. Every night we must depart and scout the sewers. Of course, these days we don’t have to hide anything from our parents. Just our spouses… they must never find out.

“All clean,” he announced as we suddenly resurfaced. I was literally blinded by light; it was already day outside, somehow. As soon as I was able to see again, I realized I was once more in my garden. Peter was on the porch, shaking hands with my parents and exchanging hugs. His suit was immaculately clean.

“Son!” I heard my mother whisper. She was standing next to me. “Where have you been? Don’t you see the guests have arrived? What’s going on with you? Your clothes are all dirty! Go get changed before they see you.”

I looked down and inspected my clothes: they were all wet and dirty indeed, and they smelled of excrement. As if I had just taken a stroll through the sewers.

From the carriage, Anne’s voice could be heard. “Shall I wear my evening shoes or my dance shoes?”