The Slippers
By Amrita Doshi
In the time when he lived out in the forest she went up to see him, on whim, during a storm, in secret, leaving as suddenly, forgetting her slippers. Years later, he examined them: black, delicate, a fairy’s sigh of a thing. The tread in them, he thought, had been in his direction. That afternoon they had wandered through the jungle, with champagne flutes (an extravagance, she had thought, a kind of posturing, really).