A Personal Ghost Story

Marie is ordering coffee at a café she has never been to before. This café has choices, which means she would not have ordinarily come here, but she had woken up, this morning, with a sense of disorientation and in her attempt to reorient herself, had ended up on the terrace of this café. The golden footprints that circle the café have as much to do with it as anything.

(She looks at the coffee menu and decides on the Sumatra coffee.)

The footprints started appearing in the city three years ago and at the time, she thought it was the brain child of a local artist—that someone was stealing out in the middle of the night, painting perfect replicas of the soles of people's shoes. Marie imagines the artist having trunk fulls of shoes with soles dyed golden from the project. But three years have passed and now she understands that those footprints belong to someone she will never meet, but whose goings and comings result in these perplexing messages. Marie has never seen the owner of the golden footprints, but she has seen the trails change, sometimes over the period of weeks, days, even hours. They have never met, yet they live in the same city, one invisible to the other. Do I leave hints of existence in her world, Marie muses, because she has decided from the shoe prints that the owner is a 'she.'

And now Marie is ordering coffee, seated outside, and she sees the footprints winding through the chairs and tables. She can sense these ones are not fresh, not alive, they have been here for awhile. She has seen them here before and she no longer notices them circling around her. When she notices them on the sidewalk, they mean something to her. This step is her own arching foot, is the smooth heel, is the pattern on the bottom of the shoe. It is Marie walking home with the groceries, tapping her toe as she's waiting for the bus, Marie tripping on the uneven bricks of the sidewalk.

Or maybe she wonders again where these footsteps are coming from. She doesn't let herself follow them. She doesn't want to get dependent. But she asks about them. She lives in a town haunted by a ghost with golden footsteps and she is forced to know everywhere the ghost goes.

(But we are still seated on the terrace of a café and Marie sees someone she knows sitting at a nearby table. She waves.)

What would happen, she thinks, if the owner of the footsteps stayed in her town forever. She would have to move, she decides. She would have to.