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I lowered my foot and sank into the shoes, which were justmy feet

THE TALE

OF THE

CINNAMON SHOES

ATTEND TO ME, GIRL I AM YOUR METRONOME Keep to my voice; I will keep your rhythm true

I see you go bare-shod This is most likely extreirls, that tribe you seek in the dark How lass and fur and wood? Too raveyards, they are so full these days You are very wise to let your soles becorow their own slippers of moss and clay and calluses This is far preferable to shoes which may become wicked at any moment

I see a tree A cinnamon tree drank rain until someone pulled it out of the earth by the hair and h-backed chairs with seats of stiff linen, a round table at which generations of children learned their letters, a post for witch-burning, an extremely expensive book with cinnamon boards and cinnamon paper written upon with cinnae wheel, and one pair of shoes

I remember also a woman’s hands, and how she sipped her tea of white leaves, violets, and a single red leaf as she pulled the roots into the complicated knot-work you see now Her shop was pleasant and dusty and I had very high co heels, their white pelts stitched with fine blue thread But they were truculent beasts, and would not speak to the ragged cinnamon shoes I was not sorry to leave them when I was packed away and sent to the city on the red plain

In Ajanabh I was the superior shoe No riding boot could compare to a shoe of

cinnamon, the sacred stuff of the city I drea at festivals of spice and starlight; I dreah podiu silk Instead, I was taken to a tomb

A tomb is like a cistern, you know It is full of flesh as a cistern is full of water, and the ceilings drip There are devotional paintings of the virtuous dead etched into the stone with inks that cost more than water or corpses, and voices echo, and the shadows lick the corners clean, and no one would go inside were they not cohtoil

She had been a good girl when she was alive, he assured everyone ould listen But what father has ever said otherwise? She was pious; she was kind to the poor Everywater—such an expense, such an extravagance in Ajanabh where they say the glass bubbles in the pane in summertime! And when her skin ached with the cold, she would dust red her arround finer than the most treasured dreams of salt They were a holy family, and had to set an example, her father said She went to the finest seminary in the city and learned there how to distill both liquor and ink froht of the Stars—and more important, she learned that each has its proper time and use, and used them as they were meant No one was more moderate in her dress or her person, her father said No one lived as more serious or more studious No one behaved so irl to behave

And when the fields died, her father said, she was disconsolate, as it is necessary for the child of the Priest of Red Spices to be She bathed in their icy fountain until her teeth chattered and her lips went blue and swollen She prayed and studied her own little cassia-cuttings, her o garden that it is only correct for a priest’s daughter to keep, but they ild and thick with needles and dusty with sweetness And finally, she stopped lashing her skin with bitter water, and left her garden to walk out a earth

She left her eyes and her mouth open to the air, but the rest she covered up in red loa up her favorite blanket over her chest And there—devout girl!—she kept up her prayers, encouraging the earth to learn fro heart, her ascendant soul And so the earth took these things, but, like aWhatever withered the roots of the basil and the paprika, the cardareens, withered her in the soil, and once planted, his beloved daughter never rose again

They unearthed her fors in the frozen fountain, and carried it to the farant cedar, a spray of cassia flowers clutched in her virginal hands, a dress of rarest bark-cloth arranged in precise folds on her body He wept at her side every day, he said, his tears her icy fountain