In Short – Issue 3 (Spring 2025)
May 31, 2025
Man-Sized Boots
By Brandi Handley
At Red Racks, a local thrift store chain, the shoes and boots line the tops of the racks of used clothing. They’re not organized by size or style or any other discernible pattern of arrangement. But it doesn’t matter. I’m only interested in what they look like at a glance.
A brownish-green pair of sneakers catches my eye. The soles are thin and caked with dried mud. The orange shoelaces are dingy, almost brown. They speak of a hard existence. The pair is a contender. But hardness has made them flimsy, soft. Perhaps they say, “I’m beat.”
What I’m looking for are sturdy, powerful-looking man-sized boots.
*
“I don’t want to scare you,” my mom wrote in a text, “but this man was on my patio early this morning.” She’d attached screenshots from her Nest Cam recording. A man in a blue coat and a stocking cap with a hood pulled over it stood on her back patio, his face pressed against her window looking in. He sucked on a plastic spoon. It was 2:42 AM. She didn’t see the footage until a few hours later, after the man had gone.
*
A pair of navy sneakers looks to be at least a size ten, but they’re well-kept, clean. And gender neutral. Nowhere near imposing.
*
I’ve started lying. “I’ll have to check with my husband before I decide,” I told a man who’d wheedled his way into my home with a lie of his own. On the phone, he’d said he was required to assess the situation before the plumber arrived. Once inside, he tried to sell me cleaning services. He lingered, ignoring me when I said, “No, thanks,” and “I don’t think so,” and “I’m not interested.”
“I’ll have to check with my husband,” I said again.
He nodded. The man of the house must first give his approval. That was something he understood.
*
Pairs of men’s loafers and sandals and slippers say little up there above the racks of clothing. Too nonchalant to stop anyone in their tracks. Especially not a man in a hood brazen enough to leave the oil from his skin on my mom’s windowpane.
*
I’m told it isn’t smart for a woman to live alone. My mom says the same. I don’t disagree. But both of us do live alone, breaking the rules, flaunting our vulnerability. Though the woman’s domain, she cannot hold down a house on her own, and it’s dangerous to try. So we’re told.
*
I find a pair of hiking boots in a size twelve. They’re worn but not overly so. Big and bulky. Man-sized. Formidable, except for the Velcro. Velcro doesn’t seem particularly manly—perhaps an old man or a very large man-child. But any man is better than none.
I buy the hiking boots and tell my mom to place them strategically on the back patio. A friend of hers suggests moving them around from time to time to make it look like they’ve been worn and then set down at random. It’s a whole production. We walk around in the boots, leaving footprints in the yard. We cake them with mud. We smear tracks in front of the back door, a barrier like a circle of salt.
Mom and I survey the effect of our performance. “It might be easier to just get married again,” I suggest.
*
It’s a victory, I suppose, that I own my home. That I can live here with two female cats. Us three girls in charge of property. As long as my closet full of feminine eight-and-a-halfs keep quiet and don’t betray our audacity.
Brandi Handley (she/her)’s work has appeared in Post Road, The Laurel Review, Moon City Review, The Dodge, and elsewhere and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Essays, and The Best American Nature Writing. She teaches English at Park University, a small liberal arts college in Parkville, Missouri.