A few months ago, before the current child refugee crisis on the border became one of the stories of the moment, I found this shoe while walking in the Arizona desert. The size is that of a small child. It was about right for an eight or 10-year-old.
Why was the shoe missing from the child's foot? Was it because the rest of the child was missing out there in the desert? Did some animal carry the boot off? Or carry pieces of the child off and leave the boot? Did the boot slip off when the child was running? Running too hard to stop and pick it up? Or did it have something to with that cut at the back or that scratch on the front? The boot could have just been split from too much time in that sun, because that sun those kids walk under for a thousand miles comes down like razor blades on fire and will split your boots and anything else you've got in two if you're out in it for too long. Abandon a car under it and see how long it takes for the paint to start peeling.
What led up to the time the adult-sized sole was stitched on? How long might some kid have had to march through the desert with the cheap sole and busted threads it came with from Wal-Mex flapping? Did some little boy or girl tie a rag or some string around it to hold it together so they could keep up with a coyote yelling at them to hurry the fuck up? Maybe it was just too difficult to keep trudging on with that big sole and barefoot was better, though I doubt that. You don't go barefoot in that desert. Not with sand spurs sharp enough and hard enough to puncture mountain bike tires. Not with blown mesquite thorns three inches long and cactus buried in dirt and tumbleweed ready to tear your foot in half. It would be hard to make it ten feet barefoot, let alone across any stretch of the Sonoran Desert. There is no barefoot out there.
Was that sole the cheapest possible way to get a repair? An act of kindness by a cobbler on this child's way? An act of cheapness on the part of a coyote in the interests of getting a kid to move it? Did the boot come off because it was replaced with something better? Or did it come off because a child ran out of water and died?
Maybe it belonged to one of the kids to whom the face of America is that of venomous adults screaming at them to get the fuck out of America, as seen from one of the unmarked white immigration buses with blacked out windows you see barreling down America's desert highways all day. Maybe it belonged to a kid who got off the bus only to find herself locked up in a kennel.
Maybe it's just my imagination, but there was nothing encouraging about that little child's boot.