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The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Shweta Ravi

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Like the man in the video game, you wonder if you’re being busy, intelligent or foolish. On
Sundays, you rinse Mahira’s white school sneakers in vinegar and sunlight before inclining them on the porch like poodles waiting to be tethered. On Mondays you gently wipe off sooty streaks from their infant mouths, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, you anoint a paste of Ariel detergent and baking soda to clap taut mud cakes off the soles, like the day’s storytelling until it’s one of those days when the Earth is spinning faster and you yell at Mahira – can the shoes ever come the way they went? The rains come, instead, with bipolar anticipation of fun and filth. Half-drowned schools declare holidays. For two days, you relish the temporarily well-behaved kicks from head to toe in greedy glee. You watch them stranded in the aftermath of perfection, where holding on to meaning suddenly becomes meaningless. Overthinking is the first honest seeking. You watch Mahira beguiled by the hypnotic pull of boredom, until a deep knowing tells you the shoes will shawl themselves in caramel dust, anyway, yield to yellowing, anyway, track in moisture, anyway, wither anyway, because the law of physics says that the universe is constantly moving towards a state of greater disorder. And so, the shoe must travel, the entitlement to motion not being only yours and certainly not yours to take away. You trace every pockmark on your face to a found city for only ruins are a proof that something had ever lived.

Existentially, inevitably, someday, the wearer and the worn shall become one. But today they are alive and kicking chlorophyll off Himalayan bridges, the sneakers getting old, each time Mahira learns something new. You now see the mucky midsole tearing itself to sponsor her plunges off pebbles, the misshaped nose of the vamp forging stability and focus on rickety terrains, the turmeric taints on the toe panel teaching her tiffin-sharing in a gorgeously selfish world, the opponent-stomped blackened lace never letting go, knotting itself like a finger in the netted dark till she shoots the ball in the hoop, the tasted tongue of the shoe with its odorful stitches nibbled, telling her that even animals need homes, the marigold paints in messy coils, Fibonacci spirals in grease and oils opening portals to color and curiosity and the unsanitary outsoles detaching from the body, the eyelets watching Mahira leap skywards, each thud in the mud clocking the Earth’s heartbeat into hers every twenty-six seconds, stars yet to unravel like dreams in the sky, for it is in this refusal of the shoe to be affected by its own sullying, in this dance of relent and defiance and on the way to death only, that life ever happens.

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Shweta Ravi is an educator and writer from India. She was shortlisted in the Strands International Flash Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in contemporary literary journals like Bending Genres, Reflex Fiction, South Florida Poetry Journal, Feral Poetry and Versification. She’s drawn to incarnating in unknown lives until her own ghost insists on claiming her back.

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