“A Confession” by Mark Cecil Stevens, page 2

         I was so startled to hear him speak that I let slip a gasp that rose, a little cloud from my lips, and drifted out over the river. The soldiers, intent in their task, did not turn my way. But you can't know why I was surprised to see him, so let me explain. Two years earlier, you see, he had left all of a sudden when my mother was very ill to go and fight at the Southern Front. She had always been what people had referred to at the time as frail. The doctor had pronounced her liver “no good” and had voiced doubt about the health of her kidneys. She stayed mostly in bed after he left, sipping broth that I brought for her. The landlady would suck her teeth and curse my father, saying that my mother was suffering from a broken heart. I doubted her, thinking that the doctor would surely have mentioned her heart if it had been the trouble. In any case, she looked bad. Her skin had a dull, xanthous pallor and her breath stank like an old woman's unwashed coat. She died only a few weeks after he left, and I was put out of the dim little apartment that we had shared. I did not receive money or even word from my father, though it occurs to me now that Mrs. Csikine, the landlady, could have been intercepting the payments. She did let me stay in the garret above her own house. I have real affection for her despite my suspicion. She would feed me occasionally, and though it was often too little to still my hunger, there was a kindness and pity in her eyes that provided me with an entirely different sustenance on those occasions.
        The hunger was what caused me to begin stealing, and I found a quick aptitude for it. The key, I found, was to present an unobtrusiveness both in appearance and in action. I kept myself clean enough, but never finely dressed. I did not beg, not out of any sense of pride, but rather because beggars are always suspect. I only ever took items that I could use myself, never to sell.
        That is the reason, up in that tree, that I was not filled with horror, or shock, or even indignance as I watched the soldiers tying the wrists of their captives together. I cannot say that what was happening was obscure to me-- the morning was so clear that even from a distance I could see from the dread worn plain on the faces of the victims that they knew that it was their fates and not just their hands that were being bound. No, it was the boots that held my attention, and the cool remove that always accompanied my thefts dulled me even to the plight of the people wincing in pain and fear at the edge of the Danube.
        I hear your question before you even ask-- if I could suppress my revulsion at the scene before me, why did I not to my father, start a rapprochement, let him again be my caretaker? Well, I will tell you, at that time a sense of shame kept me at a distance. Not shame at him for the monstrosity that he was set to commit, though I have consoled myself about his death with the thought that he had caused enough of his own. No, the shame that I felt was for my thievery. I hope that you can understand that my thefts were a matter of necessity. I have not stolen, not once, since that last time that I was led to my father.
        Ah, but I did not explain how it was that I was led. That was the boots. As I sat in the branches, drawn by the promise of warmth in those shoes, I could not find import in the events that were unfolding beneath me at the bank. In fact, I folded myself into them. And so, as the rifles reported their sharp, staggered syllables, I climbed down from the tree. Though the slack uniforms and worn coats of the soldiers could have made sense of the strategy that they employed-- they shot only one in each few captives and let the dead drag the living into the river-- I saw only a path through their reedy ranks. I took advantage of the crush that they made to the bank to see their work finished to move unseen. The victims' shouts covered the sound of my unrushed footfalls. I did not see the scene right itself from its chaos; rather, I slipped off with the boots without looking back on it.
        And when I found a private corner in which to inspect my prize, I found the boots to be better than the promise that I had sensed up in that tree. They were sturdy enough that they stood on their own and their soles were not worn. They were each lined with a single rabbit skin so well matched that it seemed that the lining had been cut from some single giant hare. But best of all, they nearly fit. I had to stuff rags into the toes and heels, but once I had, they seemed tailor-made for me.
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