Fic: Christmas Shoes

Note: The Christmas Shoes is, in my opinion, the most horrific holiday song ever. This year I got so annoyed by it that I had to write a response, which was supposed to point out the evilness of the song but instead came out much more sympathetic than I'd intended.  Aaand this is my second try at the story; the first version was a pure drabble (100 words exactly) and a three-sentence story, but I decided it left some things out.

After she knew for sure she was sick, the boy’s mother had started taking him to the beach as often as she could, carrying him barefoot onto the bus and across the asphalt streets because she couldn’t afford to replace his shoes if he lost them. One day, with a bit more money than usual in her purse, she’d tried to take him out for lunch, but they’d been chased out of the store by a tiny irate man whose shouts of “no shoes; no service” had left the boy sobbing in her arms.

So the boy really couldn’t be blamed, as she got sicker and sicker, for thinking that God would bar the gates to Heaven if she wasn’t gussied up all right and proper. If he’d been older, he’d have known better than to run off to the mall, leaving her all alone, but he was so excited about the shoes that he didn’t stop to think about how long it would take. When he got home, his excited babblings about the bestest shoes ever turned into shrieks of “Mommy, Mommy” as the red shoes fell, forgotten, to the floor.