I never realized until I grew older why my mother wore sneakers with holes. Sneakers with holes were not allowed in my school. My school’s first day felt so important to me that my mother and I drove to Walmart a few weeks earlier to buy new sneakers for me on a super back-to-school sale, crisp blue canvas ones with white edging. The white edging made them look almost the same as those the other girls wore. Other girls wore blue sneakers one day, pink the next matching them to their outfits. Their outfits were all new; mine came already worn by friends and family, except for my clothes on the first day of school. On the first day of school, I wore my brand-new sneakers with perfect white soles and fresh laces and a tiny skirt and matching blouse that my mother sewed from fabric-store remnants. Fabric-store remnants are the perfect size for a petite girl like you, my mother said one August dog day when she pushed away from the sewing machine and we took a drive, windows down in her beat-up station wagon, the hot summer air blowing around the car our only relief from the heat. The only relief from the heat besides the open windows came when we turned down a dirt road, stopped in the woods, and found our secret swimming hole fed by fresh spring water. The fresh spring water was icy cold, and, although I tried, I could never find the bottom of the swimming hole, but my mother could duck under and touch the bottom with her toes. Touching the bottom with her toes was one of the many things she could do. She could do a lot of things, but when gas was cheap, the best was roaming the roads to nowhere special. Nowhere special was what she called it. Calling it nowhere special didn’t make sense to me because nowhere special was my favorite place, just my mom and me, two explorers under the summer sky, in her beat-up station wagon, her red-polished toe poking through the hole in her sneaker as she pressed the accelerator.
Andrea Marcusa's writings have appeared in Citron Review, Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, Fictive Dream, Moon City Review, and others. She’s received recognition in a range of competitions, including Smokelong, Best Microfiction, Cleaver, Raleigh Review,and Vestal Review. She's a member of the faculty at The Writer's Studio in New York City and a flash fiction editor at Cleaver Magazine. For more information, visit: andreamarcusa.com or see her on Twitter @d_marcusa. or Bluesky @andreamarcusa.bsky.social