SEPT 12, 2024 | FEATURES | By Anya Jones
There is a pair of shoes in a plastic bag right outside my house.
Instead of a lawn, we have small rocks with an aggressive host of weeds fighting to stay relevant, much like TikToker Josh Richards. One day, we came home to these shoes in a plastic bag on our rock ‘lawn.’ They were placed with suspicious courtesy: the clear bag had an open top that was tucked underneath the Skechers – what one might do if they were trying to smother them.
That’s the other thing about the shoes: they should belong to a man between the ages of 55-74. From the shoe size, I would guess the owner stands at a generous 5’10. His name is Geoff, pronounced “Jeff” but spelled “Geoff.” While he doesn’t have a superiority complex about this misspelling, as other Geoffs do, he does have an endearing air of humble pride. Geoff’s Skechers are the tan slip-on kind, ones male nurses or overweight film directors might wear. Deeply uncool and madly comfortable, that is.
I do not believe Geoff was either a male nurse or a large film director. I believe Geoff works in tax auditing. The meticulousness with which the shoes were wrapped in clear plastic is indicative of his attention to detail. His selection, and implied attraction thereof, regarding shoe color (tan bordering on gray) tells me he is drawn to the mundane and comfortable. The lack of shoe laces means he likes it easy, which is why he has not changed careers in several decades. A comfortable salary supports his historic North End home and his wife named Mary Anne. Tax auditing suits him perfectly.
Which is why his world was turned completely upside down when he went after the wrong tax evaders.
No, but despite a local Springs mafia crime ring being an interesting tale to speculate on, there actually is no satisfying explanation as to why Geoff’s shoes ended up on our rock lawn a week ago. Nor is there a satisfying explanation as to why neither my housemates nor myself have chosen to remove the shoes from our rock lawn. One of us decided to move the shoes from their original location on the right side of our lawn to the left side, citing that it “looked less creepy.” But as I stare at them now and write you this story, I find myself just as deeply disturbed as I was when we stumbled upon them for the first time.
If something nefarious really did happen, you would think the local news would have had a headline “Kind Man Named ‘Geoff’ Goes Missing From Modest Home” somewhere. But with no such reference to criminal activity regarding a gentle middle-aged man in the recent Gazette articles, the theory is kind of void. But no human with a beating heart can shake the sinister feeling associated with walking up to your college home to find a pair of suffocated Skecher slip-on shoes in a clear plastic bag waiting for you. You start to wonder what kind of omen they are, or if your house is being marked for some kind of drug syndicate. You wonder if it’s a new kind of reality TV where they watch how a house of eight girls interacts with mysterious objects. You start to wonder if you’re imagining things.
At this point, it feels sacrilegious to remove the shoes from our property. Despite the fact that they are definitely haunted, it is somehow certainly worse to remove evidence from the scene of the crime. It will be an interesting experiment. Will they weather time, space and the elements? Will Geoff delicately take them back? Perhaps they were a gift of goodwill. Or maybe Geoff really did see something he really should not have.