Selected Short Stories Featuring Cinderella Shoes

Selected Short Stories Featuring

  Cinderella Shoes

  Copyright 2013 Nicolas Wilson

  Foreword

  Hi. I’m Nic. This is a short story collection of mine. Other stories and information about upcoming work can be found on my website: www.nicolaswilson.com. Interspersed with these short stories, you’ll find snippets of novels I’m working on. I’m calling them entertisements, because the word amuses me. Keep going to reach the fiction, or you can view the Table of Contents (including synopses of the stories in this collection).

  Stiletto

  It’s a lousy night, but they’ve all been lousy nights, lately. Marcy blames the girls, but it’s not the girls’ fault the economy’s bad, or the fact that people see strip clubs as something they can cut from their budgets when times are tight. Since no one’s making any money, girls don’t always come in, so we’re short tonight. I’ve only got three minutes to pee before I’m back on stage.

  When I open the door to the women’s bathroom I stop, listen; you hear urban legend kind of stories about girls getting attacked at the job, and its always in the bathroom, so I’m cautious. But the women’s bathroom is always empty- except that one time a girl was giving her boyfriend a handjob in one of the stalls. And it’s quiet, so I walk to the nearest stall, slide in, and close the bolt.

  I’m pissed off. I’m barely on target tonight to make cab fare, and I’ve already resigned myself to kissing the money I put in the jukebox goodbye. My time isn’t free, but I seem to be donating a lot of it lately. I think I could handle all of that if it weren’t for Marcy- always blaming us for the fact that Tory’s is struggling, treating me like I’ve been ungrateful or a bad employee. I just-

  And then I realize the floor’s wet. I don’t know if there’s someone in the next stall, or if the toilet’s backed up again, but I reach down to pull my skirt up before it gets soaked, and I get it about to my knees when my hands stop moving. The floor is slick, and it’s coming from the next stall: a long, thick trail of blood.

  I swallow hard, trying to ignore the timid instincts that tell me to run away. I’d seen this kind of thing before, not here, but when I worked at Coldstone, there was a little girl who’d just started her period, and didn’t know what it was or what to do. “Shit, do you need a tampon?” I ask. “I think I... I have one in my bag.”

  There's shuffling, nervous shuffling in the other stall, and my neck tenses. I realize I can’t see feet under the stall wall- that I really should be able to see feet. “Hello?” I ask, and my voice trembles. The blood is starting to pool near the drain in the floor, and I realize there’s an awful lot of it; I’m starting to wonder if there’s too much, when a woman's foot splashes into view. But there’s something wrong about it, something about the angle, how it isn’t right if she’s sitting on the toilet, or standing- it’s just hanging there limp.

  I know something is wrong, and how completely stupid it would be of me to check it out for myself, so I pull my skirt up and flush, and I’m reaching for the bolt on the door when suddenly there’s a loud thump and a splash, and I can tell the girl in the other stall has fallen.

  I unbolt the door, uncertain if I should check on her myself or call the bouncer, when a hand shoots out from under the stall and grabs my stiletto heel. I look back, and can tell from the way the girl fell, and from the build and from a black coat and glove that the hand isn’t hers- it’s a man’s. I shriek, and yank until my foot comes out of the shoe, then I run.

  The bathrooms are at the end of a long hall, as close to backstage as the customers ever get. Mike, the bouncer hears me and is already at the club end of the hall when I round the corner. He’s big and scary, but with soft blue teddy bear eyes that usually are comforting. “Bathroom?” he asks, and all I can do is nod. He walks past me, and there’s an energy in him I’ve never seen. I follow him back around the corner, and he hits the door so hard if it were a person I don’t think they’d ever get up.

  But he doesn’t come back out. I wait as many seconds as I can, then run out of the hall to the club. The music has stopped, and everyone’s staring at me. The bartender, Malcolm, realizes he’s the only other male employee in the place; the customers are all frozen in place in their seats. He walks around the bar, obviously unhappy about being in his position at that moment.

  He walks down the hall, around the corner. He steels himself outside the restroom door, then pushes in. He emerges a few seconds later, blood halfway up his forearms. He tells me, “Ambulance, and police.”

  I look at one of the other girls, and I realize I don’t know her name, but she understands and runs down the hallway and over to the phone. I follow Malcolm back into the bathroom.

  Mike has pulled the girl out of the stall. He’s hunched over her, performing CPR, and I hear her ribs creak like old floorboards. Her stall is empty, and I don’t see the man in the black jacket on the floor. Then I think to look in my stall, for my shoe, but it’s gone.

  The rest of the night's a bust. The girl went away in an ambulance, but the cops were there long enough that all the customers left. At least Malcolm gave me a ride home, so I didn’t have to pay for a second cab.

  There’s a moment where I’m not sure if he wants to hit on me or just try and say something comforting, but he doesn’t do either, so I get out of his car, numbly mumble a thanks for the ride, and lock myself in my apartment.

  I’d been carrying my one heel around most of the night. I feel bad about losing the other one, like the other shoe will be sad about missing a part of itself; I care entirely too much about it, but I tell myself I’m just frazzled. I want to call the hospital, to check on the girl, but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me, anyway.

  I dance under the name Sin Dee, which had started as “Sin Deep,” and I imagined using the slogan “Beauty is only Sin Deep” until I found out that I wasn’t getting as many bookings for bachelor parties because Sin Deep sounded kind of Indian, and not many men wanted an Indian stripper, and the ones who did were disappointed when I wasn’t, and didn’t tip as well.

  I can’t sleep tonight. I can’t stop myself from thinking about that girl from the bathroom stall, or who she was- I mean, she wasn't one of the dancers, so she was a customer, but what she did, who she knew.

  And I’m terrified, too, because I know I have to work tomorrow, at another club, and that if I can’t get myself together, I can’t hustle, and if I don’t hustle, I won’t make any money, and I won’t be able to make my rent. The night becomes a blur of insomniac time-killing, reorganizing my make up and listening to music, baking and freezing a month’s worth of cupcakes, anything to distract me from thinking. I can't stop wondering who the girl was, even though I know it doesn't matter.

  I finally fall asleep for a few hours before my next shift, only to be woken up by my horrible clock; I pick it up and throw it at the wall, but the cord is wrapped around my wire bed frame, so it only flies until the cord snaps it back, and it swings ineffectually from the headboard.

  The rest of the week likewise became a blur. I pick up a private party and three day shifts at a few other clubs, including one someone called off of, but days are always death. Most people are at work, and even those who aren’t and actually have the money to tip don’t think to come to the clubs, but for some reason club owners insist on bringing in girls and staying open. And if you refuse any day shifts you can forget about picking up night and weekend shifts ever.

  I contemplate replacing the heel I lost. I bought them at a sort of made-to-order shoe place, and I think the guy there has kind of a crush on me, so I might be able to talk him i
nto making me just one shoe and not another set, but I couldn’t decide if that would make me happy, or if every time I looked down at the heel I was going to see blood beneath my feet.

  It had been a week, exactly to the day, and I was back at Tory’s. Mike was bouncing, and Malcolm was behind the bar. That was actually kind of odd, because Marcy didn’t like to keep the schedule static; she said it made the girls complacent- better that they fight to get and keep the good shifts. And she said that if the girls' schedules were constantly changing that it was only fair to rotate the men, too (and she lumped Kas, our one female bartender, in with the men). But it made me feel a little safer, since they were the ones who’d come to my rescue (or whatever) last week.

  It turned out to be a better night. Some law or accounting firm down the street had given out bonuses no one expected, so some of the lower-level execs suddenly had money they had nothing else to do with. And Kimberly even showed this week, so we had the perfect number of dancers for the size of the crowd.

  I’m just finishing up a set on the main stage, mentally preparing myself to hustle for lap dances when Malcolm flags me over. “Gentleman waiting for you in the champagne room,” he says with a snigger, since we pretty much