Foston Slacks - Time's Flies

17

After eating the compulsory breakfast, watched by a keen eyed hotel staff member ensuring they ate every last crumb of the meal (Clara didn't mind so much, it was a lovely breakfast), Foston shook hands with the desk manager and they left the hotel. Clara, for one felt almost human again, which Foston, being a lemur (and a gecko before that) couldn't understand.

With her hair in 'Everyday' mode, straightened and tucked into a tidy 'rear bun', cleaned and repaired clothes feeling far better than than the day before, but still with the odd sneakers, she felt like she could really tackle the day's walk to wherever it was Foston was taking them. Even the surroundings of the wide, impossibly long corridor seemed more real and less immaterial than it had when they first arrived.

"That was due to the story's superposition of being both written and not written at the same time." Foston explained as she pointed out the more solid feel of the place. "Our mere presence within the abandoned story has brought it to the attention of the author. Instead of the author affecting the world, the world, because of our presence, is affecting the author."

"So, we might have finally made them finish writing the story?" Clara liked the idea of inspiring someone to creativity. Like a muse in odd shoes.

"Oh, I doubt it. They'll have a flurry of ideas, rush to record them and probably get distracted by something." He almost seemed sad about that. "I think the person who created this concept is a perpetual almost-author. One of those that swears they have a novel inside them, waiting to get out, but ending up watching repeats of their favourite comedy on some channel that 'stacks' shows in continuous, never ending cycles."

"I do that." Now Clara felt sad. "I've always wanted to paint. Bought the oils, the brushes, the canvasses. Drew preliminary sketches and then ended up watching daytime tv. Now that is a black hole that will suck out your soul if you let it."

"Indeed! How many houses can you see 'transformed' before you realise that living vicariously in someone else's successful endeavours can only ever lead to dark self-introspection and a habit of eating ice-cream on the sofa?" They passed a hot dog cart and Clara remembered the alternate New York, stepping further away from the cart.

If there had been sky above them and a nice cool breeze whipping across their faces and somewhere the smell of fresh cut grass wafting their way, it would have been a pleasant day. As it was, they were still in a corridor that tried gamely to impersonate a outside street, but failed in almost every respect.

They passed doors of every kind that could be imagined, all at varying intervals, sizes and heights. There were gothic looking doors, all mahogany and other darker woods, with elaborate door knockers shaped in all kinds of scary visages, echoing Dickensian motifs. Metal and glass doors that wouldn't appear out of place in a work place trying too hard to be modern and progressive. Plush, pink, fake-furred doors leading to who knows what kind of atrocities. Round doors where Clara expected little folk who never understood the aesthetic wonders of shoes to reside, awaiting some mystical old geezer to take them away and force them to reevaluate their career choices.

The Corridor really was a cornucopia of weirdness that Clara, strangely, quite liked. If the place were real, she meant really real, not a figment of someones uncommitted imagination, she thought she could enjoy living here. If only for the shoe shops, of which there appeared to be a startling number of. Which brought her back to a thought that had crossed her mind earlier on the page, or in the script, or whatever kind of literature The Corridor had been written as.

"I wonder, when we leave this place, if we ever leave this place, what happens to this running shoe?" She lifted the foot wearing the white sneaker Foston had got her earlier down the corridor. "Will it disappear? Because I think I lost the flip-flop. I mean, it is only an idea, right? A concept within the concept?"