The fabric of the socks sucked up the water almost instantaneously, the way a sponge might, or a paper towel. She felt the heels of her feet dip back and down into the soft earth below her, a slight sinking that was but a few centimetres. Pamela pulled a foot out of the water, holding at her ankle and watched the water cascade off in its suspended waterfall, back to be collected again against the smooth current of the river. She dropped it back in with a splash and it collected about her light blue blouse, and her pristine navy skirt and she didn't care.
Then she stepped in further. Behind her her disgusting shoes sat empty and useless, no longer housing her feet, and she figured would not be able to house the soaking socks once she had become bored with her current fascinations. They sat there askew in the position she had been in when she took them off, almost kissing each other but not quite. Laces were still bow-tied, the patterns of mud unchanged, crusting in the exposure of that late-day summer sun.
Pamela had asked her mother, truthfully, begged her honestly why she should be required to wear her Sunday shoes, and what in truth was the point of having just one pair for one day that cost more than the lot of her worn out pairs. Her mother had told her, classically, that it was because she had said so, but that was such a stupid answer that she had wanted to call out bullshit. But to use such language would of course warrant a smack across the cheek, and would have led to the same answer only more irritated and angry so, so it was much easier to avoid the foul language. It would have been good fun to use such an opportunity to curse.
It was the first bite of the several swarming mosquitoes that awakened Pamela to the hour. The sun had begun to retreat and she at once realized how much the temperature had taken to drop. She should have had the foresight to understand that the weather and location was prime for the pests, but she had become too excited in demolishing her shoes that she forgot to take in the time. Another mosquito bit her inside her elbow and she caught it with a slap, its blood filled body exploding into a blotch on her skin.
How miserable it must be, she figured, to be a mosquito, to buzz and pester, just trying to survive with what food you can find, only to be beaten, and killed and shooed away by your main course meals. To have that singular purpose and to be rebuked for it. She had sympathy for the blood-suckers but she still crushed them under her eleven-year-old palms just the same. Survival of the fittest, or whatever it was evolution had said.
When she turned to return to her shoes she dug her toes into the mud and twisted them sharply, pushing down with that twist in order to send a cloud of foggy mist to coat about her legs. The film ceased visibility to her feet, and when they returned to view she walked up the bank and collected her shoes, keeping them both pinched between the fingers of her right hand.
The soaking socks made her feet heavy as she trudged through the barely there path through the woods. A small sapling had somehow thought it could survive on that path, and Pamela made sure she took great strides to walk on the far side of it as if it were a traveler sharing the road. Her socks collected heaps of pine needles and dirt bits, small rocks, and the chipped residue of floor leaves. And they squished aloud with every step, every crunch musically mixed with a puddy-like-gloopiness that she would love to emulate again.
Pamela's home was a short walk but long enough for the light to start to fade more noticeably but not long enough that the night had overcome all together. In the long country driveway her father and mother's pickup trucks, one red and the other blue sat unused and useless without their drivers. The mute yellow light of the porch light grew brighter and brighter as the encroaching darkness consumed.
When she stood under the light that the night insects had already come to battle over, she had almost gone straight away for the front door knob. Her hand extended out, ready to accomplish a twist that she had performed on a multitude of occasions with that satisfying release of the latch, but she stopped herself. Her gaze returned down to the mess her socks, her church socks, the once-white socks, now littered with debris. She stepped in place, and listened to the water still seeking to gush out of them, and stared down upon the water stains on the wood porch boards.
Then she removed them, one at a time, and tossed them into a thicket-bush that sat as a border around the porch. In truth they were rose bushes, but Pamela had never seen red flowers grow there, just greenery, and thorns, for as long as she could remember remembering. Her shoes she could not toss, the punishment for losing them compared to the punishment for dirtying them was far more severe. So she kept them squeezed tight in her fingers, and went in to face whatever punishment she should face for being eleven.
