On Early Run days Pressroom Grady and Pressroom Jeff must have all pages by 10:30, no exceptions. They say we must fit ten pounds of crap into a five pound bag. We all of us take off our shoes. Wriggling, pointing, flexing unencumbered by straps, ties, and narrow tips. With naked feet we work faster.
Shelby says I have the prettiest feet of all. Shelby can hardly believe I've never had a pedicure in my life, with my shapely nails and perfect cuticles. Eyeing my long toes, she momentarily lets go the lasso tool she's using to cut out cars for the Sergio's ad. My toes itch as she looks so I wiggle them together to scratch. Shelby scootches the cars as close as she can without overlapping. But her forte is not cars, it's shoes. She likes Brown's shoe ads best, clipping and importing shoes with feet and legs even. Shelby almost always gets an OK by her second proof, sometimes her first. She's savvy that way. They hired her straight out of high school and now she's a pre-press ninja. The folder with all the ads we build is named shelby, if that gives you any idea. Looks-wise, she's a bloated Brenda Starr. On New Year's Eve, Shelby is glitter head to toe. And she has a lot of shoes, even for a girl. She says the only problem is, she has Flintstone feet. For the most part, shoes are a painful experience for her. Growing up, all of her sizes had a W after them, which stood for Wide, and she wore orthotics for flat-footedness. That's never stopped her loving shoes, though. It just made them more important to her. Her pet peeve is women who wear tennis shoes with capris.
We're talking feet on the Ad floor. Shelby asks why trim the biggest toe nails flush with the fleshy tips, because a long nail is much prettier. This is the reason all my socks at home have holes in the toe. Shelby does not know this, only knows my bare feet, beyond compare. We do not take a break until Early Run goes to press. Near eleven we stand barefoot on the loading dock talking about things that make Pressroom Grady and Pressroom Jeff turn tail with unfinished cigarettes still in hand. Such as dreams.
Such as last night I lay supine on the Ad Design floor, flanked with humming Macs. Shelby in high heels paces over me, unseeing, piercing me with her pumps and it doesn't hurt. Under her skirt is blank space. There is a flutter of stomach and a constriction of throat, like when I have something to say but there are too many people around. Last night Shelby walked up a spiraling staircase with me, stairs without end. She said we never got tired, there was only the click of heels and soles sliding in sweat.
The pressroom guys like having us around so they have something to sneer at. Before the guys take the pages back to the pressroom there's usually a jab at Shelby and her shoes. Today it's floral espadrilles that lace all the way up to her calf muscles; the wide ribbon in her hair is an exact match. This time it's Pressroom Jeff's turn to say something. He hangs his arm over Shelby's computer monitor like it's a beer-drinking buddy.
“You been cuttin up your shoes and puttin things in your hair or're you girls wearin hair thingies on your feet now?” I'm glad I'm not the only one who wondered about that. Pressroom Jeff is amused at his own attention to detail. Shelby smiles, but it's a barely-there smile, like with the Mona Lisa or the moon in the daytime. She shakes her hair down her back and saves the PDF she's working on. Usually she gives the PDFs to Jessie, the new girl, because you just have to find the file and drop it into the right dimensions, but this is the Sprint ad and if you run the wrong one, they don't have to pay for it and it's a full page and our paper can't afford to make those kinds of mistakes, especially when more than seventy per cent of the paper's revenue comes from ads. No offense to Jessie, even though she's clearly not cut out for this job. It's just easier if Shelby does it. She knows where everything is and has an incredible memory for what ran when, and so it saves us all a step.
But if we're not careful, she'll do all the work and just not tell anyone she is. We'll be talking about someone's brother getting deployed and turn around and there'll be no more ads to build and then we'll see that she's got twenty ads in her rack and she hasn't even said anything. She's a doer, not a delegator.
So I grab the Drunk Driving sig ad out of her rack. It's for Sunday. This is crazy, I think. It's a 5x21, and it only has 4 sponsors. And I need to pull clip art off six different discs. Then we start helping Shelby with the rest of Sunday's paper because Friday's is already on the press. Jeff takes the last page from the Panther and the negative leaves a trail of fluid all the way back to the pressroom. Shelby says the fluid is off, somehow. She cautions us that the negatives will stick together if we're not careful. She knows how to be careful. She'll yank my ponytail unseen by everyone and give me sideways looks with her green cat eyes.
Now I show them off for Shelby, but I used to do more with my feet. I used to run. In my secret love affair with endorphins, I had stamina but not so much the speed. I never placed above sixth in Girls Varsity. We raced on golf courses unless it was the rare college invitational. Sometimes the other leagues brought cheerleaders to stand alongside the chalk line and hold out cups of water to our mouths. I hit them away, the cups. Coach said why do that, save your energy for the race. Extraneous movements like that break your rhythm. And for heaven's sake, be a team player.
Except running is personal to me. I never thought of it as a team sport; it was just me and my feet. They'd go one in front of the other until I was past the wall and it didn't feel like footfalls anymore, more like waves crashing around my legs. The feet come back to you after the finish line, hot and buzzing as you trudge through the fluorescent-netted corral where the times and placings get recorded. Some runners lose their littlest toenails from running so much. Once my right pinky toe swelled to the size of my biggest toe. I soaked in Epsom salts until a doctor finally lanced it. Before he drained out the yellow liquid, he asked the date of my last menstrual period and I told him that was none of his business. Yes it is, he said, I'm a doctor. Truth was I didn't remember my LMP. In the best shape of my running career, my periods stopped. Girls I've told since then always laugh and say maybe they should take up running.
“Want to see what happens when a bipolar girl goes out for a run?” Mike from Editorial has just taken a page off the printer. Saju gestures to us with his camera. Editorial just sent us page 5A, which we formatted without reading, so we have no idea what Mike is talking about. Now Saju and his camera have everyone's attention, even Jessie's, whose inattention to detail is astounding.
“She jumped off de overpass at Exit 301 and hit da car.” Saju has a thick accent so it always takes a few seconds to register what he has said.
“You mean a car hit her?”
“No. She hit it. She fell on da hood. Almost killed de driver. Would've killed da passenger. I just sent de story back, you read it?”
We all exchange looks. Our feet stop working the carpet. Now we want to scan page 5A for the story. You can't eulogize someone in a newspaper, but you can learn the who, what, where, when, and sometimes why. Shelby acts first. She jumps up and pads over to Saju and his camera. They bend over it and I can't help myself, I feel my own feet padding over to where they stand hunched over its screen.
We see the woman after she jumped off the bridge, before the workers cleared the pieces off the interstate. Saju took the pictures from kind of far away, but he used a powerful Nikon camera so we can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in on the mess. It looks like she impaled herself on something. Her insides are on the outside. Her chest is cracked open and one of her breasts is hanging off at an odd angle. She must have landed on the car, slid off, and then been run over by another car.
“De driver she hit could not drive away. She had to be sedated and taken home in de ambulance. De car dat hit her was driven by an older couple on vacation,” he explains as though we need all the angles.
Shelby smells like Lip Venom. She absently reapplies it as she works her jaw over the carnage. I go back to read 5A, and I don't want to send the page to the Panther, because it's mostly about domestic disturbances in the dead woman's trailer home during the previous year. I close my eyes, then double-click.
“Are those capri pants she's wearing with those shoes?” Shelby breaks the silence on the ad floor, but her voice is all breathy and quiet.
Maybe because she made herself fashion police for the suicide, she decides to go to the funeral. I don't know what she expects to see; the casket is obviously going to be closed. After all the pages are on the press Shelby comes in as if on cue, clicking down the back hallway, faux fur jacket gathered up around her chin. The black fur sets her red hair off like bam, and makes my legs quiver in spite of myself. It sours a memory of a riddle my dad told me when I was seven years old, What's black and white and red all over? except the question is really What is black and white and read all over? A newspaper. All of a sudden I am angry that Shelby never uses the front doors, and instead prefers to come up the loading dock, arriving all wrapped up like she is a goddamn newspaper herself.
I don't ask how it went. She is humming Amazing Grace. I slip on my brand-new Earth shoes, the ones I spent over a hundred on. Shelby doesn't comment on them because they're too academic for her taste, clunky brown Mary Janes that don't showcase the toes or the legs. She's too nice to say anything nasty about them, at least to my face, but I can see her appraising them while she removes her coat. I can feel the cold air coming off her. She accidentally knocks the huge celestial-framed wedding photo off her desk and swears. She and her husband lay on the embroidered train of her gown and stare off in different directions. I leave before she can pick up the damned thing.
It's not really a conscious decision. But before she can ask me if we got the new Sprint ad this morning, I am jogging down the hallway. It's my lunch hour, and as I leap from the loading dock, I suddenly know where I'm going. My coat is too thin for the November weather, but in a mile, I won't care. It feels good to run.
The only problem is that my long nails make the toes ache. But I'm starting to like the feeling of the holes the nails have made in my socks. It makes me think of condoms, something about the way the holes fit around the toes just right. I smile. Thoughts when I'm running are always like that. They come easy and then spin off happy.
By the time I reach the interstate, my breath comes in spurts and it sounds like hawaii-hee, hawaii-hee. My throat burns with cold air. My thoughts are finally to zilch when I see Exit 301. I've been going now for four miles. Past umpteen green signs for exits and lakes and facilities plants. Past limestone strata and fields dotted with purple coneflower, little bluestem, and dock. Past a rocky hill with two decommissioned Howitzers and an atomic cannon. I'm vaguely aware that I'm holding a pebble loosely in each fist. I can't remember where I picked them up. With them I imagine two straight lines moving in the air by my sides. I only break form to signal. Then I veer right, up the exit lane. I slide a little in the rocks. There is no shoulder here.
As soon as I've jogged up the ramp and get on the even ground of the bridge, I slow, then stop myself against the cement rails of the bridge. Vehicles seem to go faster now that I'm standing up here. My head reels. I push out in a stretch against the rails, wondering how strong they really are. I imagine the bipolar woman mounting the rails and belly flopping onto the waiting highway. It must be about time for my lunch to be over; maybe I will hitchhike the five miles back into town. What is the first thing Shelby will feel when I'm not back on time after lunch—annoyance or worry? And what did the woman's family feel when she didn't come back from her run?
These are the only questions that matter to me as I stand there with the cold air biting my fingers, and I know I will never have the answers I want so instead I hurl my pebbles off the bridge and call her name.
Emily Vieyra has a Master's in Creative Writing from Kansas State University. She writes stories, sculpts clay, and raises children in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review and Fairy Tale Review.