Friday Flash Fiction
  • Home
    • About Friday Flash Fiction
    • Comely Bank Publishing
  • 100-Word Stories
  • Longer Stories
  • Poetry
  • Authors
    • A-F
    • G-L
    • M-Q
    • R-Z
  • Submissions
    • Writing Good Flash Fiction
    • Terms & Conditions
    • Technical Help
    • GDPR Compliance

A Pair of Sandals, by Sankar Chetterjee

15/1/2019

 
It was the Christmas Eve that also fell on a Sunday. By mid-morning, the market place in Chichi in Guatemalan Highlands was already exploding with sellers and buyers. Most of them, belonging to various indigenous Indian tribes came down from surrounding mountains. Everything, from home-grown vegetables to wooden handicrafts to Christmas decorative pieces, was getting traded at small makeshift stalls. Among the colorfully-dressed locals, there were a few adventurous foreigners. They learned about this “Sunday Market at Chichi” from various travel blogs. One of the visitors was the American exchange student Jim Harris who was spending a semester in the university at Guatemala City, nation’s capital.

After exploring the vegetable market, Jim was heading towards handicrafts stalls. That’s when the strap of one of his sandals came undone. He displayed it to a street-merchant and inquired whether it could be fixed at any nearby repair shop. Following the gentleman’s direction, he found a young street cobbler around the corner, busy in repairing other clients’ sandals and shoes. While fixing Jim’s sandal, the cobbler (who introduced himself as Jose Gonzalez), offered to make a new pair from recycled tires that he routinely made for the indigenous neighbors. Jim agreed. As Jose was finishing the pair for Jim, two young men on a motorbike stopped by and collected a wad of money from him. The young men kept on collecting various amounts from others. Once they vanished from the scene, Jose, with his hand gesture, explained to Jim that they’re the dreaded MS-13 gang members who terrorized several Central American countries. This event took place almost three years ago.

Recently, Jim was following the current immigration debate sweeping through his country on a flat big screen TV inside his home in upstate New York. He still used the pair of sandals that Jose custom-made for him. The narrators on the TV were reporting from two different locations, thus the screen was split right in the middle. On left, current strongman was giving a speech from a western border town. To the thunderous cheer from his xenophobic supporters, he termed all the asylum-seekers poor refugees as “criminals, rapists, and terrorists who, if allowed to enter the nation, would destroy our way of life.” On right side of the screen, several agents in a southern border town were pinning a young asylum-seeker against barbed wire. As the camera spanned, it showed a crying little girl grabbed one of the legs of an agent, while begging to let her dad go. When the agents twisted the young man’s head, his face became visible on the screen. Jim jumped out of his sofa screaming “Oh my God! It’s Jose from Chichi. He is neither a rapist nor a terrorist. He must be seeking a better life for his daughter, far away from those criminal gang-members.”

He then sat down, switched off the TV, hung his head down in shame, and murmured “How far we, as a nation, fell from our founding principles!”

Comments are closed.

    Longer
    Stories


    Longer Friday Flash Fiction Stories

    Friday Flash Fiction is primarily a site for stories of 100 words or fewer, and our authors are expected to take on that challenge if they possibly can. Most stories of under 150 words can be trimmed and we are currently not accepting submissions of 101-150 words.


    However, in response to demand, the FFF team constructed this forum for significantly longer stories of 151-500 words. Please send submissions for these using the
    Storybox


    One little request. Posting and publishing 500-word stories takes a little time if they need to be formatted, too. Please note that we tend to post longer flash fiction exactly as we find it – wrong spacing, everything.
    Picture
    If you would like to try the
    LONGER STORIES
    automatic RSS feed in your browser toolbar, click the blue "Subscribe" link below. For more help see the Help page
    SUBSCRIBE to Friday Flash Fiction - Longer Stories

    Archives

    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014

Picture
Website by Platform 36