The Stinkiest Shoes in the World

One day there was a boy named Roderic. Roderic was a boy a lot like other boys, except for one thing. He never washed his feet. Oh, Roderic would get in the shower sometimes and he would was his hair, and his face, and his body... but he never washed his feet.

This meant that Roderic's shoes were really stinky. Each day Roderic didn't wash his feet, and each day the shoes got more and more smelly. When Roderic would walk into a house, everyone would make a face, and wrinkle their nose, and say, "Ack! What is that smell?!"

There was a funny thing about Roderic. He never noticed. In fact, Roderic's nose didn't work at all. To him, if he couldn't smell his feet, then nobody else could either. But they did.

As time went on Roderic began to notice that his shoes were getting dirty. Soon there was dirt in the bottom of them, and they even began to fill up. Little bits of moss and lichen would cling to the outside of the shoes, yet he still wore them every day.

Then one day Roderic woke up and looked in his shoes, and there, in each shoe, was a tiny little plant sprouting. And Roderic said, "I can't put on these shoes any more. I could not live with myself if I harmed these little plants."

So Roderic left the house that day with no shoes. Since his feet spent the whole day outside of shoes getting fresh air, they started to stink a little less. But Roderic did not notice, of course, because his nose didn't work.

During the next week the little plants in Roderic's shoes grew every day. One morning, when Roderic woke up, they were trees growing right up to his roof. The next day, he saw little buds forming on the limbs. Roderic wondered - would they bear fruit? Would it be flowers? He did not know.

When Roderic returned home that night the little buds had turned into shoes. There are sandals, and work boots, sneakers and lady's high heeled shoes, spiffy leather loafers and even cowboy boots.

The next morning Roderic decided the new shoes on the trees were ripe, and he could start wearing shoes again. But the shoes looked so nice and new and clean that he couldn't bear to put his dirty feet in them, so he went to the tub and he washed them.

When Roderic washed his feet that first time, he had to take an ice pick and chip the crusty dirt off his feet. He used dental floss to remove the moss from between his toes. And he used a butter knife to clean under his long, curling nails, and finally clipped them with garden shears.

When his feet were clean he went to the shoe trees and picked a pair of sneakers. That day he went out and played basketball with his friends. Everybody noticed that the bad smell was gone when Roderic was around. They liked that.

The day after, Roderic picked a pair of work boots and helped a friend build his house. He learned how to use a nail gun, and a screw gun, and a saw. When a wooden beam fell on his toes, a metal jacket in the work boot's toe stopped his toes from being crushed.

Each day Roderic put on a new kind of shoes, and he used each shoe in a different way. But Roderic was always glad to have his original shoes, with their trees growing out of them.

And that is the story of the stinkiest shoes in the world, and what happened to them.

The End
(c) 2007 Ken Demarest