“The thing is,” Papa said, “everybody gets that story wrong. They always think the baby died.”
“Well, sure,” I said. “What else?”
Papa shook his head. “The baby didn’t die. The mother doesn’t want the shoes.” He finished his gin martini and motioned to the barkeep for another.
The fan turned ponderously above our heads.
“But why?” I asked.
“The shoes are a gift from the mother-in-law. You see? There’s a conflict. The women don’t get along. The ad is a knife in the ribs.”
“That’s a lot of iceberg under the water.”
Papa grinned and raised his glass. “Salute!”
I wrote this story for the 100 Word Challenge: “Memoir” at Thin Spiral Notebook.
Wonderful interpretation of the old trope. You don’t ever really know the whole story.
It’s hard to imagine a 6 word story that would not be open to multiple interpretations. Maybe the parents had lots of pairs of baby shoes and lost track of this one pair until the baby’s feet had grown too big. But there’s no conflict in that version.