Published in Issue 63.3: Summer 2024
The shoe was too big; it usually was. The customers at Manson’s Menswear were often still acquainting themselves with the quirks of men’s sizing, and they tended to overestimate, trying to will their feet into a more expansive existence. The guy Gemma was serving—short, red-haired, with the same cringing posture they all had, his body set in a rictus of preemptive apology before he’d even entered the store—had shuffled optimistically up and down the shoe aisle, tripping over himself twice. Yes, Gemma thought, the shoe was at least a size too big—but she would have to be delicate.
How’s it feeling? she said, hearing her voice assume the sympathetic nasality beloved by shop assistants the world over. It was early February in 2009: Ben Harper lilted from the store stereo as, outside, unseen, the world unspooled into one of those flawless late-summer beach days that portended, for Gemma, the start of her final year of high school.
Um, the guy said. I don’t know?
Bit too much room in that toe? Gemma prompted.
He bent his foot. The leather gaped inward at the point where his toes should have been. Maybe a bit, he allowed.
Perched above his upper lip was a sad wisp of a moustache. Gemma couldn’t stop staring at it. Why did they all do the moustache thing? she wondered. Why didn’t they just accept reality and shave? Instead there was this pubescent scattering that only made the downy cheeks and furrowed aging forehead more jarring. This was why she preferred to flirt maternally with the shop’s other demographic, the born-a-guy guys who also had need of formalwear for the shorter man. Task her with selling shoes to transsexuals desperate to be sold to and she found herself considering moustaches and dropping shoe boxes and forgetting to upsell the shop’s most expensive merino-blend dress socks. Normally Jayden handled these customers, an arrangement Gemma had always linked fuzzily to the fact that he was gay. Their boss, Victor, had opened Manson’s ten years ago, marketing it to height-challenged men (When it comes to fashion, you don’t have to draw the short stick, read an old poster in the storage closet that doubled as a staff room). Over the years, increasing numbers of trans men, perhaps tipped off by some online message board, had begun making the pilgrimage through the mall, up the escalator, and to the store in the furthest corner of the second floor.
This morning Gemma and Jayden were fighting—sort of? it was hard to tell with him—so he’d fucked off to get a coffee at the exact moment this customer had entered the store. All because yesterday there had been a mid-afternoon rush and she’d had to interrupt him in the midst of blowing someone who was decidedly not his boyfriend in the extra-large changing stall. Theoretically Gemma had another coworker, Caleb. But Caleb’s role, as Jayden had once explained to her, was less to stock shelves or refold T-shirts than to emit a beatific masculine glow that drew their customers, via desire-to-fuck or desire-to-be, inexorably inside.
Right now Caleb was leaning on the cash register, toying with the lid of a takeaway coffee and flirting with the person who’d delivered it—a girl who worked downstairs at Supré—in the detached manner of the very beautiful. Gemma tuned in briefly to their conversation, which consisted of the girl insulting his car and Caleb drawling, It’s vintage Peugeot, vintage, that’s how it’s supposed to look! and, Aw look, that was a custom paint job!
Meanwhile, the customer had accepted defeat. He slumped onto the bench and started unlacing the too-big Oxfords. In his saggy brown socks he seemed more childish than ever, and Gemma, looking down, felt sorry for him. She sensed that, in serving this type of customer, she was undergoing some crucial test of her humanity. She said gently, Now what if we tried going maybe half a size down? To a five and a half?
Yeah, go on then, the man said, with a mix of relief and soul-deep disappointment. Yeah, let’s try that.
I’ll bring out a size five, too, she said. Just to be safe.
Purchase our Summer 2024 issue, available in print and digital forms.
Charlie Sorrenson is a queer, trans writer who grew up in Indiana and New Zealand. A third-year fiction candidate at UC Irvine, he was a 2023 Lambda Scholar and a finalist for the 2023 Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. His work is published in Apogee and Tor, among other publications, and he is an alum of the Tin House and Clarion Workshops. Find him on Instagram @charliesorrenson.
