They cleared the old house after the funeral, and in the attic, under the small window, was the red lacquer marriage chest with the brass catch gone green.
The shoes were in a cloth bundle on top of the folded clothes. Red silk, twin lotuses on the toe, stitching so fine you could not find where a thread began. Her grandmother had married at seventeen and been widowed at nineteen and kept them in that box for sixty years.
She turned them over. The soles were clean. Not a scuff, not a shine, nothing. Sixty years in a chest and they had never been on a floor.
She took them home because they were beautiful, and set them beside the bed that first night, toes toward the bed, the way you leave shoes.
In the morning they were facing the door.
She turned them back. Every morning they had turned again, and by the fourth they were facing the door and half a metre further from the bed than she had left them. On the fourth morning she picked one up and turned it over.
There was wear on the sole. At the ball of the foot and at the heel — the two places a sole wears — the silk was rubbed grey and flattened, the way it goes when somebody walks.
She put them in the wardrobe that night and shut the door on them.
Later, in the dark, if you had been lying on that floor with your cheek against the boards, looking under the bed: the red shoes, side by side, toes out. And beside them, neatly, a pair of her own slippers.
She had put them on once. Only once, to see if they fitted.