#65 The Big Man

by S.B. Borgersen

He wore size 14 shoes. People laughed when I told them. They cracked jokes about his other body parts: “everything in proportion. Right?”

It wasn’t funny. But I smiled. I’ve forgotten how inconvenient an unusual size was. Trips to High and Mighty for oversized, overpriced, suits in pale green (it was the 70s) and pink shirts with 20 inch collars. Shudder.

I was five foot nothing and 98 lbs when we met. Again people laughed. Perplexed, maybe, at our incompatible coupling. We rose above the sniggers and travelled the world, requesting aircraft seats with extra leg room, hotel rooms with king sized beds (they weren’t the norm back then). His chest was too big for his Bermuda immigration X-ray; it needed two plates. It was hard not to feel abnormal.

When he disappeared to Chile, he took everything, but one pair of shoes. Brown Oxfords, the ones he polished nightly as the army had drilled into him in his earlier years. I kept them in the hall, by the front door as a deterrent to intruders, hoping they too would get the message that everything was in proportion and my giant of a man would defend me.

I finally gave them to the charity shop. Sometimes I glance in the shop window. They are still there. Each week with a different artifact placed inside. This week, being the Olympics, it is a pair of Russian dolls.

The big man would turn in his grave.