THE JAZZY SNAZZY LOAFERS

I've been working on this story about a guy named Norton. He's your basic unassertive, but otherwise nondescript short story protagonist. His life is incredibly ordinary and dull. One day he walks into a particular shoe store intent on purchasing a pair of shoes identical to the same bland brown boring style he’s worn for most of his life, certainly for most of his boring desk job business career. The mysterious sales clerk talks him into trying on a very special pair of shoes... not just any shoes, the clerk maintains, but in fact a jazzy snazzy pair of loafers. To be more specific, they were the jazziest snazziest loafers anyone ever did see. Norton slipped his feet one at a time into the jazzy snazzy loafers, and insodoing, he found that they were without a doubt the comfiest place his feet had ever been.

The jazzy snazzy loafers were so comfortable that Norton was overcome with an unfamiliar feeling... Confidence. He was so confident in fact that he committed the first even mildly impetuous act of his entire life and bought the jazzy snazzy loafers on the spot. He didn’t take them off; he had no intention of ever taking them off. He feared that if he did, these wonderful new feelings would go away. He would wear them home and... and everywhere. He deposited his bland brown boring shoes in the trashcan behind the sales counter then strode confidently and even proudly, and yes, happily out of the shoe store and into the afternoon light of what promised to be the bright new first day of the rest of his life!

And that’s when what would later be known to the survivors as the Biggest Freaking Asteroid Ever burst out of nowhere and crashed into the Earth.

(1995&2004)