The Founders Prize is awarded annually by the three founders of The Telling Room: Susan Conley, Sara Corbett, and Michael Paterniti to the author of the best piece of writing to come out of a Telling Room program.
Congratulations to our 2024 Founders Prize recipient, “To My Sister’s Shoes” by purpleunicorn73!
A Few Words from the Founders
“We loved the originality and wild choice the narrator made to tell a heartrending story through her sister's left-behind pair of shoes. We admired the writer's beautiful feel for the rhythms of language and the swell of emotion conveyed by the writer's keen description of life in her sister's absence. ‘I felt my sister in the shade of my hair,’ they write, ‘the pitch of my laugh, the bridge of my nose.’ By this point, we feel it, too, hurtling along to that beautiful ending that balances captivity and freedom, pain and understanding. In reading this we felt ourselves in the presence of an emerging writer newly emerged. And what a thrilling thing!
To My Sister’s Shoes
by purpleunicorn73
My sister wore you religiously as she sulked the city streets. Your cotton canvas soaked in the polluted air, and your sharp black dye wore away to a soft, crusted gray over the years. You cushioned her legs as she walked from one friend’s house to another, her fall as she wept in the school bathroom, trying to find new ways to spend one more day away from home. You gave her a reason to keep moving, to continue hiding bills under her mattress, in her textbooks, taped to her coat hangers. Cries of inadequacy rang out with each thud of your free-flowing layers against the ground. You became a poor excuse of a shoe, laces frayed and held together with tape.
She wore you while she left for days or weeks, then for weeks or months. She wore you till she left for the last time. I found you in a pile of clothes and knick-knacks, a parting gift for me. You had a crumpled note taped hastily to your rubber, boasting some superficial sentences with no reasons why she had left, only an unwanted burden in the form of a disintegrating sneaker. All I had was a hole in my heart, the shape of a sister and the depth of a childhood. I took her room, I wore her flannel-lined jacket, I even kept you—anything to get closer to her. You let her grow, you let her leave, you let her free. Why didn’t you let me free then, too? I hated you, I shunned you to the shadows of my closet, I vowed to never let you hurt me again.
Memories of her faded, giving way to the passing of years. But as I grew, I felt my sister in the shade of my hair, the pitch of my laugh, the bridge of my nose. You murmured to me from the shackles of your shoe rack as I grew into a shadow of my sister. But soon, as I daydreamed of colleges hundreds of miles away or summer jobs across the country, you screamed to me, rattling the bars of your prison.
One night, to speed up my packing, my friends dug through my closet to find a pair of shoes and landed on you. They tossed you over nonchalantly, ignorant of your power, unaware of why I locked you away. I never meant to wear you, but the sight of you made my heart jump, my thoughts dissolve. I grabbed you with clumsy thumbs, my body turning numb and coursed with anxiety. My friends thought you were just a throwaway garment, a sneaker meant to be destroyed by the dirt, soaked through by the dew. I never told them of your ability to uproot a daughter from her misery, your ease in letting her run away to Boston, your lack of regret in leaving her sister behind to face the consequences. It was just once that I wore you, the evening my friends & I snuck out.
The dirt ground to dust beneath our steps, your tattered soles catching each root, slapping the trail in protest. The blueberry bushes held the shape of our path, catching your taped-up wraps and catapulting dew drops through the night. I walked for a while, but with every pound against the ground you rolled over, till finally, you woke up. Oh, how I ran that night. Each step a dance of rebellion, each kicked-up cloud of dust a memory of her. The tall grass crushed beneath your weight, seed pods filling the knots in your laces. I felt your spirit wake me out of my drowsy stroll as we picked up speed, the taste of blood overtaking my lungs, the sound of my friends’ laughs filling the air. My heart racing, I felt freedom coursing through my veins with each stride, the breath of the stark night reminding me I was alive.
We ran and ran, till we found ourselves in pure isolation, as far from home as possible, accompanied only by the trees and the stars. Finally, you had let me leave too, and I felt the spirit of my sister. The countless hours she spent away, the nights she arrived only after the house lay dormant, the bags she packed months in advance. As I lay hand-in-hand stargazing beneath the white pines with my friends, I wondered why each of us chose to leave that night.
I glanced to my right, at my friend’s bright red “outdoor shoes’’ with black scuffs from her awkward gait marking each inner ankle. To my left was my other friend’s clunky boots, a camouflage set she swears is her size, even though they contribute to half of her falls. We all sported our own stories, our own heartbreak, our own moments of bravery or failure, all in the form of a measly shoe. Such an overlooked artifact, yet a constant reminder of the life my sister lived. Your bright green paint specks from her 3rd-period art class, your rich red dots from her constant nosebleeds, your penned-on graphics from her stints of boredom. Just like my friends’ outdoor shoes or clunky hiking boots, you were a sampling of freedom, a small reminder of that crumpled-up note telling me I’m not alone, the one I stumbled upon as I awoke to her empty shelves, her stripped bedroom, her last-resort move of survival.
Now I understand you, tattered shoe, and why you forced her away before it was too late, before she was too weak to keep going. As you pushed me running through the night, and carried her packing up for the last time, you liberated us from the prison of a home we grew up in. Now I understand you, my long-forgotten sister, and why you ran away to freedom.
purpleunicorn73 is a senior from the Maine School of Science and Mathematics. Her memoir is a piece of creative nonfiction about hand-me-down shoes from her sister. In her free time, she loves to run fast and lift heavy, woot woot.