The only thing that remained of Eleanor Weatherby was her chicken boots.
They were not, as one might expect, standing neatly by the door, where she placed them every evening after feeding the chickens and tending the garden. Nor were they tossed carelessly at her bedside, as sometimes happened after an especially long day. The hearth, too, was bare—no boots drying by the fire.
No, Eleanor Weatherby’s boots were standing, shoulder width apart—as though Eleanor herself were standing in them—on top of the little knoll where she stood each morning in her tattered patchwork dress, drinking a hot cuppa and looking out across the meadows that bordered her small farm.
Nothing else of Eleanor remained. No clothes, no furniture, no garden, not even a chicken feather. One day she was there, and the next, her home sat empty, as though it had been abandoned for a hundred years.
Except for the chicken boots.
The police thought nothing of it, chalked it up to another of Eleanor’s idiosyncrasies. This was the lady who once showed up to a funeral in a bikini, after all, wrinkled skin hanging out every which way. And the same lady who carried an iguana on her shoulder everywhere she went, never once acknowledging that it was there.
Rumors spread quickly through the village. She was a witch; she’d been abducted by aliens; she went back to the circus.
Eleanor’s disappearance soon became a distant memory. A story told to misbehaving children at bedtime: it could happen to Eleanor, and it will happen to you, too, if you keep this up, young man. Before long, there was no one in the village who remembered her at all.
And then one day, a young woman walked in to town, which was miles from anywhere, so how she got there was anyone’s guess. An iguana perched on her shoulder as she lugged her roller bag across the rutted dirt lane, up the hill to the old abandoned house.
And when she arrived, she stepped out of her flip flops and into the two chicken boots, which, somehow, had stood there forgotten all this time.
Love this story.