This is the fourth story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. You can read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction stories from 2017 and 2018, here.

The note read “I like your shoes.” She found it spelled out in the condensation on her living-room window, written glidingly, with a sort of throwaway prettiness, in strokes the width of a fingertip. When she attempted to wipe it off, her palm came back dry. Even so, it took her a moment to understand the situation. The writing was—had to be—on the outside of the glass. Her apartment was on the sixteenth floor, with no balconies or even window ledges. How such a message could have gotten there, who could have composed it, eluded her. The heat of the morning took hold as the sun crested the high-rises, and she watched as, all at once, the words were inhaled back into the air.

The second note arrived a few months later: “I like your shoes,” written in the same pleasingly rounded hand as before. She pressed her cheek to the window, searching for a suspended platform, a bungee cord, some scaffolding or suction marks, but the face of the building offered only glass and aluminum.

The third note appeared early the following winter, lingering in the frost above the kitchen sink as she washed the dishes. The familiar words—“I like your shoes”—almost escaped her notice, since the sky behind them was the same marmoreal gray as the ice.

The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh notes arrived on a hot April afternoon within the span of a few minutes, fading away and then replacing one another with a bellows-like breathing rhythm: “I like your shoes,” “I like your shoes,” “I like your shoes,” “I like your shoes.” By then, she had moved to a third-floor walkup in a converted school building. Her new boyfriend, obliged by his commute to wake an hour earlier than she did, often left little goodbyes for her on the kitchen counter or on the dry-erase board, but his crabbed script was nothing like the declarations that had pursued her across the city, so fluidly, so puckishly made. She was certain they were not from him.

What she was starting to suspect was that the notes would accompany her for the rest of her life. That some god, ghost, or demon would go on, until the day she died, liking her shoes. And that even after eleven different houses and apartments, hundreds of guest rooms and hotel suites, seven boyfriends, two husbands, and several checkerboards’ worth of windows, she would never be sure whether the message was meant to be a compliment or an insult. The phrase reminded her of the roundabout observations of teen-age girls, the kind who put just enough sugar on their barbs to disguise them as flattery. Every time she went shoe shopping, she found herself asking the same question: But what do they really think?