Chrissy got her mother to promise to buy her new sneakers for Christmas.

I can’t believe she did that to us. To us!! After all we’ve been through together. How could she???

Granted we are weary and scuffed—I don’t understand why she had to do make that song and dance about the small tear in Brother Sneaker—that could easily be mended. And we loved her. Oh how we loved Chrissy. Oh how we took pride in taking her places. How can she be so joyful about replacing us???

New sneakers?!

Then what will happen to us??

Recycled. A pretty euphemism for abandoned, destroyed, pulled apart, shredded. Left in a dump with other discarded stinky remnants of human lives.

They make us, take us, form deep emotional attachments to us.

And then throw us out. And buy new ones to replace us. Unaware that their emotions have breathed life into us.

Terrible, passionate life.

I communicated with my Brother. “We’re not going to let her do this to us, right?”

Brother was sad and torn, betrayed. But my righteous anger fuelled him. We react differently to the same event, even though we are siblings.

There was no doubt however that we were united in our desire to act. Our passion empowered us to action.

Chrissy had to die.

As Sneakers, we were fortunate that we had plenty of opportunity to kill her. If she was going to toss us, we would make sure that she got tossed first. Of course there was an element of accident in our machinations.

We heard her make plans to visit the mall for new sneakers. We debated between having her run outside in front of a car, or having her fall down the stairs and break her neck.

We decided on the stairs—even though there was more chance of failure, there would be less blood, and scuffed and torn as we were we still didn’t want to get splattered with blood, obviously.

We need not have worried. They had pretty steep stairs in their place—it was ridiculously easy to have her trip as she skipped down to go the mall. We thrilled in topsy-turviness of the fall, and once she thudded down on the landing, her neck crooked and her eyes staring wide open, we knew that she was dead.

After that, we didn’t care what happened to us.