Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Polite Postapocalyptic Short Fiction

May 21, 2025

Norton H. Morton needed new shoes. His nice old shoes had been stolen from him in a grievous incident some weeks back and it was time to get back on his feet, as it were.

That was to be understood in a metaphorical sense, as Mr Morton had, at the same time as losing the shoes, lost both his feet, sawed off at the ankles in a wanton act of unprecedented barbarism. But he felt that he owed it to himself to uphold standards of decency and to soldier on as if nothing were amiss.

There was the matter of the shoestore having been pillaged by marauders. There was that. But even so: without feet, without any place to obtain shoes that was readily apparent, Mr Morton truly believed that both sound civic values and adherence to a personal code of conduct required that he be properly shod.

To do otherwise would be to invite disorder. And though the nation had in fact literally lived in a state of absolute lawlessness since the collapse of the residual elements of the government last December, nevertheless he – Norton H. Morton – would not be the one to invite anarchy into his life.

No - anarchy would have to gatecrash his world, and stand there awkwardly, uninvited, wondering if it dare grab at the potluck party snacks or help itself to the communally-supplied wine. Of course, given the nature of this metaphor, anarchy would grab and it would swig, for it was anarchy after all, but Mr. Morton would hardly be the one to make it welcome. His stern look of disapproval would surely take the edge off anarchy’s enjoyment.

He kneel-walked onto the porch to gauge the mood out on the streets. It was a peaceful summer's day in the suburbs, partly cloudy and with only a very few scattered properties burning in the middle distance. The breeze drifted gently from the southwest, bringing to his nostrils the scent of lilac and scorched motor oil.

It was the kind of summer's day his wife Roberta loved, and though she had been dead for quite some weeks now, Mr. Morton held fast to her memory by sparing always a thought of her at just such times as these. He did so now, pleasuring his remembrance with the recall of her lemon tea and spongecake.

Morton sighed, as a decorous tear fell from his eye, and passed a regretful eye over the saw marks and stains of blood on the porch that marked her final passing.

At the corner store they had no shoes either. Bob Adelman, who had fashioned with his own hands the crutches that Mr. Norton now used, and traded them to him in return for Roberta’s unneeded dresses, could in normal times get anything at a moment's notice. But a simple pair of brown brogues was now apparently beyond him.

"Ya know Norton, I really don't know why you're lookin' fer shoes in any case," said Adelman. "I don't wish to be indelicate, but you don’t hardly have anyplace to put 'em on to anymore."

This was so typical of the whiny, giving-in attitude that had so sadly taken hold of late, thought Mr. Morton. Adelman hadn't even bothered to shave today.

"Never mind why I want them, Bob," he said aloud. "Just remember, the customer's always right."
"Well, that's another thing, Norton," said Adelman. "Since you ain't got any money, you ain't strictly speakin' even a customer here no more."
"Not my fault that the ATM doesn't work, Bob," retorted Mr. Morton. "Nor that your cardreader doohickey is non-functional."
"Now, don't get all riled up, Norton. Your credit is still good here. Didn't mean nothin' by it."

Mr. Morton cast a glance around Adelman's shelves, hoping to find something that meant his painful trip down here, shuffling on stumps, wasn't completely wasted. But there was little in Adelman's sadly reduced inventory to even merit his attention. A salted coyote shank, with complementary coyote pelt. A jar of something murky and yellow-green which he didn't care to ask about. Car parts. Lots of spare car parts.

He turned and started to head for the street. Then he remembered something, and pivoted around on his left crutch to face Bob Adelman.

"A good day to you, Bob."
"Good day, Norton."

Whatever else happened, civic values and simple good manners would be maintained. To do otherwise would be to invite anarchy.

He decided to take the path by the creek on the way home. There had been nobody out on the streets, even on such a balmy and comfortable day as this. Probably inside playing on their Playstations, thought Mr. Morton. Nobody just took to the streets on their bicycles or had a pick-up neighborhood ballgame the way he and his friends used to, back in those summertimes so very long ago.

Just as he was crutching his way over the footbridge over the creek, he caught sight of something lying down below on the bank. A body, stretched out with its head in the water, weakly leaking red into the clear water.

But was that...?

As he made his way down the bank he saw that it was indeed a pair of shiny new brown brogues on the feet of the deceased man, apparently in his size. A godsend and no mistake.

An awkward moment or two, balancing on his crutches one by one while leaning down and... gottem! They were indeed in his size and though scuffed and mudstained they would polish up nicely. He tied them by the shoelaces and dangled the pair round his neck.

"HEY YOU!! The fuck you doin'?"

A gruff voice, that of a burly individual. Mr. Morton looked toward the sound, across the creek and into the trees opposite. He considered escape but just as quickly saw that it would be futile, caught as he was on a muddy riverbank with no feet and encumbered by homemade crutches.

"You lootin' corpse-robbin’ motherfucker!"

Morton decided to face up to these unfounded accusations with dignity. He straightened up and spoke up loudly in the direction of the voice.

"I can assure you sir, I am no looter."
"The fuck is 'sir', asshole?"

He saw that he was in fact speaking to a very large and muscular woman of some fifty years of age, now rushing across the footbridge towards him. Her hair straggled out in the air behind her.

"What are you doing with my George?" she howled at him plaintively, in a not unpleasant basso profondo.

In vain did Mr. Morton remonstrate with the gigantic and irate woman. In vain did he attempt to convince her that he was not a pillager, that he had no designs on the late George's property beyond that sorely-needed pair of shoes. She failed even to grasp that there was a divine providence at work in the way George's footwear had come into his hands at just the moment it was most sought-after.

Serendipity was not a word in her dictionary. But aggravated assault most certainly was. Two, in fact. Two words in her dictionary. Serendipity was not a word in her dictionary, but aggravated assault were most definitely two words in her dictionary, most probably. This is the quip Mr. Morton soon came to compose in his head as the woman thwacked him regularly across same, while also inflicting a good few rather painful clouts to his thorax.

He had often found that concentrating hard on the precise wording of witty put-downs had become an effective method of distracting himself from any physical pain. Just a few weeks before, while the punkish gang leader had taken a chainsaw to his ankles, as the lowly henchmen took turns on poor Roberta - just for admonishing him about the impropriety of making off with other people's property, to whit the very same chainsaw that was being used at that moment to his very detriment - Mr. Morton had composed the most devastating jibe in even his long and storied career of devising effective barbs for the letters pages of local publications.

He'd said: "You may think you're leaving me footless, but if you want me to bow to your unwonted brutality, your actions are in fact completely bootless!" The gang leader, called Spider Dave by his grubby associates, had not replied.

Maybe he was rendered speechless at Mr. Morton's quick-witted aplomb, or maybe he just couldn't hear over the snarling roar of the chainsaw. It was a rather literary reference and no doubt a little bit above Spider Dave’s paygrade.

Nonetheless, Spider Dave had proved a decent enough chap in the end. As he placed a single shot in Roberta’s head, a merciful coup de grace, he ordered two of the henchmen to fetch belts from Mortons’ closet and bound up the bloody stumps with tourniquets. Mr Morton was rather grateful to him for this act.

Spider had no obligation to perform these kindnesses. It was a solid example of working across the aisle, Morton felt.

Now, beside the creek, his beating at the hands of the aggrieved woman continued. She worked on Mr. Morton for a good twenty minutes, pacing herself and making sure not to wear herself out. Finally she dropped his bruised body and it slipped down next to the defunct George on the creekside, top-n-tailing the dead man as if they were estranged lovers no longer on speaking terms. His scarred ankle-stumps lay in the water beside the man's cracked skull and its gently leaking contents. Wounds soothed by the healing spring, it seemed to Morton.

He now lay adrift in an endless raging ocean tormented by some rather irksome twinges of discomfort. Still, in an effort that even now struck him as quietly heroic, part of him in a soft numb corner of his consciousness continued to compose satirical squibs directed at his tormentrix. He faced toward the dead man's sock-clad feet and silently unleashed his coruscating wit.

Madam, are all your attempts at seduction quite so hyperbolic? he declaimed inwardly. Don't you know when your somewhat forceful wooing has crossed the line over into what the youth of today like to describe as a microaggression?

This, he felt, neatly encapsulated the situation from the point of view of both the elder and the younger demographic, while at the same time wisfully ironizing on the tendency of folks today to employ overblown jargonistic psychobabble. Some of the hurt in his cracked ribs receded at the thought of his successful wit.

The woman squatted by the side of the dead man and hauled his body out of the creek. He was a man of the same general build and age as Norton H. Morton, and his damp and weed-strewn forehead was pierced by a single hole. Now Mr. Horton saw that a pistol had fallen from the man's hand onto the bank.

"Why'd you do it, George?" the woman wailed in her gravelly bass tone. "Why'd you leave me?"

I imagine he had had quite enough of your energetic style of physical romancing, thought Mr. Morton.

"What'd you say, asshole?" growled the woman, swiveling toward him with George's dead body still in her embrace.

Mr. Morton cursed himself for thinking quite so aloud at quite such an awkward moment.

Her name was Primrose. Primrose Peaches Kendrick. Her former hubby the late George Kendrick had been a car mechanic, poet and artist; she, a bartender and occasional bouncer in a lesbian biker roadhouse up on the highway there, some ways to the north.

Though herself not of the sapphic sisterhood, the bar’s owners had appreciated her evident handiness with sap and baseball bat, and its utility in safeguarding the security of the establishment.

When the disorder had become too great for them to remain in their suburban home, they sought shelter at the biker bar. But George had not in the end been welcome there, considered too homophobic for the comfort of the biker ladies, and the couple had been obliged to wander the byways of the county.

George, in their foraging expeditions through deserted properties, had somehow acquired a .38 snub-nosed revolver just like the old-timey detectives used to have. So when he became at length despondent, and considered to himself that only his maleness, his raw untrammelled masculinity, stood between Primrose and secure shelter at the lesbian roadhouse, he decided to do the honorable thing. They don’t make men like that any more.

Mr. Morton could respect that decision, being something noble and selfless he imagined he himself would do, if indeed the need arose. Primrose had indeed warmed to him after he had "taken his lickin' like a man”.

He subsequently invited her back to his house, where they would be able to give George a decent burial alongside Roberta in the Morton backyard. She assented.

The ceremony was most moving. Primrose wept copiously and Norton Morton sang a hymn he knew from his boyscouting days, balanced on his crutches. The sun went down and the mood was, in its own sublime and melancholy way, quite perfect.

And so it was forged, this new and indissoluble union. Primrose was to stay with him and protect the property against intruders. Mr. Morton offered her shelter and, as a decent interval of time had passed, a novel use for his ankle stumps that pleased her greatly.

And he got to keep those new brogues after all. They cleaned up nicely, all shone to perfection with his spit-and-polish thoroughness. He wore them round his neck with pride as he sipped coffee on the verandah of a morning, Primrose hulking by his side like a mountainous avatar of domesticity arisen dreamlike as if from a trollish fairytale.

And so this is a fairytale where a tamed ogre and a peaceable wizard sit serenely in the midst of a tormented land. All is well. Decency and civic values have been upheld after all. Barbarism averted and anarchy held at bay, for now.

But Mr. Morton's vigilance would ever be untiring as he sipped his acorn coffee, and held Primrose’s vast hand in his, and thought back to the times that had been, and ahead to the times that were to come, and smiled to himself with the glad knowledge that is reserved for those few, those very few, who conserve the flame of civilization for the rest of us.