My sister Alicia. and her shoes.

My sister Alicia won second place and $400 worth of shoes in the Manolo’s Super Fantastic Essay Contest with this short story:

Hemingway Loves Shoes
by Alicia DiDonato

It is night in Cuba and the young soldier drinks on the porch. Absinthe mixed with sugar is his ruin. It is sweet like the darkness and sultry like the periodista americana and her shoes. He thinks of carmine heels glimmering like blood spilled by a matador on a dirty dance floor, and remembers rounded toes like wine pooling on a walnut table in a Parisian cafe, and an arch as good and shapely as any he’d ever seen. He thinks of the click clack. His fever rises from her shoes.

“Ernesto,” he says.

His companion turns. “Si?” The old man asks. His skin is leathery, like soft brown Manolos from last season.

“She and her shoes… will they destroy me?”

“They always do,” sneers Ernesto.

The young man looks at the stars. They twinkle like diamonds on Beverly Feldman sandals, worn the sensuous cubana from the small smoky whisky bar. He thinks of other stars he saw from the trenches, and the glints of light on his bayonet, sharp as the points of Jimmy Choos, but then always he comes back to her americana legs ending in those red, red shoes of death and he knows he is already gone, a victim. He loves her. He loves death.

“You are a dead man,” says Ernesto.

“Only by the stiletto of her heels.” He rises, drains his drink. I have known better women, he thinks, but none with heels of Prada. He walks into the night and his doom.

21 thoughts on “My sister Alicia. and her shoes.

  • 10/17/2005 at 10:23 am
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    I can feel the heat from that periodista americana’s hot shoes. The concluding sentence really packs a punch too. I empathize for this soldier cubano. He is a dead man.

    no one is more deserving of this prize. well done Alicia.

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  • 10/17/2005 at 10:44 am
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    This is like the most amazing week ever. It’s my birthday, I win a prize for hilarity in an internet mspaint contest, and I win $400 worth of shoes in an internet essay contest!
    Life is good, and the internet is even better.

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  • 10/17/2005 at 10:47 am
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    The thing is: you LOVE shoes. Shoes have always been a huge passion of yours, so your winning this contest is all the more amazing because you LOVE shoes. Well done, you inspire me.

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  • 10/17/2005 at 11:09 am
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    You inspire all of us, actually. Cheers!

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  • 10/17/2005 at 11:43 am
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    Shauna is never allowed to own Prada shoes thanks to your story.

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  • 10/17/2005 at 12:37 pm
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    Shauna can never afford Prada shoes thanks to the fact that we both work for the state!

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  • 10/17/2005 at 1:09 pm
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    $400! That’s awesome. And an awesome essay, I see why you win.

    You can probably afford a down payment on a pair of Blahnik’s now, how awesome!

    Mike! Why dosn’t your mspaint contest award $400 worth of… pixels or something?

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  • 10/17/2005 at 1:14 pm
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    Have you ever tried looking for them on eBay?

    That’s where I get all my Ralph Lauren and Lacoste polos.

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  • 10/17/2005 at 1:20 pm
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    I would love $400 worth of pixels.

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  • 10/17/2005 at 1:23 pm
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    You could have a contest as to who could do the most with just 400 pixels.

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  • 10/17/2005 at 1:29 pm
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    I just did some quick math. For $400 you can buy a 400 Gigabyte hard drive. A 1 pixel bitmap takes up 58 bytes. A 2 pixel bitmap takes up 62 bytes. So my guess is that a single pixel uses about 4 bytes. There are 1,073,741,824 bytes in a gigabyte, so by dividing by four, and multiplying by four hundred, we get 107.37 billion pixels.

    I don’t plan on awarding anyone that volume of pixels for being able to draw a good representation of a pirate playing chess against a keg.

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  • 10/17/2005 at 2:22 pm
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    You fail to take into account the value of the work and craftmanship inherent in each pixel. That’s like saying a car is worth the amount that it would cost if it were melted down into ingots.

    Ingots, by the way, is an awesome word. Say it sometime.

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  • 10/17/2005 at 3:57 pm
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    Furthermore, if you wanted to be even more of a cheapskate, you could use 16-color bitmaps (something I did for my Evel Knievel Clown). Using 16-color bitmaps, 100 pixels costs you only 40 bytes, instead of 400 with the infinite amount of color possibilties.

    That’s 10x as many pixels for your buck, which means that you could get over a TRILLION pixels for $400.

    And even furthermore, if we wanted monochromatic bitmaps (who would?), then 100 pixels costs only 12 bytes. At that price, you could get over 3.5 TRILLION pixels for $400. And if you wanted to view that bitmap in it’s entirety, you’d need enough 19″ monitors at 1920×1440 resolution to fill 30 football fields!

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  • 10/17/2005 at 7:04 pm
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    Speaking of which – does anyone know what a good size MSPaint would be so that it doesn’t need to be expanded in internet explorer? My internet automatically resizes them , so when miked says they are ‘large’ i don’t know what he’s referring to. I want my voters to have the simplicity of no-click viewing.

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  • 10/17/2005 at 8:34 pm
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    I can’t be exactly sure how IE resizes things, however a good rule of thumb is not to make anything larger than about 75% of your resolution. Your picture will vary in its resizing based on the resolutions of those viewing it, however, so a decent baseline would be assume some have the lowest, either 640×480 or second lowest 800×600.
    Of course, in Advanced Internet Options those people with higher bandwidths (or patience for dial-up) can eliminiate this automatic resizing (and that pesky image toolbar) by unchecking a box or two.

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  • 10/18/2005 at 1:18 am
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    If you went 900×600 you would have a fine widescreen canvas on which to work with and it would not resize for anyone running 1024×768 and up.

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  • 10/18/2005 at 1:42 pm
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    thats right. Also when me and shauna talked about the shoe thing. I said ” You can’t own Prada cause according to alicia’s story I would die”
    To which my wife said, “No, I can’t own Prada cause they are too expensive.”
    Me dying is in second place when compared to why we can’t own prada.

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  • 10/18/2005 at 3:06 pm
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    Well, Sander, IE still downloads the entire image and then shrinks it. So, it dosn’t save time or bandwidth at all, just makes it easily viewable on a smaller window.

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