Don’t Let Them Take Your Boots

Author’s Note: Originally published last year, “Don’t Let Them Take Your Boots” was Top in Fiction’s featured Short Story the week of December 13th, 2024, and is presented here with new voice-over accompaniment.

Influenced by Italo Calvino and Nikolai Gogol, the story of Giacomo Mazzone—an Italian immigrant navigating the brutal churn of early 20th-century America in New York City—is a folkloric meditation on identity, loss, and the quiet violence of bureaucratic indifference.

In many ways, all my writing circles back to the folktales I absorbed and reimagined in childhood. Their structures were straightforward, even blunt; characters made choices, and consequences followed. Beneath the surface, a kind of distilled wisdom always lingered. Today, those stories might seem too moralistic, too unsophisticated for the literary marketplace, but I’ve never stopped valuing their clarity.

Some call magical realism the modern folktale, but that term has grown diluted. True folktales never needed to apologize for the surreal; they weren’t negotiating with plausibility. Magic simply was, because the world was never only rational to begin with. Realism, in contrast, is often deployed now as a kind of cultural credential—“Based on true events,” “rendered by lived trauma”—as if truth demands paperwork. But for those who come from oral traditions, from places where ghosts were once neighbors and dreams were warnings, that framing misses the point. The magic isn’t a metaphor. It’s memory.

In Gogol’s The Overcoat, Akaky Akakievich is undone by the theft of a garment that defined his worth. In this story, Giacomo’s stolen boots carry a similar weight—dignity, agency, the right to move forward. Both men live in systems where survival depends not on strength or cunning, but on staying invisible. Until they can't. Until something small is taken, and everything collapses.

These aren’t just stories of poverty or alienation. They’re reminders that in certain worlds, a coat or a pair of boots can hold a man’s whole existence. And once taken, there’s no appeal. Only the cold air where something used to be.

DON’T LET THEM TAKE YOUR BOOTS

There was something extraordinary about Giacomo Mazzone’s boots, though they seemed plain enough to everyone else. Sturdy, laced snugly about his feet, they carried him from the dry, unforgiving hills of Southern Italy across the vast Atlantic to the cracked and pitiless pavements of New York City.

When he stepped off the ship in 1909, his boots struck the pavement around Ellis Island with a resolute thud—a firm declaration that he had arrived. He didn’t bring much with him. No English. No connections. Just a body that could haul bricks and boots that could keep him steady while he did it.

Above his ankles, he was flesh and uncertainty; below, leather and resolve. In that way, Giacomo’s boots were extraordinary.

Fellow bricklayers would nod at them in silent respect, knowing a man who kept his modest boots in shape probably did the same with his mortar lines. The women who worked street corners clicked their tongues and admired the stubborn shine of the leather, wondering how his feet stayed dry when theirs were perpetually soaked. And the hustlers? They eyed those boots like they eyed wallets—something to snatch if you weren’t paying attention.

Every night, Giacomo’s routine was simple: boots off, boots washed, boots ready. Except he never actually took them off. He’d step right into a bathtub, laces tight, water running down his calves, while soap frothed around the scuffed tips. Call it superstition, call it an immigrant’s paranoia—either way, he trusted clean boots more than luck.

However, Giacomo’s boots weren’t so loyal in his nightly dreams. They had a nasty habit of disappearing. He’d find himself barefoot, the city’s cracked concrete biting at his soles.

From the tenement windows above, voices would howl, “Pick yourself up by your bootstraps!” It was a taunt from those who believed anything could be accomplished through sheer willpower, blind to the irony that without boots — without the means — there were no straps to pull.

But every morning, Giacomo would wake up in a sweat, patting his feet in the dark, relieved to feel the boots still there, laced up and ready. He would gladly anticipate the sound they made once they hit the floor to greet the day.<