It was one of those lazy Sunday afternoons, when you don’t really want to do anything in particular like laundry, and nothing good is on TV, and you’ve gone through all the interesting bits in the paper, read the comics, worked the crossword, even checked your horoscope, and you’re just flat out bored.

One of those days my friend called to ask if I knew what was on special that day, which seemed like just my sort of thing. Well, I didn’t know because I’d only skimmed the ads that day, but she told me to look in my insert, and there it was, in blue and white: “Clearance! Soulmates! (slightly irregular; limit one per customer).”

But the ad promised they had only tiny defects, ones you’d never notice, and a few were perfectly fine, just returns (wrong size, wrong color, that sort of thing), and my friend said she’d seen them only last week, in aisle four, she thought, next to the beach umbrellas and the acrylic lemonade pitchers, of which she’d purchased two (icy pink and apple green), and she assured me they looked perfectly fine to her. Some, she said, were compact and dark and shiny, like oil in a rain puddle, and others were larger and almost transparent, and others looked like they had bubbles in them, like blown glass. She was sure I’d find at least one that would suit me. Well, I wasn’t in the market for a soulmate (the lemonade pitchers sounded good, though), but the more I thought about it, the more I could imagine all sorts of uses for something like that -- such a nice accessory, and I had a bare spot on the bookshelf that screamed for something pretty, something different.

So, I walked into the store and asked the first red-smocked person I found where the soulmates were — the ones on special, not the fancy designer—labeled ones that were probably made by poor starving children in Bangladesh, getting maybe eight cents an hour for their trouble. Aisle four — so my friend was right, and the lemonade pitchers were still there, too. Good, I thought.

So, I started toward aisle four, pausing to throw a bag of Cheetos into my basket and try on sneakers (did I want red or pastel plaid, or another pair of plain white ones?) when I heard it. It was so sweet, so thunderous, like a whisper of fine crystal in the softest breeze, a symphony of shattering. Then, “Clean up on aisle four.” Well that just figured.

I was only two aisles away, so I tiptoed over to peek around the corner. The floor was littered with little shards of soulmates, some dark and shiny, some light as soap bubbles, some in impossible colors, some cloudy and marbled, but all achingly beautiful, all intermingled.

I couldn’t help myself; I moved forward, reaching for one fragment, then another, mourning for this one and that, thinking of how nice it would have looked in my house, how sad to see such brutal perfection littering the floor. But something felt funny, and I realized I’d gone and walked down aisle four perfectly barefoot. My feet were bleeding from a thousand tiny cuts from tiny slivers - dark, clear, beautiful, heavy, tender, bejeweled, dazzling slivers, all mingling, all different, none ever designed to go together. And I couldn’t get them out.

There they were, working themselves deeper into my flesh, burning, stinging, tingling, sort of vibrating like they were fighting each other, like a bad organ transplant, and I thought who ever heard of a festering soulmate? I bet that’s why they went on sale. But that didn’t help.

I wasn’t in the mood to shop after that, so I put the Cheetos back just as two red-smocked clerks sprinted past with brooms and dustpans and bullhorns, and I went home. Well first there was the incident at the door, when they tried to make me pay for all the little shards in my feet, but they finally decided the math was too hard (okay, she’s got three slivers of model KL990, and gosh, eight bits of model HT87j, but those are half price), so they gave up. They wanted to put Band-Aids on my feet so I wouldn’t bleed on the floor, but I didn’t want to be charged for those too, so I just left.

I’m never going back there again, even if they do have the nicest lemonade pitchers, and I could use a pair of red sneakers.

As for my feet, they’ve healed, though you can still see ribbons of tiny white scars, a pretty patchwork really, and the shards have worked their way up, settling somewhere, I guess. Every now and then, when a bell rings or a choir hits just the right note, they resonate, and I close my eyes, and I can see their precarious vibration, their shiny, dark rainbows and their soap-bubble thin glimmers and deep colors and soft shimmers, and I wonder how I would have chosen just one.