The Old Shoe

A long time ago there was an old shoe who belonged to a giant.
The shoe went everywhere with the giant and his best friend Lefty. One day when the three of them were on a stroll through the clouded hills, the giant tripped.
As the giant tripped, the old shoe got tangled in a roc's wing and slipped off the giant's foot.
The roc shrieked in frustration as it and the old shoe tumbled down through the clouds into open sky. With a fierce peck of its beak, the roc managed to tear the old shoe free of its wing, and tossed the old shoe away.
With a hole in its toe, the old shoe fell down, down, down.
Then the old shoe hit the ground with a thump.
Dazed by the fall, the old shoe couldn't focus enough to figure out what to do.
But once it could, the old shoe realized that it had a problem.
Besides being in a strange land with hard green and brown clouds for the ground, along with tiny twigs pretending to be trees, the old shoe couldn't move.
His laces wouldn't twitch, his tongue refused to wobble, and his sole felt awfully cold.
Without the giant, the old shoe was stuck.
But surely Lefty would let the giant know that the old shoe was missing, and then they would come find it.
Until the came, the old shoe decided to wait.
(Decided to, because making the decision to wait felt better than admitting that it couldn't do anything at all.)
And so the old shoe waited.
And waited.
Then waited some more.
One day, a teeny tiny giant with even tinier baby giants wandered by. The old shoe couldn't believe how small they were. Why, it was bigger than the tiny giants!
The tiny giants looked at the old shoe, and it felt hopeful that they might have been sent by its giant.
"It may smell of rotten cabbages and boiled beets, but we can make this into our home," said the tiny giant to the tiny giant babies. "Now go play on the laces, while I get the inside settled."
The old shoe couldn't believe what was happening to it. The tiny giant had gone inside through the hole in its toe, while a tiny giant babies were swinging on its laces!
That was no way to treat an old shoe!
But now matter how it tried to call out that it wasn't a house, the tiny giants didn't seem able to hear the old shoe.
And so the time passed, and the old shoe withered away bit by bit as the tiny giant and her brood tore its leather apart to make windows and doors, poked a chimney through its tongue, and put a cellar in its sole.
Whenever the old shoe would see clouds cover the sky, it would cry out for Lefty and its giant to come.
But they never heard.