We know we recognize this song.

We bounce on the edge of the bed experimentally. Tears run down our faces. The judges are weeping openly. That song sounds so familiar. Did they play it at our wedding? Miss Kansas rolls through the air, tucks her knees under her arms and drops like a stone, she springs up again and doesn't come back down, the air buoying her up the same way that you are holding me – naked as a jaybird, she hangs balanced in the air, the terrible, noisy, bonecracking air: we hold on tight to each other. The wind is rising. If you were to let go – don't let go -

3. The dictator's wife.

The dictator's wife lives in the shoe museum. During visiting hours she lies in bed downstairs with the rest of the exhibits. When you come in, you can't see her but you can hear her. She is talking about her husband. "He loved to eat strawberries. I don't care to eat strawberries. They taste like dead people to me. I'd rather drink soup made from a stone. We ate off the most beautiful plates every night. I don't know who they belonged to. I just kept track of the shoes."

The museum is a maze of cases. Visitors wander through narrow aisles, elbows tucked in to bodies, so they don't brush against the glass displays. They drift towards the center of the exhibit room, towards the voice of the old lady, until they come upon a bed. Glass boxes stacked up in tall rows hedge in the bed on all sides. In the boxes are pairs of shoes. In the bed is the dictator's wife, covers pulled up to her chin. Visitors stop and stare at the dictator's wife.

She stares back, old and fragile and crumbly. It is disconcerting, to be stared at by this old woman. In proper museums, you go to stare at the exhibits. They do not stare back at you. The dictator's wife is wrinkly like one of those dogs. She's wearing a black wig that's too small for her head. Her false teeth are in a souvenir glass beside the bed. She puts her teeth in.

The dictator's wife will stare at visitors' shoes until the visitors look down too, wondering if a shoelace has come untied.

Another old lady – but not quite as old – lets visitors in. On Tuesdays she dusts cases with an old silk dress. "Admission free today," she said. "Stay as long as you like."

"My shoes," the dictator's wife says to a visitor who has stopped to stare at her. She says this the way some people say, My children. She's got an accent, or maybe her teeth don't fit so well. "People don't think about shoes as much as they should. What happens to your shoes when you die? When you're dead, what do you need with shoes? Where are you planning to go?"

The dictator's wife says, "Every time my husband had someone killed, I went to that person's family and asked for a pair of their shoes. Sometimes there wasn't anyone to ask. My husband was a very suspicious man."

Now and then her right hand disappears up under her wig as if she's looking for something up there. "A family sits down to breakfast. The wife might say something about the weather. Someone might happen to walk by and hear the wife say something about the weather. Then soldiers would come along, and the soldiers would take them, husband, wife, children, away. They would be given shovels. They would dig an enormous hole, there would be other people digging other holes. Then the soldiers would line them up, fathers, mothers, children, and shoot them.

"In this country you think talking about the weather is safe but it isn't. Neither is breakfast. I gave soldiers bribes. They brought me the shoes of the people they shot. Eventually there were so many pits full of dead people in our country that you couldn't lay out a vegetable garden without digging someone up. It was a small country but dead people take up a lot of space. I had special closets made for all the shoes.

"Sometimes I dream about those dead people. They never say anything. They just stand there barefoot and look at me."

Under the covers, the dictator's wife looks like an arrangement of cups and bones, knives and sticks. The visitor can't tell if she's wearing shoes or not. Visitors don't like to think of the dictator's wife's shoes, shiny and black as coffins, hiding under the sheets. The visitor might not want to think of the dictator's wife's cold bare feet either. And that bed – who knows what's under it? Dead people, lined up in pairs like bedroom slippers.

The dictator's wife says, "When I married him I was fifteen."

The dictator's wife says:

I was considered to be the most beautiful girl in the country (remember, it was not a big country). My pictures were in all the papers. My parents wanted me to marry an older man who had a large estate. This man had bad teeth but his eyes were kind. I thought he would make a good husband, so I said yes. My dress was so beautiful. Nuns made the lace. The train was twelve feet long and I had two dozen girls from good families to hold it in the air behind me as we walked up the aisle. The dressmaker said that I looked like a movie star or a saint.

On my wedding day, the dictator saw me riding in my father's car. He followed me to the church and he offered me a choice.

The dictator said that he had fallen in love with me. He said that I could marry him instead or else he would have my fiancЋ shot.

The dictator had not been in power for very long. There had been rumors. No one believed them. My fiancЋ said that the dictator should go outside with him and they would talk like men, or else they could fight. But the dictator nodded to one of his soldiers and they dragged my fiancЋ outside and they shot him.

Then the dictator said that I could marry him or he would shoot my father. My father was an influential man. I think he believed that the dictator wouldn't dare shoot him. But they took him outside and they shot him just outside the church door, although I was begging them not to.

Then my mother said that he would have to shoot her as well because she didn't plan on living any longer. She was shaking. The dictator looked very disappointed. She was not being reasonable. She looked at me as they led her out, but she didn't say anything. One shoe fell off. They didn't stop to let her pick it up.

I had twin brothers, a year older than me. When the soldiers took my mother, my brothers ran after them. The soldiers shot them as they ran through the door. I thought that next the dictator would have me taken outside, but my sister Effie began to sob. All the bridesmaids were crying as well. Effie said that she didn't want to die and that she didn't want me to die either. She was very young. So I said I would marry the dictator.

The soldiers escorted us outside. At the door, the dictator bent over. He picked up my mother's shoe and gave it to me, as if it were a love token. A souvenir.

The next day Effie and I buried my parents and my brothers and my fiance. We washed their bodies and we dressed them. We put them in good sturdy coffins and buried them, but we buried them barefoot. I took my parents' shoes and my fiancЋ's shoes to the dictator's house for my trousseau, but I gave Effie to an aunt to look after.

Underneath the messy wig, the face of the dictator's wife looks like the face of an evil old man and – just for a minute – the visitor may think that it isn't the dictator's wife at all, lying there in the old woman's bed, but the dictator himself, disguised in an old dirty wig.

"I was too beautiful," the dictator's wife says. "I killed a lot of men. The dictator killed anyone – men, women – who stared at me too long. He killed women because he heard someone say that they were more beautiful than his wife. He killed my hairdresser because I told my hairdresser to cut off all my hair. I didn't want people to stare at me. I thought if I had no hair, no one would stare at me because I was beautiful."