The Left Shoe First

I wake to the ghost of the track: sweat, turf, the echo my muscles still expect to chase. Rain works the window , patient and deliberate. The alarm shivers until my palm quiets it. In the gray light, the ceiling lines blur into lanes, and somewhere inside me the body flinches for a starter's pistol no one fires anymore.

The blade leans patiently against the nightstand. Sometimes the rain still carries the ghost-smell of rubber and smoke, the scent of the crash baked into the weather. I listen first: rain drumming like a crowd that forgot my name. Then I reached. Fingers find cold carbon, the faint notch I carved years ago. Superstition. Proof. I seat the limb. The lock answers, sharp and final. Balance returns in small negotiations: flesh to steel, steel to floor, socket tugging skin already tender: like a language I once spoke fluently and now must translate back to myself.

By the door sit the old sneakers, same model as ever, blue stripes dulled by years. The ritual steadies me. Left first, then right. Always.

I used to tape motivational quotes above my bed. Once, someone else’s handwriting was on one. None of them mentioned prosthetics that squeak.

The phone buzzes on the counter, the world keeping its schedule without me. Without thinking, I slide the right shoe on and pull the lace tight. I stop. The left sits untouched beside the prosthetic foot.

For a breath, my pulse keeps time with the rain.

Panic rises, quick as heat. I tear the right shoe off, ordinary and wrong in my hand—and stare the way a believer stares at a broken prayer bead. Left, slowly. Deliberately. As if I can coax the morning back into alignment. When I stand, the air feels charged: the hush after lightning before the world decides whether to break or continue.

Before the crash, the world had edges you could lean into. The lanes were clean white fractures across green; I knew where to place each footfall, where to spend and where to save. I was a small-town comet, fast enough that newspapers came to practice to photograph sweat, as if sweat proved destiny.

The ritual began as a dare. Sophomore year, a kid on the team said, “Left shoe first or the gods get confused.” He was joking. I wasn’t. I slid the left on and felt the day click into place like a drawer shutting. I ran a personal best that afternoon, heard my name shatter through metal speakers and come back a second later, echoing, bigger. After that, the left shoe first wasn’t a ritual. It was insurance.

My mother came to meet with a Thermos of coffee and a folding chair she never unfolded. She stood for every lap, mouth set, eyes bright as rain. She had a way of watching that made me feel already across the finish line. When I won state, she cried into my shirt and said, “I always knew the world would have to make room for you.” I thought that was what winning meant: the world stepping aside.

There was a girl then. Claire. She worked part-time for the athletic department, handing out bibs and pinning safety pins to foam boards and looking at me as if the question had been answered. We kissed once behind the bleachers while the marching band practiced in the parking lot, the horns like geese arguing with winter. “You tie your left shoe first,” she said, and when I nodded, she laughed into my neck. “You’re ridiculous.” “I’m fast,” I told her. “That's kind of ridiculous,” she said. It felt like a blessing.

The morning of the crash, the air had a taste to it-metallic, like a coin held too long in the mouth. Rain threatened the horizon. Coaches glanced up, the field crew nervous about lightning. We ran anyway. We always ran anyway. I laced the left first, then the right. I touched the notch of bone below my knee and told myself it was luck.

The gun cracked. The body became fuse, sound became wind. The lanes were ropes pulling me forward and the crowd a single animal with breath and teeth. I was there, burning, and then the world folded in half. Tires howled, rubber, panic, glass—and a driver who’d mistaken an access road for a parking lot punched through the fence and onto the curve. It looked slow as a commercial. It felt like a betrayal.

I remember the taste of iron. A teammate screaming. My mother climbed the rail and fell, then climbed again. Looking down and not understanding which part was me. The rest is a door slamming.

Hospitals teach you a new grammar: pain as a verb, hope as something measured and charted. Recovery is a hallway you learn to walk the length of, applauded for reaching a chair. Nurses called me sweetie, champ, hero. People sent cards with indecent sunshine on them. Coaches visited and said brave too loudly. Claire held my hand and didn’t know where to set her eyes.

The first time I stood on a prosthetic, the room applauded. I smiled because that is what rooms demand from men who survive. Later, in private, I pressed my forehead to the seam where skin met socket, skin rubbed raw from the day’s friction, phantom itches sparking like static in the calf that wasn’t there. I whispered to the limb as if it were a dog I had to convince to stay. I tied the left shoe first, even then, even on a foot that no longer felt the lace. Insurance, I told myself. Or maybe an elegy.

When I finally came home, the apartment seemed smaller. The refrigerator hummed an old patient note, and the window remembered how to receive rain. I hung my medals above the dresser. The shoes, blue-striped, lived by the door like a couple that no longer shared secrets. Life went on. It is stubborn where you least expect it.

By noon today, the rain has turned from comfort to background noise. At lunch, the sandwich tastes like damp cardboard. I wonder if pain expires like old medicine, whether there’s a date stamped somewhere that I’ve already missed.

In the break room I pour coffee that is bitter and too light to matter. My elbow clips the cup. It spins and bursts, splashing a brown bruise across the right shoe.

I freeze. A beat of nothing. Then Claire from accounting—different Claire, because the universe loves bad jokes—drops to her knees with napkins. “It’s fine,” she says softly, as if speaking to a wound.

I hear the kindness crouched under the pity. “No,” I say, sharper than I mean. “It isn’t.” Silence tightens until I can hear my own pulse in my ears. My stump throbs once, a dull warning the body sends when the heart won’t listen. I wipe anyway, clumsy; the prosthetic scrapes the tile like a reprimand, socket biting at the seam, phantom toes curling against a floor they’ll never touch. When I look up, she’s already standing, already leaving, the damp napkins crushed in her fist.

The bus windows fog over on the ride home, turning the city into static. At a stoplight, a woman in a red coat laughs into her phone. The sound cuts through the rain like something still alive.

The apartment smells of wet fabric and old coffee. The refrigerator hums its steady note. I miss the hook with my keys and let them stay where they fall. I wait for the day to drain out of my body.

It doesn’t.

In the dark bathroom, lightning cuts me into parts: scar, cheek, the blur where the leg ends. I press my palm to the glass as if the surface could give something back. For a heartbeat, the flash returns a different man. Shoulders square, both legs under him, the face from photographs.

The light leaves. So do I.

Wind rattles the pane. The hum grows until it’s all there is. I lift a crutch and throw. Glass answers: sharp rain, trophies tumbling, a photo frame splitting at the seam. Then nothing but breath, rough in, rough out. The room is the same size and somehow smaller. Dust from shattered frames clings to the sweat on my forearms, tiny stars I can’t shake off.

I kneel among the shards. A small gold runner lies beheaded at my knee, mid-stride, unfinished. I pick it up, and the metal is colder than it should be. A laugh catches and breaks in my throat. I set the figure down, gentle now, as if it could still feel the race.

On purpose, I tie the right shoe first. The heartbeat stutters, waiting for punishment. Nothing happens. The quiet that follows isn’t approval—more like a door left cracked.

I tie the left. I put on my jacket. I leave.

The park is slick and black under the elms. My breath ghosts the air. A jogger passes me and nods the way veterans recognize each other without asking which war. I take a stance I haven’t taken in years and let the body decide. The first strides are ugly, the blade slapping, the other foot learning a stranger’s rhythm. The socket pulls, phantom itches flare, but I keep my line. I almost go down in a puddle, windmilling, then don’t.

I keep going.

Breath flames the chest. Muscles protest. I go anyway. The blade clicks faintly with every heartbeat, like applause trapped in a fist. The crowd in my head is only the weather. The pistol is only thunder. The path carries me forward and then brings me back.

At home I stand in the kitchen and listen to the refrigerator’s steady hum, like a world too stubborn to notice who’s missing. It is the metronome I live in now. I breathe once, just to see if I still can. It isn’t grace, but it’s something.

Days split like kindling: work, rain, sleep, repeat. The ritual persists. Left shoe first. Sometimes I test it, tie right first to see if the sky will crack. Sometimes I want it to. There’s a relief in punishment, a kind of order. But the world refuses to bless or curse me on command. It is disobedient that way.

On Thursday my coach calls. I haven’t heard his voice in years. It still carries that gravel, that urgency of men who think the body is a machine that only needs the right instructions.

“How are you, kid?” he asks.

“Fine,” I say.

“Your mother says you’re working too much.”

He pauses, waiting for honesty I don’t give him. “We’re doing a reunion Saturday,” he says. “Old team. Just barbecue and lies. You should come by.”

I picture the field. The fence mended and the paint new, as if erasing were the same as healing. “I can’t,” I say. “Work.”

“You always were a lousy liar,” he says, and hangs up.

That night the dream came again. I’m in the blocks, fingers splayed, hips high, each breath counted like money. The gun fires. The first step lands. The second. The third. The road splits open, but this time I leap cleanly over the hood. I wake gasping, the old finish-line taste of iron still in my mouth.

Saturday I go. I tell myself I’m only scouting a site for the charity 5K the office is hosting. Lies are easiest when they wear purpose.

The access road is blocked by a plastic chain. On the bleachers, my old teammates laugh in the specific past tense of people who outgrew their own myths. Coach is there, arms crossed, the sun turning his hair to steel.

I stay far enough away that I don’t become a project. From here I can see the curve. The paint is bright as a wound.

“Hey,” someone says, and it’s Claire—the first one, not the office one. Time has done what time does: softened some edges, sharpened others. She holds a toddler on her hip who is busy dismantling a cracker. “I thought that was you,” she says.

“Here I am,” I manage.

She glances down at my leg with that polite, trained flick of the eyes. “You look good,” she says, and then laughs. “Sorry. I never know what to say that isn’t wrong.”

“Everything anyone says is wrong,” I tell her. “You might as well be kindly wrong.”

We stand watching a group of freshmen in the blocks. “Do you still run?” she asks.

“Sometimes,” I say.

“You were fast.”

“Was,” I agree. The word feels like a small funeral.

The coach spots me then. He waves but doesn’t call my name. I lift a hand; it’s enough.

When the grill smokes and the stories start looping, I walk the curve alone. The rubber remembers feet. Mine does what it can. I stopped where the car broke the world. There’s no scar now, just air that feels slightly bruised.

I don’t plan to run. I do anyway.

Two steps, then a third. The blade finds rhythm, clumsy but real, socket tugging skin, phantom toes curling with each stride. I make it twenty meters, maybe twenty-five, before my lungs revolt. The field turns its head politely away. I bend over the line, hands on my knees, waiting for something inside me to decide between breaking and continuing.

A hand lands on my shoulder. Coach. “You don’t have to,” he says, not meaning the running. “You never had to.”

He’s wrong, but only in ways that matter to me.

I nod, straighten, and make a joke about my 40 times. He laughs, mercy in the sound. When I leave, I don’t say goodbye.

The charity 5K comes together faster than expected. HR loves the symmetry of holding it on a track. Marketing calls it “Left, Right, Forward.” I laugh too loudly when they suggest I give a speech.

I go early on test day. The lanes shine like wet glass. A maintenance man asks if I’m lost; I tell him I’m with the race. He waves me through.

I walk the curve. A puddle glints at the edge of lane four. Water reflects the sky in a way that makes you feel like you could step straight into another world.

There’s no one around. I take a stance I haven’t taken in years.

“I,” the body says.

“I,” I answered.

I run.

Five steps. Ten. The blade clicks in time with my pulse, phantom itches sparking, socket pressing in protest. The other foot remembers, slower but willing. Breath flares in my chest. The curve arrives like a question. I lean into it, the way you trust someone for the second time. I stop because I choose to, which is its own victory.

In the puddle, for a second, the two-legged boy appears: all hunger and speed. Then the water ripples and he is gone. In his place, me. One flesh, one carbon. I’m not angry at the substitution.

My mother’s voice drifts from memory: “I stood up, and that’s the part no one clapped for.”

I tie my right shoe first. Nothing happens. The quiet that follows isn’t approval. It's a room.

Race day. Tents, bibs, chatter. HR’s crying already, which feels honest for once. Children dart like small comets. Someone thanks me for being “an inspiration,” as if I invented surviving.

When they call me to the mic, I say only: “I used to be fast. Then I wasn’t. Today I’m trying to be something else.” The crowd claps, grateful for the simplicity.

The horn sounds. Runners surge forward. I stand aside and watch them go, the sound of footsteps like rain beginning again.

Later, when the medals have been handed out and the field is empty, I walk the lanes one last time. The puddle is gone. The sun has done what suns do.

I called my mother. “People finished,” I told her. “They were happy. They’ll be sore tomorrow.”

“And you?” she asks.

“I stood up,” I say.

On the bus home, the city exhales around me. Ordinary, forgiving. At my stop I climb the stairs slower than I want to and faster than I feared. The refrigerator hums when I enter, steady as ever, like a world too stubborn to notice who’s missing.

I take off my shoes and hold them for a moment. Then I set them side by side by the door, left and right, equal for once.

In the mirror I meet the man who carries me. He isn’t the boy I was, or the hero people clap for. He’s a work in progress. I touch the seam where skin meets socket, not as a bargain, but as a greeting.

Outside, rain starts again. I tie my shoes without looking: sometimes left first, sometimes right, and step out into a world that keeps making room.

It still isn’t grace. But this time, it’s enough.